The National Urbanism Next Conference is almost here, but there’s still time to register! It’s going to be a jam-packed couple of days full of information, ideas, and insights—we hope you’ll join us!
On Tuesday, May 7 we’ll be hosting a series of half-day workshops at the White Stag Building, along with a full-day workshop geared towards elected officials and government leaders. Workshops are filling up, so be sure to register soon if you’re interested in getting into of those! (We will be offering a wait list for those that are already full.) On Tuesday evening, we’ll be heading over to Urban Studio for a round of fun and fast-paced lightning talks. RSVP here!
We’ll be moving over to the Oregon Convention Center on Wednesday, May 8 and the morning will be filled with a series of plenaries about e-commerce and last mile delivery, public-private partnerships, new mobility and transit, the opportunity to re-forest cities, and how climate, economy, and health outcomes can be translated into tangible change. The afternoon will be full of breakout sessions covering a wide range of Urbanism Next-related topics, and the day will be capped off with an evening reception.
On Thursday, May 9 we’ll be kicking off the day with a plenary about why racial equity matters in mobility. Attendees will then have a slew of great breakout sessions to choose from throughout the day, with a lunch that will be accompanied by a discussion about mobility-as-a-service.
Whether it’s senior housing in the smart technology era, how transportation changes impact municipal budgets, micromobility pilot programs, or labor considerations for the gig economy, we’ll be talking about it in just two short weeks in Portland!
Commercial package delivery by drones is one step closer to reality. The Federal Aviation Agency (F.A.A.) has approved Wing, the drone-delivery company owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, for commercial deliveries—a first of its kind in the U.S. Wing plans to start drone deliveries in Virginia sometime later this year, as reported by the NY Times. Wing has been testing its drones near Canberra, Australia and has already logged some 3,000 deliveries.
Urban delivery is a complex ecosystem, and one that continues to evolve as new technologies emerge. Terrestrial drones (or self-driving robots, or robo-couriers) like those operated by Starship Technologies are already on the scene, and growing in popularity— they seem to be especially popular on college campuses. Amazon, perhaps unsurprisingly, is getting into the terrestrial game as well and has started piloting the “Scout” for Prime deliveries in a few neighborhoods in Washington.
What does urban delivery look like when we add an aerial component? According to a Pew Research Center survey, there’s still a lot of wariness about drone delivery—about 54% of respondents said they didn’t think that drones should be allowed to fly near people’s homes. That being said, the question posed was not specific to commercial delivery but just drones in general. Perhaps some people may feel differently if the drone flying close to their home is making a quick package delivery? There are potential environmental benefits of drone delivery, but it’s hard to know just how quickly this kind of delivery might scale up—and what it might mean for cities if/when it does.
Article from the SF Chronicle is tracking the conversation about E-Scooter expansion in San Francisco. Scoot and Skip have been operating there for the last year after a contentious start to scooterdom in the city. A number of companies flooded the market, prompting the City to ban them altogether until they developed a plan for pilot deployment. That went well and now they are thinking of going from at total of 1250 scooters to 2500 scooters.
Some of the secrets to success of the roll-out:
Regulation and enforcement that keeps scooter riders off of sidewalks
Locking! The entire SF fleet has locking mechanisms that seem to have 1. reduced overall number of complaints about scooters misparked on sidewalks and 2. have limited the number of scooter thefts.
Some problems to keep working on: demographic using the scooters is still largely white, male and wealthy.
Come to the Urbanism Next Conference to learn how cities throughout the country are shaping micromobility in their communities!
Early bird registration rates for the National Urbanism Next Conference are only available through the end of the day Friday! We are very excited about the conference program, and we have a great lineup of speakers, sessions, and workshops covering everything from how to harness shared mobility data and curb management to the opportunities and challenges of urban delivery and senior housing in the age of the sharing economy. Check out our website for complete details. This year we will also be hosting a lightning talks event on Tuesday, May 7! We hope you will join us in Portland May 7-9!
London’s new Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) charge was instated this week, adding a £12.50 ($16.40) charge on top of the regular £11.50 ($15.10) congestion charge for driving in the heart of London. The added ULEZ charge applies to gas-powered vehicles older than 2006 as well as diesel-powered vehicles older than 2015. Want to drive a diesel or gas-powered private bus into the ULEZ? That’ll be an additional fee of £100, or roughly $131, per trip please.
