by Anne Brown -

Could a Cap on Ridehailing Curb Equity Gains?

Though no longer brand new, ridehail companies like Uber and Lyft continue to cause consternation as cities struggle with how to plan for and regulate them. Some cities have opted for trip-based taxes and fees, while others have regulated the number of cars allowed to operate. In August, New York City became the first American city to cap the number of ridehail vehicles permitted to operate each day .

Taxi drivers celebrated this move as a victory against Silicon Valley titans. But some city councilors cautioned that the New York City cap could harm low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, who have historically been underserved or avoided by taxis. Could they be right? My own research on Lyft in Los Angeles suggests: yes. Ridehailing extends reliable car access to low-income neighborhoods, majority-black neighborhoods, and areas with limited access to personal cars. A cap on ridehailing could concentrate drivers in wealthier neighborhoods, driving up prices and wait times in lower-income neighborhoods. In other words, a ridehail cap threatens to undermine the access it delivers to neighborhoods that need it the most.

Lyft serves everywhere. Data from over 6.3 million Lyft trips in Los Angeles reveal that Lyft service is remarkably ubiquitous. In a county with dense urban centers, sprawling suburbs, and remote mountain towns, Lyft trips served neighborhoods home to 99.8 percent of the population.

Lyft is used most where personal car access is lowest. Most people used Lyft to fill an occasional travel need, taking just one trip per month on average. But data also suggest that people took more Lyft trips where its close substitute—the household car—was scarcest and corresponding car travel was most limited.

Ridehail use is highest in low-income neighborhoods. Riders living in low-income neighborhoods relied disproportionately on Lyft, taking 36 percent more Lyft trips per month than users living in high-income neighborhoods. Riders in these neighborhoods made more of their trips on shared and less-expensive Lyft Line compared to riders living in high-income neighborhoods. Over one-third (34%) of users in low-income areas made shared trips on Lyft Line while users in high-income areas used this service less frequently, approximately 22 percent of the time. These results suggest that sharing provides an important low-cost option for cost-sensitive travelers.

Access is improved, yet questions remain, in communities of color. Taxis have historically avoided or refused to serve communities of color. Lyft presents a more promising story. Riders living in majority-black neighborhoods in Los Angeles took more Lyft trips than riders living in neighborhoods with any other racial/ethnic majority group, even after accounting for neighborhood characteristics like density and transit service. At the same time, questions about barriers to ridehail service remain. Riders living in majority-Hispanic and majority-Asian neighborhoods took fewer trips than expected all else being equal; lower use in these neighborhoods may reflect unequal banking access, smartphone ownership, or other barriers that inhibit residents from hailing a Lyft. More research is needed to ensure that all travelers can hail a ride.

Ridehailing provides car access in neighborhoods where personal access to cars is lowest. Capping the number of ridehail vehicles could encourage drivers to concentrate on higher-income neighborhoods, where they may anticipate more demand and longer, pricier trips. Taxis have long ascribed to this model, gathering around downtown hotels and businesses where they anticipate high-paying clientele. In doing so, taxis often avoid lower-income neighborhoods where personal car access is lowest, despite data showing that the residents in these areas rely disproportionately on taxis to travel by car. A ridehail cap could similarly encourage drivers to flock to wealthier neighborhoods, raising prices or wait times in less-affluent or less-central neighborhoods. Higher prices and long wait times in these communities could undermine the access benefits that ridehailing has provided to date. Worse, attempts to draw drivers into these areas through tactics such as “surge pricing”, while an incentive for drivers, could put ridehailing out of financial reach entirely for those who need it the most.

Instead of simply capping ridehailing, cities should consider the holistic role ridehailing can play in the broader mobility puzzle and how different regulations will affect cities’ visions for the future. While ridehailing can and should be regulated—such as to maintain safety standards or require data sharing—it is important that cities understand the wider effects of these regulations and implement equitable policies that will improve access for all.

 

by Amanda Howell -

Why Kroger’s Driverless Grocery Delivery Pilot Is a Harbinger of Disruption

By Rick Stein, Principal and Owner of Urban Decision Group

The largest grocery chain in the U.S. recently announced they are testing driverless grocery delivery in Scottsdale, Arizona.  In the U.S., The Kroger Company is the Walmart/Amazon of the grocery sector.  In other words, this is a big deal.  We’ve spent a lot of time discussing the impacts of AV on the transport of humans, but the earliest, and arguably the most profound impacts, will occur because of rapidly changing consumer expectations.

