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!

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.

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.

At the beginning of May the mobility company LimeBike announced it was shedding the word “bike” from its name. In their announcement, the company described its pivot as “a subtle shift that means big things for the world of smart personal mobility.” Along with revealing its name change, Lime also announced the release of its Lime-S electric scooter, powered by Segway. Lime, which started in 2017 with dockless bikes and e-assist bikes, officially entered the e-scooter game along with the likes of Bird, Skip, Spin, and Goat. (Apparently a four-letter name is popular in the world of new mobility…Uber, Lyft…perhaps another reason for Lime to drop the onerous additional four letters?) Lime seems to have meant what it said that its name change could mean big things for the world of personal mobility. Just last week Axios published a scoop on Lime noting that the company intends to expand its business to ultra-compact cars and hopes to begin offering customers the opportunity to rent an ultra-compact car, like the Renault Twizy, as early as Q4 this year.

And what about those e-scooters? According to the scoop, Lime deployed its e-scooters with just three weeks of prep work (much to the chagrin of many San Franciscans…) and broke even in just two weeks. TWO WEEKS. That’s a pretty quick turnaround. Furthermore, Lime estimates that by the end of the year the e-scooters will have a gross margin of $12.40 and a payoff period of just one month. What that means is that the heat is likely about to turn up as Lime, and its competitors, race to deploy the e-scooters in as many as cities as possible.

The companies aren’t the only ones racing either. Companies like Lime and Bird are paying independent contractors to recharge their scooters and according to a recent article in The Atlantic, e-scooter charging (a.k.a. Bird Hunting or Lime Juicing) has become a pretty competitive business. And for good reason. Getting into the business appears to be fairly easy…the registration process is simple, the requirements are relatively minimal, and once you’re registered the chargers are shipped to you. After that, it’s up to you to round up the scooters, charge them, and return them to the “wild.” Lime said more than 60% of its scooters in San Francisco, Austin, and San Diego are charged by freelancers and the average charger makes $30-50 per day by charging seven scooters. That doesn’t sound like a bad way to make some quick cash, so it’s perhaps no wonder that so many people are rushing to get into the market. (The Atlantic article is definitely worth a read for a peek into the interesting world of scooter charging.)

As always, questions about who benefits remain. Even though the costs of entry to the charging game are relatively low, you still have to have an address and a bank account in order to register. (You may also need to have access to a vehicle, according to Lime’s site.) And in order to ride one, you have to have a driver’s license and a card you can connect to your account. How can we ensure that the personal mobility revolution serves everyone and not just those who are more likely to be well-served already?

For those of you who are in the College Park or D.C. area this week, we have TWO exciting events coming up. On Thursday, June 21 Urbanism Next Center Director Nico Larco will be on the roster of speakers for the inaugural TEDxCollegePark. They have organized a great lineup of speakers around the theme GET OUTside encouraging audience members to “GET OUTside physically to appreciate the benefits of being connected outdoors as well as metaphorically to get out of your current mindsets, comfort zones, us versus them mentality and stereotypes.” The event will take place at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland from 9am-4pm this Thursday. Tickets are available here. (But if you can’t make it, we’ll be sure to share the video as soon as it’s available!)

On Friday, June 22 Nico will be heading to Capitol Hill for a congressional briefing on the “Secondary Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles” hosted by Rep. Blumenauer. The lunchtime briefing will be held at 2167 Rayburn House Office Building from 12-1pm. The briefing will be open to the public, so please feel free to attend if you’re in the D.C. area on Friday!

Weren’t able to attend the first annual Urbanism Next Conference? Or, you were able to attend, but you didn’t catch all the sessions you wanted to? Well, we have good news! The videos of the plenary presentations as well as slides from many of the sessions are now available online. There were so many great discussions and sessions, and we’re thrilled to be able to provide this window to the conference. Watch Urbanism Next Center Director Nico Larco kick off the conference and then hear what Mayor Ted Wheeler and U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer have to say about emerging technologies and the precipice of change we are on. (Maybe even do so with a cup of coffee in hand to recreate the full conference experience!)