London’s polluted air affects two million residents and the amount of pollution-related deaths is startling. Limiting older, more polluting vehicles is an important step in addressing these preventable deaths and illnesses. While the ULEZ is now operational in the Central London core, London plans to expand the ULEZ to a much broader and more residential area in 2021. Since lower income people tend to live in areas more exposed to pollutants in disproportionate numbers, expanding the ULEZ to include London’s inner ring suburbs will help extend the benefits of cleaner air to these groups. However, lower income people also tend to be more car-dependent, especially those who work in the central city area but have been pushed to seek more affordable housing further from their jobs. And lower income people are also more likely to drive vehicles that would subject them to the ULEZ fees in their own neighborhoods when the area is expanded.
The potential for financial impacts to lower income people also came into play in New York City’s congestion pricing debates as well. However, as Laura Bliss from CityLab reports, a prominent NYC anti-poverty advocacy group found that the vast majority of lower income people that commute to Manhattan use transit, and thus would benefit from the transit system improvements that congestion pricing would fund. Additional financial mitigation measures are being considered for affected lower income people in NYC, and in London there are plans to provide lower-income people with funding to replace their cars with newer ones that would be exempt from the ULEZ charges.
The idea that congestion charges are inequitable does deserve careful consideration as it is important that the needs and experiences of all road users are accounted for. But in order to compare the fairness of congestion pricing to the current system without such pricing, we must think more broadly about what fairness entails. As Michael Manville outlines, “the benefits of free roads accrue disproportionately to wealthy people.” Only the lower income people who can afford to buy, fuel, insure, and maintain the vehicles needed to drive on ‘free’ roads benefit from this amenity. Conversely, many more lower income people cannot afford driving at all, making strategic and systemic investment in transit all the more critical. Congestion pricing with well-planned revenue allocations can indeed help benefit lower income populations with better transit services and cleaner air in the neighborhoods that are closest to major streets and highways.
One of the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities, which was initiated by Robin Chase and has now been signed by a broad coalition of nonprofit entities, private companies, and municipalities, is to “support fair user fees across all modes” While transportation network companies (TNCs) have been the target of some fee programs, including in NYC, the above Shared Mobility Principle reminds us that it’s important to think comprehensively about the transportation system and congestion. True, there is evidence to suggest that TNCs are contributing to congestion, but congestion existed long before TNCs did TNCs are also being used in ways that benefit lower income people with limited transit access or special needs, like Columbus, Ohio’s prenatal care TNC transportation pilot. Congestion pricing, therefore, needs to be applied not in ways that focus on a single mode, but in ways that seek to make the entirety of the transportation system better and more fair for all users.
How can we harness technological innovations to achieve the outcomes we want to see? We’ll be discussing that in depth at the upcoming National Urbanism Next Conference in Portland, OR May 7-9. We hope you’ll join us! Early bird registration is now available through Friday, April 12!
We are thrilled to be bringing together architects, planners, landscape architects, developers, academics, and many others for conference. Experts from around the country (and the world!) will discuss what new mobility, AVs, and e-commerce mean for equity, health, the environment, the economy, and governance. Check out our website to get information about plenary speakers, as well as details about all the sessions and workshops that will be presented!
Those are the words that Donald Shoup used to describe the curb during a session at the LA CoMotion Conference a few months ago. And he is right. For years, curb space has primarily been allocated to the storage of private vehicles through the provision of short- and long-term on-street parking. While there have always been competing demands placed on this limited space, it has never has been as in demand as it is today. There are all kinds of reasons for the heightened demand—the introduction of transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft, the growth in dockless shared mobility devices like electric scooters, the continued growth of e-commerce, and the ease of in-app ordering combined with low-cost delivery, often provided by courier services like Grubhub and Doordash. All those drivers, couriers, riders, mobility service providers, etc. are in need of curb space, so perhaps it’s no wonder that this previously overlooked bit of real estate is becoming hotly contested.
Here’s the dilemma—or rather ONE of the dilemmas: “Most cities don’t currently have digital maps that would allow them to regulate curb users in anything approaching real time,” as reported in Citylab. This is a big problem in the era of new mobility we now live in. Cities need this data in order to better regulate this space, but that data hasn’t always been easy to come by or collect. Enter companies like Coord, Populous, and Remix. In “The Race to Code the Curb,” Andrew Small and Laura Bliss of Citylab break down the various efforts underway to fill this massive data gap while contextualizing some of the issues. For instance, what granularity of data is needed in order to regulate the space? What privacy issues exist? As Andrew Small and Laura Bliss write: “some of the new, data-oriented products that aim to pave over conflicts at the curb are also raising new conflicts about privacy and governance of public space. In attempting to combine real-time and long-term efforts to manage the curb, cities could risk overstepping their right to surveil the action.”
