Early registration pricing for the Urbanism Next Conference 2018 ends Monday, February 5

The last day for early bird registration for the 2018 Urbanism Next conference is next week – Monday, February 5, 2018! Join us in Portland, Oregon March 5-7, 2018 to engage in dialogue about how technology is transforming our cities.

The conference will focus on the secondary impacts on real estate, land use, urban design, and transportation as a result of emerging technologies including autonomous vehicles.

Highlights:

  • Learn about the implications of emerging technologies for equity, the environment, the economy, and governance.
  • Hear from Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer, ZipCar Founder Robin Chase, Nelson\Nygaard’s Jeff Tumlin and many more
  • Engage with architects, planners, landscape architects, developers, academics and others in interactive workshops

Please visit the conference site for additional details about speakers, schedule, and accommodations and to complete your registration.

Special rates are available for members of the AIA, APA, ASLA, ULI, and academics. Conference organizers are applying for continuing education credits for the American Institute of Architects (LU/HSWs) and the American Institute of Certified Planners (CMs). ASLA members are eligible to self-report hours per the requirements of their state licensure boards.

New Report: Rethinking the Street in an Era of Driverless Cars

Communities get few moments to rethink their streets and make decisions that will serve the basic purposes of transportation, address urgent challenges like climate change, rising obesity, social isolation and conflict, and expand opportunities for general happiness throughout society.  Such a pivotal moment is upon us, as autonomous vehicles represent a potentially disruptive technology that can re-make the city for good or for ill.

Urbanism Next has released a new report delineating ways our communities can begin repurposing their most common public space – the streets – to better serve public uses.  Driverless cars may need less parking, narrower lanes, and may be able to occupy bi-directional shared lanes, all leading to a significantly reduced need for road space currently used to move and store vehicles. Where driverless cars are primarily available as fleets where users are buying rides instead of vehicles, the space savings may be more significant.

City planners, policy makers and community residents have a unique, and immediate, opportunity to rethink their streets with purposeful and creative consideration about how this critical public good may best serve the public for generations to come.  Read this Urbanism Next report to learn more.  And to see other Urbanism Next briefs, visit this page.

Future of jobs and the end of the cashier

Seattle may not have the SuperSonics basketball franchise anymore (this still burns me up—but that is a story for another day and a different blog) –or the headquarters of Boeing—but they do have supersonic convenience store checkout now. Amazon, based in Seattle, now has its first Amazon Go store up and running. This brick and mortar Amazon store location just requires shoppers to “Simply present the Amazon Go app at the gates and start shopping.” A range of technology (cameras and sensors) is used to monitor shoppers as they browse and shop. When the shoppers are done selecting their goods they just leave the store and get charged to their Amazon accounts.

Amazon Go store in Seattle (credit: www.theguardian.com)

Some shoppers at the store described the store as an experience that they just had to experience for themselves—“It’s at the cutting edge of AI and machine learning and I wanted to experience it for myself,” said one shopper. And while this may be novel for the shopper, it is a real threat to a lot of jobs (cashier being the 2nd most common job title in the US). This threat to employment is no longer in the far off distance of 2 or 3 years from now, as might be the case for truck drivers, but has actually already occurred. These types of shifts could be the end of a lot of jobs, but stores could also use as a way to improve customer services on the floor—and probably get shoppers to buy more as their employees focus on upselling rather than asking at check-out if “I found everything I was looking for.”

 

 

 

 

Pick your workshop at the Urbanism Next Conference

Day 2 of the Urbanism Next Conference will be an active day of in-depth workshops. Each attendee will have the opportunity to select from 17, 3-hour workshops – there’s something for everyone.

  • Equity issues take center stage in An AV for Everyone: Shared Mobility and Equity.
  • Curious about implications for local government budgets and finance? Where did All the Money Go? Opportunities and Challenges for Local Government Finances is your session.
  • Scenario Planning for an Uncertain Future is a great choice for planners to help foster public engagement.

Attendance is limited to approximately 35 people per workshop. Register today to make sure you get your first choice!