We’ll be highlighting some of the other plenaries, panel discussions, and sessions next week, so stay tuned! (And a big thank you to our University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communications videographers for the great job they did capturing so much of it on video!)

Nico Larco, Urbanism Next Lead, will be speaking at the University of Oregon’s Wings event on Friday, June 1 along with three other UO-affiliated presenters. Wings: UO Presidential Speakers Series is a curated series of talks showcasing research, innovation, and creativity. If you are interested in hearing more about the more research we’re doing at Urbanism Next, as well as checking out the interesting work that the three other presenters are doing, we hope you’ll join us on Friday, June 1 at 5:30pm! More information about the event is available at UO Speaker Series and tickets are available here.

A recent article from Curbed examines our long-neglected pedestrian infrastructure and the variety of solutions that are being tested to improve our most basic form of mobility – walking. Sara Polsky writes about the benefits of pedestrian-centered streets as well as some of the reasons people were relegated to the sidewalk in the first place (hint: it was because of cars).

With transportation contributing over half of the greenhouse gas emissions across the country, cities are starting to invest more in walkable neighborhoods, and in many places their residents are pushing for this change even more strongly. And while some advocacy groups are trying to simply get their city to maintain their sidewalk network, others are starting to imagine pedestrian life without the sidewalk. Here are some of the more radical ideas:

• Seattle is testing temporary, permeable pavement that can be removed as street trees grow, with the pilot streets serving as pedestrian-oriented spaces.
• Some American cities are starting to consider the Dutch idea of woonerf, or “shared street,”  where all modes of transportation intermix with each other. This idea has already started to spread across Europe.

Bell Street Park, Seattle

• Design and tech companies are promoting a variety of design ideas of multi-modal streets or reclaiming parking spaces for other uses including parklets, bike corrals, or café seating. The big names include Pensa, Nelson\Nygaard, and Perkins + Will. Even Zipcar, Uber, and Lyft have partnered with other mobility tech companies to create a collective vision for transportation.
• Google-incubated Alphabet spinoff is busy building Sidewalk Toronto, a $50 million, 800-acre neighborhood-from-scratch in the Quayside district of Toronto. The neighborhood will exemplify the idea of walkability and mixed-use development.

With the advent of autonomous vehicles, some of these ideas could become even easier to implement. With the expected reduction in parking need and narrower vehicle lanes, more space could be converted from car-only to multi-modal. The Curbed article discusses these ideas as well, and brings up the idea that with ubiquitous sensors, AVs could even operate in a shared street environment.

Maybe new street design ideas should start thinking outside the sidewalk box.

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.

The words “Arizona” and “autonomous vehicles” are quickly becoming synonymous it would seem. The newest headline is that Chandler, AZ may become the first U.S. city to amend its zoning code in anticipation of self-driving cars. City planning staff in Chandler have submitted a list of recommended zoning amendments to the Planning and Zoning Commission, which, if adopted, would go into effect June 9. The proposed amendments would allow for minimum parking requirements to be reduced by up to 40% in exchange for the inclusion of passenger loading zones. One passenger loading zone could warrant a 10% reduction in parking, with a cap at 40% and controlling for building square footage. (A complete list of the proposed amendments is available here. Interesting and worth a look!) Planning staff have outlined two primary objectives: 1) allow for more flexibility in parking minimums as demand for parking changes and 2) promote the creation of passenger loading zones.

