I get it. It’s been the UI since the beginning, or quite some time. But we have a top bar and then launcher. Like many, I move the launcher to bottom. Now, we have 2 users panels. Extra screen space occupied due to two panels. Why not just a single one and give more screen space to apps ? Just curious 
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Most of the shell design is inherited from Gnome. So if you’d like to see fundamental design changes made that would benefit everyone then it would be best to get involved there: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design
There is however a simpler solution to wasted screen space you can use right now…
Settings > Dock > Auto-hide the Dock = ON
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In vanilla GNOME, which you can get on Ubuntu 17.10 with sudo apt install gnome-session, there’s only one bar. As @vanvugt says, for the Ubuntu session you can just set the Dock to autohide 