Visit the Urbanism Next website for full workshop descriptions, information about the nationally renowned professionals speaking at the conference, accommodations, and more.

The National Urbanism Next Conference is a collaboration between the University of Oregon and the Urban Land Institute, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Planning Association, and the American Institute of Architects.

Thank you to our partners and sponsors.

 

 

Podcast Double Feature – Urbanism Next on The Mobility Podcast and Convenience Matters

Here’s some food for thought to listen to on your commute home today – how might autonomous vehicles transform your commute next year? Urbanism Next’s Nico Larco and Becky Steckler share their thoughts on that question and more in two recent podcasts.

First, hear Nico’s discussion with The Mobility Podcast during the 2018 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting:

When we adopt new and innovative approaches to mobility, Nico Larco says we should pull back the curtain first. As the Co-Director of the Sustainable Cities Initiative at the University of Oregon, Larco helps public and private entities understand the potential impacts of autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, and ecommerce on cities.

In this wide-ranging discussion, Larco describes how he evaluates these technologies as transportation issues in order to understand their secondary impacts on health, livability, and housing.

Next, check out Becky’s conversation about New Vehicle Technologies and Urban Design on Convenience Matters:

Emerging technologies are having profound effects on how we live, move and spend our time in cities, but also increasingly on urban form and development itself. Listen in as we discuss the secondary impacts of emerging technologies on urban design and transportation.

The Far, Way Off, Hard to Imagine Future of 2019

General Motors just announced that in the far off distance future of 2019 – next year – they are prepared to introduce commercial scale fleets of electric, autonomous vehicles to be used for ride buying, not individual car purchasing.  This may be the most major announcement of its kind to date and significantly accelerates the need for communities to figure out everything, including managing curb drop off and loading, surplus street and surface parking, the re-use opportunities of the public right of way, the impacts on land value and municipal budgets, plus issues of safety, security, etc.

Because the future seemed so, well, far into the future, most communities, from elected leaders to developers to livability advocates, don’t even know where to start in thinking about all of these things.  The GM announcement is not an announcement about just transportation, it is an announcement about everything that has to do with how and where we live, making the upcoming Urbanism Next conference much more critical for all communities, whether in attendance or not.

Register Now for the 2018 National Urbanism Next Conference

Early bird registration for the National Urbanism Next conference is now open!

Join us in Portland March 5-7, 2018 to engage in the dialogue about how technology is transforming our cities.

Highlights:

  • Learn about the secondary impacts of emerging technologies on land uses, urban design, transportation, and real estate markets and the implications of these changes for equity, the environment, the economy, and governance.
  • Hear from Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer, ZipCar Founder Robin Chase, Nelson\Nygaard’s Jeff Tumlin and many more
  • Engage with planners, architects, landscape architects, developers, academics and others in interactive workshops and charrettes

Please visit the conference site for additional details about speakers, schedule, and accommodations and to complete your registration.

Special rates are available for AIA, APA, ASLA, and ULI members.

Stay connected on the latest news by following us on our Twitter and Facebook pages

Twitter: @urbanismnext

Facebook: Urbanism Next

We are grateful for the support of our partners and sponsors:

For questions, please contact Program Manager Becky Steckler, beckys@uoregon.edu

2018 Supreme Court ruling may help (or continue to hurt) state and local finances

Early last year Amazon indicated that they would finally start collecting sales tax in states that assess sales taxes, with the one caveat that they would only collect sales taxes on items that they sold or fulfilled. Only half of the goods sold on Amazon are sold by the e-commerce giant, leaving the rest of the goods (potentially) untaxed.

The Supreme Court has ruled that e-commerce retailers cannot be compelled to pay the sales taxes in states they don’t have a “physical presence.” With a $100 billion in e-commerce for the 2017 holiday season alone, e-commerce has a huge and growing footprint. State and local governments’ have been struggling as more commerce moves online—and the revenue from those sales disappears as brick & mortar close their doors. This year the Supreme Court has the potential to upend the long-running feud between state and local governments and online retail. While the court was certainly within its right to claim that the “requirements…the court decided, were indeed undue burdens that would ultimately harm the national economy” when they ruled on the Quill (mail order office supplier) case in the 1960s. However, technology has clearly reduced the regulatory compliance costs associated sales tax collection burdens—in that computers can easily match rates with each transaction and assure state/local compliance.