On the one hand, this news is encouraging—the demand for parking is already changing as a result of the rise of transportation network companies like Lyft and Uber and self-driving cars are anticipated to have further impacts on parking demand—and it is important that planners take these changes into account. Parking is expensive to build and drives up the cost of development. (See Don Shoup for comprehensive research on the high costs of parking minimums.) Making parking minimums more flexible could have lots of positive impacts, such as reducing the cost of developing multifamily housing. Encouraging the development of passenger loading zones also seems like a good idea—by this point, many of us have probably found ourselves stuck behind a TNC driver who is double parked awaiting a passenger…or we’ve been that passenger/driver ourselves. However, these proposed amendments bring up a whole host of questions that are worth considering. For starters, do we want each building to have its own passenger loading zone? How might that impact urban design? Or would we prefer that there be shared passenger loading zones for several developments or perhaps a whole block? And what about the possible impacts on congestion as cars spill out into the road while they wait their turn to enter passenger loading zones for popular destinations? Will that encourage the widening of roads to ensure that travel lanes are consistently moving, and if so, is that what we really want? Indeed, there are so many questions to consider and as of yet, so few answers.

If you’re in New Orleans kicking off the National APA Conference today, here are a few sessions to check out featuring Urbanism Next representatives!

Saturday 2:45 pm
Automated Vehicles: Effects on Urban Development
This deep-dive charrette will highlight presentations from experts and in-depth conversations about how automated vehicles impact land use, physical city design, urban densification or sprawl, and local vitality and activity.

Sunday 1 pm
Planning for Autonomous Vehicles
Autonomous vehicles will begin to revolutionize mobility in communities across the nation by 2020. This session will present the latest research from APA, along with examples of places that are introducing shared autonomous vehicles to reshape development.

Fast, Funny, and Passionate
These six bite-sized presentations will both entertain and inform you, capturing the flavor of today’s planning by making you laugh — and think. This grouping is ideal for those interested in learning about how transportation, mobility, and technology impact the world we live in.

Monday 1 pm
Getting Ahead of Self-Driving Cars
Self-driving cars are coming — and fast. Hear from a public works director, national researcher, and national consultant who examine two key areas where planners should be focusing on autonomous vehicle impacts: street design/management and parking-garage design/management.

Monday 4:15 pm
Impacts of Emerging Technology on Development
Examine emerging technologies – autonomous vehicles (AVs), e-commerce, and the sharing economy – and the profound impacts they may have on parking, residential preferences, housing prices, and transit-oriented development.

Share your takeaways, thoughts, and insights with us on Twitter at @UrbanismNext, and happy conferencing!

Did you hear? The most recent spending bill includes $100m for research on autonomous vehicles. A good chunk of that money ($60m) will go towards grants that test the “feasibility and safety” of autonomous vehicles, and those funds will only be available to local governments and academic institutions. Congress has also earmarked $1.5m to look at the impacts that autonomous vehicles may have on employment, with a particular eye on truck, taxi, and other commercial drivers. Considering that the U.S. Dept. of Commerce published a report in August 2017 that suggested that as many as 15.5m people work in occupations that could be affected by the introduction of autonomous vehicles, this investment seems critical to getting out ahead of these changes before industries are upended. As we say over here at Urbanism Next, AVs are not a transportation issue, they are an everything issue…labor included.

Angela DeLuca
ENR/Urbanism Next Research Fellow, School of Law, University of Oregon

Inevitably, at almost every presentation on how emerging technologies will impact cities, someone will suggest that Americans love their cars and will never give them up for shared transportation or autonomous vehicles (AVs). Our broad response is that people used to love riding horses as well. If there are less expensive transportation choices that allows the commuter to be productive during their commute, then people will utilize these choices.

The automobile has been a fixture of American life since the explosion of automobile ownership after World War II. Cities encouraged this trend by requiring parking minimums on new buildings. However, the policy of providing abundant parking is being called into question and a paradigm shift in transportation choices is calling for a change in our parking policy.

Transportation network companies (TNCs), such as Uber and Lyft, are of one of the driving forces shaking up the traditional parking market. The ride-hail economy offers users the convenience of a private vehicle transportation without the additional burden of parking.  TNCs have exponentially increased their services in the last four years. In Chicago, TNC rides quadrupled in the last three years. On a typical weekday in San Francisco, 5,700 TNC vehicles are in operation, accounting for 15% of all intra-city vehicle trips and 20% of all local daily vehicle miles traveled (VMT). TNC trips are concentrated in the densest and most congested parts of San Francisco.

