Month: July 2018

As Portland’s Willamette Week writes, the scooters are coming. Portland’s Bureau of Transportation recently announced that it was accepting applications for shared electric scooters after putting the finishing touches on a comprehensive, thirty-five page permit application. (Read it in full here.) The permitting process is preparing the city for a 120-day pilot period which could start as early as the end of July, according to a PBOT spokesperson. After witnessing the scooter invasion in places like Santa Monica and San Francisco where scooters appeared virtually overnight, to the consternation of many city officials, Portland staff were motivated to get a permitting policy in place ASAP. Here are some important highlights of the application:

• E-scooters will be capped at 2,500 TOTAL throughout the pilot period.
• Every company holding a permit to deploy scooters will be required to deploy a minimum of 100 scooters or 20% of its local fleet in historically underserved East Portland neighborhoods as defined by the City’s 2035 Comprehensive Plan.
• In addition to requiring safety and complaint histories, the application process also requires companies to submit a user equity plan and an economic opportunity plan.
• Companies must adhere to a data sharing agreement.
• AND there will be $0.25 per-trip surcharge assessed by the City.

Yes, you read that right. The City of Portland is assessing a per-trip surcharge, and according to Sightline Institute’s Michael Andersen that’s just fine. Andersen argues that over-regulating scooters (like capping the number of scooters) is a bigger risk than overtaxing them. This is a thorough and interesting piece…definitely recommended reading. While only time will tell how this all plays out, this permitting process appears to holds promise, especially if the equity components are realized.

Ready, set, scoot.

Our transportation options are expanding tremendously.  Innovations in new mobility ranging from dockless bikeshare, to dockless e-scooters, to hoverboards, to terrestrial drones, to microtransit, are bringing a wide range of new players into the streetscape.  All of these modes are going to need to integrate with existing pedestrians, cyclists, transit, freight vehicles, and – of course – the automobile.  The question is where each mode should live and what areas of the street should be open to each mode.

Historically, we have divided the street by mode: pedestrians on the sidewalk, bikes in the bike lane, cars/freight/transit in the vehicle travel lanes.  A few mixes have been allowed (bikes on sidewalks or in vehicle travel lanes for instance).

The proliferation of mobility options is forcing us to reconsider how we organize the street.  And given the speed at which new options keep arising, reorganizing the street each time a new option arrives, or creating designated lanes for each mode is becoming unfeasible.

What if, instead, we reframed our current thinking of streets to go from a separation by modes, to a separation by speed.

Modified from image created by Sabrina Ortiz, Univ. of Oregon

Our sidewalks can continue to be defined by the speed of pedestrians.  Into that can now also be introduced terrestrial drones and low speed hover boards.  The former bikelane can now become a zone for anything moving up to 15 mph.  E-scooters, faster moving hoverboards, low speed delivery vehicles, low speed AV microtransit shuttles could all exist in this area.  Further into the street we could have a zone of 15-35mph that accommodates legacy cars, AVs, transit and freight.  And finally, we could potentially have a zone (on some streets) that accommodates the highest speed vehicles – and with connected vehicle technology could act as a dedicated (or at least prioritized) lane for high occupancy and high speed transit and freight.

Reframing the street this ways can give heightened status to a range of lower speed mobility options and increase the real-estate for these modes on the street.  It can create more efficient street flow in much the same way a boulevard does as it separates travel by speed.  It also provides a model that easily accommodates new mobility modes as they arrive.

As mobility changes, our streets will need to change as well – a great opportunity to improve the experience for all users and to re-balance the space currently given over to the automobile.  New, better options exist.  We need to make street that work for them.

The e-scooter business just keeps heating up, it would seem. The most recent news, announced this morning, is that Uber is investing in Lime as part of a $335 million financing round for the bikeshare and e-scooter company. GV (Alphabet Inc.’s venture capital arm) is leading the deal and values Lime at $1.1 billion. (FYI, Lime’s rival Bird Rides is apparently valued at $2 billion.) As part of the partnership between Uber and Lime, Uber will be making e-scooter rentals available through its app. That means the company that started as a ride hail service now offers customers access to bikes as a result of its recent acquisition of Jump, as well as soon-to-come e-scooters. (Uber isn’t the only one expanding its offerings—Lyft is purchasing the bikeshare company Motivate, which operates the Citi Bike program in New York in addition to other bikeshare programs.) One of the reasons that Uber cited for being interested in Lime is because the company already has scooters available in several major cities. However, Uber has apparently also filed an application in San Francisco to introduce its own scooter service. It will certainly be interesting to see how that unfolds but suffice it to say, the wave of e-scooters is building speed rapidly…and likely coming to a city near you.

