Retail Closures, Vertical Warehouses, Distribution Blimps, and Flying Cars

Here is a roundup of a few interesting bits of news that cropped up in the past week…

In another installment of major retail closures, Sears Holdings announced that it will close an additional 46 Sears and Kmart locations this fall. This came on the heels of Lowe’s announcement that it intends to close all Orchard Supply Hardware store locations by early next year. The Sears and Kmart stores are scattered throughout the country while Orchard Supply’s 99 locations are concentrated in California, Oregon, and Florida. All told, that’s a lot of large retail space that’s about to be vacant…how will those spaces be adapted?

Perhaps they will become vertical warehouses if Amazon’s pending patent application is approved. If a multistory distribution center that looks like a skyscraper sounds a bit unbelievable, check out the story about Amazon’s additional patent application for an airborne fulfillment center that looks like a blimp. The e-commerce giant intends to use drones to access the flying warehouse. Just imagine what THAT air traffic might look like…

And speaking of air traffic, Japan is reportedly working with Uber and Boeing to make flying cars a reality. (You have to see it to believe it. Check out the embedded video to see what the future of flying cars might actually look like.)

More news coming soon!

Upcoming TRB Webinar on Emerging Technologies and Transportation Revenue

Curious about the impacts of emerging technologies on things like parking revenue, traffic fines, registration fines, and other transportation revenue streams? Well, the Transportation Research Board is organizing a webinar about these very questions on Thursday, September 6 from 1-2:30PM ET! This webinar is based on a workshop that was presented in January at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board and will feature Urbanism Next Center Director Nico Larco. Bruce Schaller, who recently published a report on “The New Automobility” that has garnered a fair bit of attention, will also be presenting. (See here and here for some interesting responses to his findings.) Additional details about the webinar can be accessed here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the impact of emerging technologies on municipal finance, check out the Urbanism Next white paper on this topic that was published last year!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Autonomous Vehicle

By Matt Hoffman, VP of Innovation at Enterprise Community Partners

The housing and community development sector is looking in the rearview mirror as it tries to tackle the affordability and opportunity challenges that face millions of Americans – and it is about to have a head-on collision with an autonomous vehicle.

As we work to address the 7-million unit housing shortage in the U.S. and enable people to live where they have access to good-paying jobs and high-quality schools, we need to look beyond the bricks and sticks, amortizations, and tax credits and start figuring out how self-driving cars and a whole suite of mobility, data, and communications-related technologies are about to transform how and where we live and the implications that will have for low-income people and communities.

The combination of technology and data applications being applied in urban environments, loosely referred to as “The Smart City,” has initiated a slew of policy and planning work in cities and regions across the country that provide an opportunity to shape an inclusive and equitable future for lower-income citizens and communities.

New technology-enabled forms of mobility are the biggest driver of urban transformation. Until recently, options for getting from point A to point B (too far to just walk) were limited: privately owned car, taxi, and public transportation (bus or subway). But the onset of the shared economy, enabled by digital technology and ubiquitous mobile devices and high bandwidth networks, has introduced a nascent multi-modal network that includes options such as shared private cars, e-bikes, e-scooters, shared pedal-powered bikes, and soon autonomous cars and buses.

As we continue to try to build our way out of the affordability shortage, we need to do it in the context of what the market will look like over the next decade and beyond. If people can move more efficiently, at lower cost, and on-demand throughout a city, what implication does that have for how real estate is used and valued and how affordable housing is produced, preserved, and allocated? Is location in the city core or in a high-resourced neighborhood as valuable if the access or proximity to that place is not as distant or isolated as it previously was? What does transit-oriented development mean when the transit network becomes dynamic, on-demand, and comes to wherever you are?

While we don’t have a crystal ball that tells us what cities will look like 10 years from now, we do know that technology will continue to be more pervasive, less expensive to deploy, and generate some unexpected (and maybe unintended) outcomes. Identifying and applying core principles that derive greater equity, inclusion, and social and economic justice in our society will help steer us to better outcomes regardless of what technologies get deployed.

Put People First: Especially as cities plan and design transportation systems and make zoning decisions that dictate where new housing can be built and its density, these decisions must be made in the context of how people actually live and what resources they have. There has to be a balance between what we want to see and the reality of how life plays out, especially for those lacking resources. How do we help unhoused and underhoused people find permanent housing that also enables a commute to a job in less than 30 minutes? How do we help the senior citizen living alone in need of some light assistance but not appropriate for a nursing home and not able to afford an assisted living facility? How do we keep the child connected to her network of social supports where she has grown up? We must make the systems we build, both digital and analog, fit people’s lives and not build to suit the technology’s capability just because we can.