Airports are already feeling the price pinch of TNC operations. Airports generate 25% of their operating budget from parking fees. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Stateline Report, Fresno Yosemite International Airport is losing an estimated $180,000 per year in parking revenue. Leigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania saw a decrease of $123,000 in parking revenue in the 2016 fiscal year. At Dallas Fort Worth, parking revenue is nearly $4 million lower than was projected for fiscal year 2017. Buffalo Niagara International Airport is estimating a loss of $2 million from TNC operations.

Other parking markets are starting to see the beginning of this shift as well. The two highest markets for private parking spaces are New York and Washington D.C. In D.C., a parking spot was recently sold for 10% of its purchased value eight years ago. In New York, parking space rentals are in the hundreds per month, instead of in the thousands. And according to a recent news report from San Diego, Ace Parking contends that TNCs are responsible for as much as 50% reduction in parking revenue with restaurant and nightclub parking valets being hit the hardest.

So, what does this mean for the parking industry? The need for abundant parking is coming to an end as people increasingly utilize TNCs and as some move away from private vehicle ownership altogether. Parking spaces come at a cost, especially to renters. A study of 23 recently completed Seattle-area apartment buildings showed that 15% of rent in Seattle stemmed from the cost of building parking. The same study showed that parking requirements increased rent on average by $246 a month. At the surveyed developments, only 63% of the parking spaces were utilized at the peak of demand. In addition, more units were rented in the developments than there were cars in the parking lots, illustrating that not all tenants owned an automobile.

Cities are starting to take notice of these shifts. Summit, New Jersey, for example, forewent building a new parking structure and instead entered into a transportation deal with Uber. Summit is located 30 miles from Manhattan and the city transit center is a hub for commuters who work in the city. The City addressed its parking shortage at the transit center by offering commuters free or discounted rides through Uber. One hundred commuters who have purchased parking passes are eligible for free Uber rides to and from the station. Additional riders can pay $2 per trip each way. The program is estimated to cost the city around $167,00 per year in contrast to the $10 million price tag of a new parking structure. Unlike the parking structure, the new program is also flexible to changes in future if the use of AVs and TNCs expand.

The way the average American commutes is changing. The rising generation is calling into question automobile-centric policy that has supported the inflated parking market. As Summit’s Mayor Nora Radest said “… our program is the first of its kind in the United States… [o]ur innovation has the potential to shape how municipalities think about and implement parking options in the future.” The days of the single-driver commute might be numbered and new models of mobility and innovation may very well be shaping the emerging commuter market and thus, the parking market.  

We were fortunate enough to have Mobility Lab as a media sponsor for the conference, and Mobility Lab’s Paul Mackie interviewed Nico Larco of Urbanism Next last week. They covered a lot of ground, including transportation demand management, infrastructure funding, changes we can expect to see this year, and how the Urbanism Next Conference even came to be!

We were also happy to have the organizers of the The Mobility Podcast with us last week. Check out the conversation they had with Nico Larco and Becky Steckler, Urbanism Next’s Program Manager, as the conference kicked off. In addition, don’t miss the discussions they had with plenary speakers Susan Shaheen and Robin Chase! Lots to mull over.

Have a read, have a listen, and let us know what you think!

Things are happening faster than we can write about them these days! As a result, we are starting a series called “This Week’s Don’t Miss Stories.” We’ll round up the stories we’ve read this week that we think are especially interesting and of note. Here’s a snapshot of what we read this week…

Autonomous shuttle service launched in San Ramon, California last week. EasyMile became the first autonomous vehicle to make use of California’s new regulations around driverless testing and use of AVs on public roads. EasyMile may soon be running service between BART and Bishop Ranch, a 585-acre office park where approximately 30,000 work every day, in the hope of improving the first/last mile conundrum. (Contra Costa County says that it wants to have in the vicinity of 100 autonomous buses by 2020!)