Image: Nuro

Kroger’s pilot program currently uses an autonomous Prius with a human in the driver’s seat to monitor the car’s performance, but future versions of this service will be completely autonomous.  Kroger is partnering with Nuro, a startup founded by two Google engineers who worked at Google’s Waymo venture.  During this pilot phase, a clerk loads the groceries into the vehicle and then the vehicle delivers the groceries to the customer at their curb where the customer enters a numeric code to open the vehicle.  These are baby steps towards the inevitable – the complete automation of the entire process from ordering to stocking the food pantry in your home.  And oh, by the way, the entire supply chain will be automated as well.  It’s time to make friends with our robot overlords.

This past March, I and two of my colleagues traveled to Portland for the inaugural Urbanism Next Conference where we gave a presentation in which we speculated that the retail industry will likely be the earliest, and most significant adopters of autonomous vehicle technology.  The presentation was well-received and even got some love from the folks at The Atlantic’s CityLab.  At the time, we told those in attendance to prepare for the one-hour delivery of virtually anything within three years or so.  A series of recent acquisitions and partnerships undertaken by The Kroger Company seems to validate the ambitious goals of automating the entire grocery procurement process.  While the timeline for achieving these goals will be impacted by factors such as regulations (including zoning), technology, safety, and the economy, to name a few – make no mistake, it’s coming.

Up until now, all you really needed to do was pay attention to the seemingly daily barrage of articles about Amazon and Walmart competing for the consumer’s attention.  Now we can throw Kroger into the mix as well.  Obviously, there will be other retailers that embrace autonomy in the next couple of years – many, many others.  The battle to bring goods to the market for the lowest price has long been the goal of the largest retailers, but prices can only go so low before producing a good stops making sense.  The war on price isn’t over, but it is going to take a back seat to the next epic fight – the battle over your time.  And this war will be ugly if we aren’t prepared for it.

In 2005, Amazon introduced us to Amazon Prime – a membership-based service that promised free two-day shipping on eligible purchases within the contiguous United States.  Within a few years, we will likely reflect on Amazon Prime as a cute idea.  From this point forward, the consumer’s “time” is squarely the target of the world’s largest retailers.  While a lot of attention is paid to the concept of “experiential retail” as a means of saving conventional brick and mortar retail, the battle over our time will have a much larger impact on us all, regardless of our level of consumerism.

Amazon is currently rolling out a two-hour delivery service from Whole Foods through Prime Now.  Prime Now does not use autonomy/robotics/AI and it is only for items stocked at Whole Foods.  Rest assured, future versions of Prime Now will almost certainly employ all those inter-related technologies and will extend way beyond grocery items.  Each of the major retailers will try to one-up each other to deliver goods to us as fast as is technologically possible. What does this mean for our cities?  Well, it means cities need to be prepared for a level of disruption not seen since the widespread adoption of the automobile and the post-World War II demand for housing produced the modern suburb.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

There are going to be autonomous delivery vehicles on our roads – a lot of them.  You could make the argument that if I purchase goods online and the goods are delivered to me (autonomously or not), then aren’t I simply substituting my trip with another’s trip?  In theory this is true, but we have evidence in the form of humankind’s relatively recent adoption of computing technology, that we don’t merely substitute one thing for another; rather, we tend to add additional tasks into the voids created by technologically-enabled efficiency.  For example, the adoption of electronic spreadsheets reduced the amount of time to complete most accounting tasks.  Calculations that took hours or days to complete could now be done in a matter of minutes or seconds.  Employers took advantage of that time savings and added more and more tasks.  Smart phone adoption is a more recent example of a tool that made us more efficient on one hand, but somehow resulted in us being even more busy than before.  It stands to reason that if we chose to have most things delivered to us, we will use our newfound time to do something else – and that something else may very well be taking a trip somewhere – perhaps a trip to an experiential retailer.

How are we going to deal with all these extra vehicles on our streets and roads?  We don’t have the space or the money to build our way out of it.  Not to mention, there is no evidence that it is even possible to build your way out of traffic congestion in the long run.  Further, we haven’t even talked about the inevitability of existing physical retail buildings functioning as distribution nodes and the challenges this presents to existing zoning.  That is another conversation for another blog post (or book).