Solve Problems, Don’t Search for Them:  So many technology applications seem to be solutions in search of a problem to solve. Yet the problems in the social sector are right in front of our faces: affordable housing, quality education, access to fresh food, living wage jobs, climate change, and mobility. If cities define their problems well and ask companies to bring their best solutions regardless of technology or analog function or preference, then we are likely to get better outcomes than asking for a specific technology to do X, Y, or Z. If we lead with problem-solving, then we will evolve to a city of meaning, purpose, and justice. If we lead with technology, then we are likely to end up with a dystopia.

Get the infrastructure right: Infrastructure, especially hard infrastructure that requires rights of way (roads, bridges, water/sewer, fixed rail) is extremely expensive and only gets built and rebuilt once every few generations. Decisions we make today will likely last upwards of a century. But some infrastructures, such as transportation and power are becoming more flexible and dynamic, less constrained. As cities face decisions today on critical infrastructure projects, they need to consider how needs will change over the next decades especially regarding technological and climate change influences. That means running scenarios for multiple futures and determining how any given investment will respond. It also means testing for resiliency and how infrastructure can withstand and adapt to changing climate and market conditions.

Rigorously measure outputs and assess externalities: As solutions are put in place, outputs should be measured in real time and routinely evaluated. These metrics need to be considered and structured for in advance. Assessments for externalities need to be conducted to ensure that unanticipated costs or problems are not being generated.

Open the process to citizens: Governments should view citizens as their partners, not just customers. As Smart Cities evolve and produce immense volumes of data, those data sets should be made public in real-time so citizens can help identify problems and generate solution options. Imagine the creativity and brainpower that could be unlocked if people were invited to participate in making their communities as great as possible. Rather than viewing government as something to tolerate and where citizens are essentially passive consumers of government services, rules, and regulations, we could start to shift to a partnership model where citizens felt empowered to bring solutions as well as complaints.

Let’s collectively flag down that big self-driving bus barreling down on us and hop on board. It and the other emerging Smart City technologies can help redefine what is possible for a more equitable, prosperous, just, healthy and sustainable society. It may also help us solve the housing affordability challenge.

NYC at Cap-acity

Photo by Kevin Lee on Unsplash

It is official—after much anticipation, the New York City Council voted to impose a year-long cap on for-hire vehicles and will not issue any new vehicle licenses for the duration of the cap period, although they have made an exception for wheelchair accessible vehicles. (Of which there are not nearly enough.) During the upcoming year, the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) will also be tasked with studying whether to adopt vehicle utilization standards or regulations…essentially, they will determine if there should be permanent regulations in place limiting the number of for-hire vehicle licenses issued, much the way that taxi medallions have been regulated for decades. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Uber and Lyft lobbied pretty hard against this bill, arguing that a cap on the number of vehicles will decrease vehicle availability leading to longer wait times and, possibly, higher fares. Despite their efforts, the bill passed 39-6.

According to the NY Times, the number of for-hire vehicles in the city has increased to 100,000, up from 63,000 in 2015 when Mayor de Blasio tried, and failed, to institute a cap. This time around, there was support not just from taxi drivers who have seen the value of their medallions plummet but also many of the independent contractors who drive for the TNCs. (The Independent Drivers Guild was heavily involved in the campaign to pass the bill.) In addition to imposing a cap on vehicles, the NYC Council also voted in favor of giving the Taxi and Limousine Commission the ability to establish minimum payments for for-hire drivers—a big win for drivers.

For a window into the for-hire driver’s view, I suggest checking out the Independent Drivers Guild’s FAQs about the cap, which provides a easy-to-digest summary of what they’re anticipating the cap will mean. (They anticipate the demand for leasing to skyrocket under the cap as new drivers look for ways to acquire vehicles.) The Rideshare Guy, a go-to source of information for rideshare drivers, also posted a summary of the suite of bills that passed yesterday and how to decipher them.

The passage of these bills comes on the heels of a new report published by Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant and former DOT commissioner, who did some serious data crunching and determined that “Private ride TNC services (UberX, Lyft) put 2.8 new TNC vehicles miles on the road for each mile of personal driving removed, for an overall 180 percent increase in driving on city streets.” He also concludes that TNCs primarily compete with transit, walking, and biking, not other private vehicles. (This does to seem to be in line with a growing body of research that finds that people are using TNCs in place of trips they might otherwise have made by transit, walking, or biking.)