Amazon and Uber may be heading towards a package delivery showdown that could disrupt the global logistics industry, reportedly worth $8.1 trillion. Scroll down to read through the interesting comparison infographic they’ve put together for statistics about Amazon, Uber, and the state of the trucking industry. (It’s e-commerce, the sharing economy, and the advent of autonomous vehicles all in one.)

Lyft is testing a monthly subscription plan. The subscription service is targeted at users who spend upwards of $450/month on Lyft rides. According to Lyft CEO Logan Green, “a subscription to Lyft could cost something along the lines of $200, which gets you 1,000 miles of traveling around.” This doesn’t sound like the greatest plan if reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is a goal. Sure, you could argue that these high-frequency users are already spending the money to travel as much as they are, indicating they aren’t price sensitive, so perhaps this change won’t make much of a dent on VMT. However, this could very well encourage less frequent users to up their usage if they’re on the cusp of thinking it could be worth the cost, thereby driving up VMT.

The Museum of Ice Cream provides insights into the future of retail—spoiler—it’s about the experience. The Museum of Ice Cream lures customers to its New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco locations with a pool of sprinkles, among other innovative (and scrumptious?) experiences. This is an especially interesting look at the future of retail and raises the question about whether it’s even about the retail at all. In this case, you pay $38 just for admission (that’s the “museum” part), but what if more retailers start considering charging for the experience altogether? No more simple browsing without paying a price of admission? Perhaps that may never come to pass, but it’s interesting food for thought as we consider the future of retail and where we may choose to spend our time, if we can afford it…

Uber has launched a platform to help facilitate access to healthcare. While many people miss appointments because they cannot get to a doctor (claimed to be more than 3.6 million).

The experiences of healthcare providers using TNCs to get patients to care has been mixed. The director of consumer health initiatives at MedStar Health has said that “Uber has helped us drastically reduce appointment cancellations. It’s great to be able to quickly request a ride with so that in need patients can make an appointment they’d otherwise miss.” And a working paper from a University of Kansas Economist has shown that TNCs entry into a city’s transportation market “reduced the per capital ambulance volume by at least 7%”.

However, research in the JAMA Internal Medicine has demonstrated that free ride services using TNCs “may not be as effective as previously thought.” So as Uber rolls out its platform it may be challenged to sustain the connections with those that most need a ride with their technology–specifically as it relates to the digital divide and access to the technology needed to Uber/Lyft. Though there is evidence that government use of smartphone applications have been shown potential to help bridge the digital divide.

It’s true. The future is here. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., is officially permitted to operate as a Transportation Network Company (TNC) in Arizona. Why is this a big deal, you ask? Because Waymo is operating fully autonomous vehicles—that’s LEVEL FOUR AUTONOMY. The Arizona Department of Transportation granted Waymo’s permit on January 24, less than two weeks after the application was filed. This means that Waymo can begin charging passengers for rides, something it hasn’t done since it began testing its autonomous vehicles in April 2017. According to Digital Trends, Waymo’s fleet of vehicles is comprised of Chrysler Pacifica Hybrids, which are plug-in hybrids with an all-electric range of 33 miles. If everything goes according to plan, Waymo will start offering paid rides via an app (yep, just like Uber and Lyft) in Phoenix later this year.

Speaking of Uber and Lyft, this could spell competition for them since driverless cars are widely believed to be the thing that will make ride-hailing profitable with the elimination of driver wages. (According to Quartz, Uber paid ~$8 billion to drivers in earnings and bonuses in the 4th quarter of 2017.) Of course, Uber is famously working on its own driverless fleet, as is Lyft, though neither is yet operating fully autonomous vehicles. Waymo hasn’t announced a price structure, but chances are good that they’ll be competitive with what Uber and Lyft are currently charging.