For some cities, using Uber is cheaper than driving. This is the future of TNCs and AVs.

This is the finding from Mary Meeker’s (of Kleiner Perkins) internet trend 2018 report. She notes that there is 2x year over year growth in rideshare rides, with 20% of those rides being taken using shared rides (UberPool)—in markets where that service is available. She also notes that public transit use is up 30% since 1995—though use has been flat or declining in more recent years.

These trends are clear for areas where parking and insurance rates are high, but “When you move somewhere where everyone has their own driveway and parking is earlier to find, the reverse is more likely to be true.”

One of the more interesting things in the report, to me at least, is that the cost of operating and maintaining vehicles has increased as a share of personal spending over the last 45 years. The complexity of vehicles has increased. Based on what we know about AVs’ complexity, it would seem as though their complexity will be substantially higher, perhaps pushing toward fleet ownership, where economies of scale could make that cost of ownership lower if you’ve got a lot of cars rather than just the one. Clearly, this is speculation, but with evidence that people are increasing their use of TNCs, becoming more willing to share their rides, and that in some cities TNCs are already cheaper than car ownership, then it becomes safer to assume that the AV world and the world of shared-mobility will collide sooner than many expect.

One focus of the work of Urbanism Next has been to try to understand and organize the various impacts of emerging technology on cities.  We have done this through conducting and gathering specific research, developing and disseminating reports, through our conference and through the building of a national network of partners in the public, private and academic sectors.

Through this work, we have developed a long list of impacts we should all be considering when looking at the effects of new mobility, e-commerce and the sharing economy will have on cities.  While this was a helpful first step, we saw a strong need to organize these impacts in a way that makes them easy for us to understand and relate to each other.

What we are presenting here today is a draft of what we are calling the Urbanism Next Framework.  This framework organizes impacts based on four key areas – land use, urban design, transportation, and real estate – and relates those to the implications they will have on equity, health, the environment, the economy, and governance.

This framework is helping guide our research efforts, helping us understand gaps in knowledge, and helping us make links between the various areas impacted by emerging technology.  We are currently engaged in various projects, including work with NSF and the Bullitt Foundation, that is based on this framework and we will be sharing the outcomes of this work – that deepens the information in the framework further – shortly.

As mentioned, this is a draft document, so we look forward to hearing your comments and thoughts about how this resonates with you and about how it might be modified and improved.  We hope this framework can help organize both city responses and research about emerging technology impacts and can help all of us push ahead in these important tasks.

We already know that transportation network companies (TNCs) are shaping our mobility choices and behavior in all kinds of ways…perhaps you’ve read about how people are increasingly substituting pricey ambulance rides with TNCs…which got us thinking about the myriad ways that medical institutions are already being impacted by emerging technologies and how the advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs) might further impact them. How does a medical institution, a transportation microcosm of both people and goods movement, plan for the future in the face of disruptive technologies? That’s the question that a recent ‘Future Proofing’ workshop for staff at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a premier medical, teaching, and research institution, attempted to address. Urbanism Next’s Becky Steckler partnered with the transportation planning and engineering firm Fehr & Peers on the workshop to assess the implications of current transportation trends on UCSF in 2035 assuming a reasonable range of AV fleet adoption, and to identify the most problematic potential effects/outcomes UCSF wants to avoid.

The workshop sought to educate UCSF staff on the current state of emerging technologies, including TNCs, AVs, and autonomous delivery technologies, and provide them with an opportunity to rank potential implications as well as identify gaps. The primary focus of the workshop was the impact that these disruptive mobility trends will have on the practices at UCSF. (It is worth noting Fehr & Peers has developed a nifty tool that approximates the relative magnitude of the effect of these trends on vehicle trips, parking demand and curbspace demand, based on different AV adoption scenarios. Check out a snapshot below of the results for one of the scenarios that UCSF tested and/or learn more about the effects of autonomous vehicles on their webpage here).

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s what the workshop participants identified as key implications of emerging technologies on UCSF’s future planning efforts:

• Plan for decreased parking demand
• Plan for increased passenger loading demand
• Rethink the function of certain streets
• Explore opportunities to further centralize delivery processes off-campus
• Consider the need for new infrastructure to support emerging delivery technologies
• Understand how the long adoption periods of AV technology will affect campus planning
• Acknowledge importance of partnerships with diverse groups in preparing for technology and policy changes
• Consider and develop UCSF’s position on city, state and federal regulations with respect to emerging technologies

As you can imagine, these are all BIG issues and we’re all still trying to figure out what the solutions should be. However, it is important to acknowledge and commend UCSF for recognizing the need to “future proof.” If we’re planning cities, or even our hospitals, for the ways thing look today then we are already behind.