Robin Chase, co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, thinks we are far too focused on the trips being replaced by TNCs and are missing the bigger picture: 72% of trips taken are taken by private vehicle. TNCs and taxis only account for 1.2% of total trips nationwide. Why aren’t we asking what other modes people might have used for a trip if they hadn’t used a personal vehicle, she wonders. Presumably some fraction of those personal vehicle trips could have been made by walk, bike, or transit. All of this focus on the impacts that TNCs are having on congestion is glossing over the fact that congestion was already an issue long before TNCs arrived, she argues. Instead, we should institute fair user fees across ALL modes, private vehicles included, which is one of Shared Mobility Principles that have been committed to by a growing number of agencies, private companies, and advocacy groups. (Notably, NYC recently enacted a surcharge for taxis and TNCs in Manhattan for rides south of 96th Street, but did not manage to institute the much-discussed congestion zone, which would have required private vehicles to pay a daily use fee during busy times—with the idea that the funds would help raise money for the subway.)

It will be illuminating to see how the vehicle cap plays out in NYC over the coming year, and what findings the TLC arrive at. But one thing does seem clear…there may be enough political support to cap TNCs in NY but the private vehicle will live to see other another day without a congestion fee or a cap.

 

Urbanism Next is Hiring!

Urbanism Next is growing! We are hiring a Project Manager to oversee a variety of research projects, as well as to develop the Urbanism Next Clearinghouse, a national online resource. If you’re interested in emerging technologies and the impacts that they are having on how we live, move, and spend our time, then this may be the job for you! These are exciting, challenging, constantly-evolving issues and there’s lots of work to do be done. We hope you’ll consider joining the team.

For a full description of the position, check out the job posting here. The first review of applications will take place August 21, but the position will remain open until filled.

What Could Off-Road AV Technology Mean for Urban Street Design?

Land Rover has just announced Cortex, their investment in off-road AV technology, and Wired summarized the project in a recent article.

Outdoors enthusiasts have expressed skepticism in people’s willingness to give up conventional vehicles since it would mean losing the ability to adventure in places that are only accessible by rough, unpredictable roads. So far, experts hypothesize that AV technology will need a highly controlled road space with smooth surfaces and freshly painted markings, but this clearly poses challenges to adoption since many roads, even in cities, don’t fit these criteria.

While AVs capable of all-terrain navigation are obviously useful for reaching a favorite mountain hike, they could also provide additional benefits in more developed areas. For example, shared streets could become easier to implement since clearly designated lane markings wouldn’t be needed to keep the vehicles on track. Cities could change up the street space by adding planters or street furniture without requiring navigational software updates for all the cars in town. Plus, cities could save a lot of money if roads don’t need to be maintained in pristine conditions all the time.

There is one last benefit to more adventure-ready AVs. If people no longer need to hold on to their conventional cars for their outdoor adventures, the transition to a fully automated vehicle stock could happen sooner, meaning cities will exist in the confusing transition period for less time.

Steph Nappa is a Master’s Candidate in Community and Regional Planning and an Urbanism Next Fellow at the University of Oregon.  She is examining how to re-design city streets to prioritize bicycles, pedestrians and transit in an era of autonomous vehicles.

Shaping Transportation Through Pricing

Cities are beginning to consider the potential impacts that autonomous vehicles will have on their transportation systems and whether those impacts can be shaped to support city goals. A recent article from The Economist explored how pricing can be used to shape the outcomes of autonomous vehicles.

The article offers ways that AVs can mitigate certain negative impacts created by cars over the past century. The negative effects that vehicles and vehicle infrastructure have inflicted upon cites, like congestion, sprawl, and ecological damage, could all be reversed through the reallocation of space that is currently dedicated to cars. Alternatively, these problems could get worse if the use of AVs is not effectively managed.

As the article states, “It all depends on the rules for their use, and in particular the pricing.”

It is suggested that road pricing will become more feasible due to an AV’s ability to recognize where the vehicle is at all times, allowing for better congestion management. Ride pricing can also be used to reduce congestion, making peak trip times more expensive.

In suburban job centers, public transit systems that have prioritized commuter movement into the central city often no longer match commuting trends of the region. While AVs provide a cost-effective opportunity for ride sharing companies or transit systems to move people more efficiently between suburbs, they could also encourage sprawl by allowing people to live even further from their place of work. Again, pricing mechanisms can be used to discourage this behavior.

Lastly, the current auto-oriented transportation system dedicates large amounts of valuable land to parked cars. If AVs reduce the need for parking, this land can be repurposed for higher value uses, and in some cases can even transform the land to provide valuable ecological functions. The Economist argues that the current overuse of space for parking is due to an improper pricing scheme. Essentially, the negative externalities of cars have not been appropriately included in their cost of use. The authors close on the hopeful note that this time around, cities may have learned from their mistakes and will price AVs appropriately to achieve their desired outcomes.

Steph Nappa is a Master’s Candidate in Community and Regional Planning and an Urbanism Next Fellow at the University of Oregon.  She is examining how to re-design city streets to prioritize bicycles, pedestrians and transit in an era of autonomous vehicles.