The race is on and now is definitely the time for cities to get up to speed and get those regulations in place. As of now, there hasn’t been any mention of Waymo’s TNC roll-out prioritizing ridesharing, just ridehailing. What happens if they are all private rides? Will we be able to make the switch to shared after the fact? It increasingly seems like we are on the brink of Robin Chase’s Heaven or Hell scenario. Now seems like the perfect time to be convening experts from across the country to explore these questions and plan for the future…which is upon us. The Urbanism Next Conference kicks off Monday, March 5—there’s still time to register, but if you can’t make it in person keep an eye on our blog for updates!

In less than one month’s time, practitioners and policy-makers across the country will convene in Portland, Oregon to learn about, explore, and discuss a variety of topics related to transformative technologies, urbanism and planning.

What lies ahead for communities across the world is anyone’s guess—and the ‘guesses’ vary quite a bit. That’s just what Dr. Kristina M. Currans and Dr. Tara Goddard—Assistant Professors from University of Arizona and Texas A&M, respectively—are interested in. In the weeks between now and the conference, Drs. Currans and Goddard will be administering a 6-10-minute survey aimed at understanding practitioner and policy-maker perceptions of planning for autonomous vehicles.

The researchers plan to share the synthesis of their findings after the conference. In the meantime, they have made it available to the general public. Learn more and take their brief survey here!

We often get the questions about when AVs will arrive – and although that date seems closer and closer — (see our post here about car manufacturers plans, here about level 4 automation in Phoenix last November, here about GM’s request for federal approval for a fleet of level 4 AVs to be rolled out in 2019, and here for an article about Waymo’s recent order of thousands of Pacifica vans they will be deploying as AVs around the country) — we like to point out that AVs, or more precisely the model of how we will use AVs, is already prevalent throughout the country in the form of TNCs.

Transportation Network Companies like Uber, Lyft, Via and Chariot are examples of exactly how we will be using AVs, just with drivers in them.  The mobile apps, the on-demand nature, the sometimes limited contact with anyone easily map onto the AV future.

The implication for this is that we can be studying the impacts of TNCs to get a sense of what the impacts of AVs will be.  Recent reports from Bruce Schaller, Susan Shaheen, and UC Davis’ 3 Revolutions on the impacts of TNCs on travel behavior and mode choice can be seen as early predictors of the future we will have with AVs.

For cities wondering what the future will look like, it has already arrived.  Just take a look at TNC impacts.

We have often said that the largest barrier to the roll-out of AVs will not be state of the technology, but instead the backlash to it.  Our work has focused on understanding the impacts of emerging technologies on cities and we firmly believe that these impacts, if not well structured and guided, might be detrimental to cities.  If cities and communities suffer – or fear they are going to be negatively impacted – we will start to see resistance to the technologies en masse.

As a case in point – UPS is currently in contract negotiations with the Teamsters and one of the key issues on the table is that UPS agree to not pursue the use of drone technology or autonomous vehicles.  From conversations we have had with transit agencies around the country, this is a similar issue coming up in labor negotiations nationally.

Labor and industry will need to figure out a path forward that takes into account the needs of workers and the reality of competition (as other companies that are pursing AVs may outcompete those that don’t).  This all points to a need to think proactively about the implications of these new technologies – going beyond transportation and beyond labor as well – to understand how we can best shape an emerging technology future.

Amazon has been developing a program they call ‘Seller Flex’ which allows them to do deliveries for third party suppliers (this is Amazon delivering packages for products they do not stock, but offer through their website).  This will largely be competition for FedEx and UPS who currently do most of these types of deliveries.

The implications for warehousing is that individual sites around the city that stock different goods will now be more integrated into a network of warehouses.  This means space needs could be reduced, efficiencies could improve and there will start to be added benefits of having various key warehouses located near each other so that Amazon can more easily access and service them all.  Amazon will be streamlining delivery while not having to own all of the individual warehouses or merchandise themselves.

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.

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.

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 2^nd 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.”