Beyond the regulatory burdens, “state and local governments will lose about $34 billion in revenue in 2018 because of the physical presence requirement” that was set forth in the Quill case. The physical presence rule has also hampered local economic development because “it discourages [online retailers] from establishing a brick-and-mortar location (and creating jobs) in a new state and being liable for collecting its sales tax. Online retailers also enjoy state services — like roads that allow their products to be delivered efficiently to customers — without contributing to their upkeep.” It is clearly far past time to recognize that e-commerce is just commerce.

 

 

 

Town Seizes Control of Its Own Streets

One of the biggest assets any city owns is its streets.  And since no driver likes to be stuck in traffic, the predominant fix to congestion for the last 60 years has been to expand the street right of way to add more lanes.  Time and again, this new road space only leads to more car trips and the very congestion street expansion was supposed to fix.

There are a a lot of new experiments going on across the country about this problem, often by re-allocating some of this public space for other public uses like bike, pedestrian, or transit spaces, or to re-purpose parking and lanes for leisure (think parklets) or ecological function. These types of efforts recognize the trade-offs in use of the street and figure that if a community can’t solve congestion, it can at least provide more efficient transportation alternatives and better use of this public space.

But what if a community simply banned excess cars to eliminate congestion, thereby taking a more active role in the management of its street right of way? Not banned cars to create a car-free utopia, but simply banned excess cars?

This is the idea of Leonia, New Jersey, which is upset by being a vehicle shortcut preferred by navigation systems like Google Maps and Waze. The excess ‘outsiders’ are causing severe traffic issues and the approach of Leonia is to give tickets to anyone outside the community driving in certain areas at certain times.

While I have significant concerns about a city banning outsiders as disturbingly exclusionary, especially on the use of public streets for legal purposes, what is intriguing in this story is the appetite to seize greater control of the public right of way to help carry out the community’s values, which in this case is congestion-free streets.

While the approach of banning outsider’s cars from public streets seems misguided and unnecessary (just do traffic calming to reduce speeds locally and they won’t be attractive for commuters), proactively deciding how the street right of way will be accessed is a critical issue for cities beginning to think about how autonomous vehicles alter their future.

AV companies require access to the right of way to operate and right now may be a unique opportunity for many cities to decide what parts of town are accessible by what types of vehicles. AVs will require local maps that include where they can and cannot go, so while it may not be wise for a community to outlaw non-residents from its public streets, cities can restrict what types of vehicles can go where.

This is an important consideration as autonomous vehicles roll out much faster than most cities are planning for their implications on traffic, land use, or general quality of life issues.  Cities must remember that they own the transportation pipeline – their streets – that AVs will depend on and utilizing this asset to achieve community goals is something that cities can proactively control.

 

Amazon’s Moves Directly Affecting Brick and Mortar Companies

In yet another sign of Amazon’s strength and impact on cities, a recent article tracked the way moves by the company had direct effects on other companies’ stocks.  When Amazon announced the purchase of Whole Foods, Kroger and Target lost value (10-20% of their value) with a second drop happening a few months later as Amazon announced it would be lowering prices in their Whole Foods stores.

This type of impact on competitors’ stock prices happened most dramatically when Amazon announced it was considering getting into the prescription business.  At that point CVS and Walgreens, the two largest pharmacy chains in the country, dropped a whopping 30+% over the next few weeks.

This trend was repeated with auto parts, delivery, and prepared food companies as Amazon announced moves that were viewed as competition for these industries.

The takeaway for our purposes is not so much a focus on the stock price, but on the notion that the stock prices are reflecting a perceived market shift away from these brick and mortar companies and towards the online retailer.  For cities this translates to store closings and increases in direct deliveries and warehousing.  The trend we have seen the last year, with more than 6,500 store closings – the highest ever in the US, will most probably continue into 2018.  Certainly something for all of us to be paying attention to and preparing for.