The takeaway is this – our cities are ill-prepared to handle the disruption that is coming their way.  The “solutions” are going to be complicated and will impact everything from zoning to transportation funding.  Although cities are on the front lines, this will require an “all hands on deck” approach that includes regional, state, and federal coordination.  The way we manage autonomous delivery of retail goods will likely be an indicator of our ability to manage the autonomous delivery of humans.  It’s the proverbial canary in the coalmine.

by Amanda Howell -

AVs in the Pacific Northwest: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in a Time of Automation [New Report]

Urbanism Next is pleased to share a new report: AVs in the Pacific Northwest: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in a Time of Automation (Larco, Howell, Lewis, and Steckler). The policy decisions made over the next 10 years that shape the deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) will have significant repercussions for our communities as well as environmental repercussions related to greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to climate change. In recognition of that, Urbanism Next worked with the cities of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC to better understand how new mobility technologies such as AVs could affect greenhouse gas emissions thereby impacting their ability to achieve the goals in their respective climate action plans.

After conducting a literature review, reviewing existing new mobility documents, conversations with stakeholders, and conversations with partners in the public, private, and academic sectors, we compiled a variety of possible implementation actions that we think cities could consider to reduce GHG emissions. We invite you flip through and see what you think. (Please note, while we we think the actions we identified can serve as a starting point for thinking about the impacts of AVs on climate goals and how best to mitigate the potentially negative ones, we know that this will be an ongoing, iterative process as promising practices are developed.) There may be challenges ahead, there are also many opportunities to make positive changes. We hope those opportunities will seized!

This project grew out of a partnership between the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (CNCA/USDN) and the Cities of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver and was generously supported by the Bullitt Foundation.

by Nico Larco -

Ensuring the Benefits of Vertically Integrated MaaS

Cities are starting to see a vertical integration of the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) landscape.  A number of companies (see examples of Uber and Lyft) are realizing the opportunity to provide multiple MaaS options to their clients and not only focus on one part of the mobility pie.  Rideshare, bikeshare, e-scooters, etc. all have the possibility of on one hand cannibalizing one another and on the other being an entryway to a broader set of possible MaaS options.  By integrating services vertically, companies can offer a broader suite of services and ensure that all transactions are within their platform (and their bottom line).

While vertically integrated MaaS options will have large benefits for users, it also points to a potential future where a few dominant companies offer a Helsinki-like vertically integrated mobility option. As a consumer you may end up needing to decide if you want to subscribe to the Lyft MaaS suite, the Uber MaaS suite, or the Waymo MaaS suite.  A large concern with this is that it will stifle competition and keep small companies out of the marketplace.  Cities can play a lead role in ensuring that this doesn’t happen so that their residents have a wider range of options and the economic benefits of MaaS are not restricted to a few large, key players.

The three things that are necessary for an open MaaS platform are:

  • Shared route/cost/time information– There are already a number of examples of this happening thanks, in large part to Google’s leadership on creating GTFS. A number of apps – including Google’s own Google Maps – let you compare travel options, complete with time and cost information.  The next generation of these apps needs to start thinking about how to show expanded travel options which mix modes (the height of the MaaS vision). It would be great to see a travel option that includes bikeshare from your house to the transit stop, the transit trip itself, and then a scooter option for the last-mile. More and more, this is exactly the types of trips we will all be making in a MaaS world.
  • Uniform payment platform– Critical in making all of this work is a single payment platform that allows easy movement from one mode and service to another. This will facilitate use of the most efficient mode of travel and will allow small companies to compete with larger ones.  While uniform payment has been a challenge in many parts of the US, there are examples abroad that show this is absolutely possible.  For example, OV Chipcard in the Netherlands is a single payment platform that is used by train, tram, bus, carshare and bikeshare companies.  It is simple to plug into the system and from the user’s perspective, makes transportation choices easy to make.
  • Multi-company subscription services – Both of the points above create the opportunity for multi–company subscription services where movement between MaaS modes becomes easy and economically beneficial. The difficulty will be in finding the framing and levers to bring private sector companies along and not have them each create their own transportation fiefdoms.  One large lever will be that, if this shared subscription marketplace can be created, companies will want to join simply to have access to users.  If they are outside of it, their competitors will get the rides.  It is a tricky proposition and will require a good amount of thinking and coordination (both with companies and with regulatory bodies) to make this work, but the potential upside is tremendous for user experience, economic opportunity, and for the overall efficient use of the transportation network.

This is an important moment where cities should be shifting their thinking from how to deal with a continuing series of mode innovations (e.g. e-scooters being the latest one) to a more expansive and forward thinking approach that is focused on outcomes and on creating a broad platform that can accommodate current and future transportation options in a level playing field.