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Author Archives: Russell Brooks

How should cities price access to their curb spaces and right-of-way?

The second year of our Smart Cities Collaborative—which launched today with 22 cities—will examine how emerging technologies and new mobility options are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space via four key topics. Our fourth and final post taking a quick look at these topics is about how pricing strategies can be employed in service of a city’s long-term outcomes.

Year two of T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative will explore how emerging technologies and new mobility options are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space. Our content and curriculum will be separated into four sub-topics; design, measure, manage, and price. This fourth topic will examine how cities can begin to determine the value of their assets and price them accordingly in an effort to achieve their long-term outcomes. Read about the launch of the Collaborative and the 22 cities selected to participate.

PRICE

As much as urban dwellers have come to rely on app-based ridesourcing services or bikesharing systems, it’s hard to grasp sometimes just how much has changed with urban mobility in such a short period of time. Ten years ago, most cities had what we’d all consider as pretty simple menu of options: Taxis. Personally owned automobilies and bicycles. Public buses and trains. Commuter rail and bus. Your own two feet.

But as new mobility options such as ridesharing, ridesourcing, microtransit, dockless bikesharing and more have entered cities, they’ve placed new demands on the right-of-way and curb space. Since their arrival, cities have struggled to effectively manage private providers and adapt to these new modes. As we explored in our manage post, the time is overdue to explore new management strategies for these assets.

Flickr photo by Daniel Lobo. https://www.flickr.com/photos/daquellamanera/38503203635/

With this increasing level of demand for access, many cities have begun to recognize that streets and curbs are some of their most valuable assets—assets they have largely been giving away for free. At the same time, new mobility models and the coming wave of automated vehicles also threaten the viability of various revenue streams at the federal, state and local level. Though this makes new pricing mechanisms attractive solutions to future revenue shortfalls, they can and should be designed as demand management tools first, with new revenue a secondary benefit.

Before cities can begin charging for use, they need to have a better sense of value.

Today, there is no formula or standard for how to determine this value and many are wildly inconsistent when it comes to pricing access to their streets, curbs and sidewalks. Cities charge (often not enough) for curb use for parking, but don’t charge ridesourcing or delivery vehicles using similar space, even as these services are often having greater impacts on congestion and safety. Similarly, cities charge street vendors to set up on the sidewalk, but not for dockless bikeshare or newspaper boxes occupying the space directly next to it.

Without a framework to detemine the actual costs and value of these assets, it’s impossible to appropriately charge for their use and thus difficult to effectively and consistently manage demand and access across modes, departments and use cases.

This year, with the 22 participating cities, the Collaborative will endeavor to get a handle on all the different users of these spaces, which departments are managing the various pieces and how they’re currently valuing their use. To assess the full value of these assets, we’ll nail down expenses associated with building this infrastructure (like concrete, steel and street furniture), evaluate the long-term maintenance costs and examine how these spaces can affect areas of concern, such as congestion, safety and pollution.

Once we develop a better understanding of costs and impacts we can start to develop a formula and derive appropriate pricing levels across modes and departments. We’ll begin with streets, curbs and sidewalks, but our goal is to help cities understand how to measure value and then subsequently price their resources appropriately so they can transfer this to other assets, such as data or vehicle-to-infrastructure technology.

The Collaborative will also explore the various hurdles that come along with developing and implementing pricing strategies—technological, financial and political. We’ll review messaging strategies that have gone wrong and how successful cities have focused the public conversation on behavior change and affecting long-term outcomes such as reducing congestion, vehicle miles traveled, emissions, and creating safer streets.

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Year two of the Smart Cities Collaborative will tackle four new topics

During the first year of our Smart Cities Collaborative an overall theme emerged: how new technologies and new mobility are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space. Year two of the Collaborative will address these challenges head-on.

Reminder: Applications for year two of the Collaborative are open until next Friday, February 16. Find out more information about eligibility and apply to participate here.

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As we continue building a forum for collaboration and providing direct technical assistance to a new cohort of cities, the second year of the Collaborative will explore how new technologies and new mobility are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space. The content and curriculum will be separated into four sub-topics; design, measure, manage and price.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish in-depth posts on each of these topics and explain how we’ll approach them in the Collaborative. This is part one of a four-part series and our first topic will examine how the right-of-way and curb space are evolving and what cities can do to adapt.

Design

Wikimedia photo by SounderBruce

With rare exception, city streets across the United States were and continue to be designed, operated and managed for use by the single occupant automobile. The demands and conflicts created by existing competing needs and uses—ridehail pick up and drop off, increased delivery in residential and commercial areas, separated and combined lanes for bike and transit use, pedestrian crossing and safety—are substantial and widespread, but are currently being addressed on a piecemeal basis.

Solutions are frequently just band-aids, making amendments to the existing streetscape rather than fundamentally redesigning the street for new needs.

And then there’s the deployment of automated vehicles, and the impacts and implications of them on the design, operation and management of streets. Coupled with heightened demands for wayfinding kiosks, electric vehicle charging stations, sensor networks and other digital infrastructure, it is clear there is a need for new streets that can not only accommodate but embrace and maximize the benefits of the new mobility era.

The past few years have provided cities with a wake-up call on the need to reassess current street design and curb management guidelines in an effort to reclaim our streets as cherished public spaces for people, while still serving as critical arteries for traffic.

Instead of examining these issues through the limited lens of a single technology or piece of infrastructure (e.g. “How can we fit bikeshare in here?”), the Collaborative will take a comprehensive look at how the street of the future should look, feel and operate, and determine the policies, design guidelines and new infrastructure that will help cities get there. We’ll examine various street typologies, look at every use case and user for right-of-way and curbside space, explore the variety of technologies and new mobility infrastructure that may need to be deployed on a given street, and ensure that we’re making streets that are safer and more accessible to everyone that needs to use them.

Throughout the year, the Collaborative will work with participants to rethink their streets and address these new demands for roadway and curb space while making them more human-centered and friendly. The end result will be an accessible document that describes:

  • The need for new approaches to our streets;
  • Provides street typologies with design guidelines;
  • Operation and management strategies;
  • Performance measurements; and
  • Pilot projects for cities to test.

Stay tuned for our next post on our second Collaborative topic this coming year—measure—and how a robust system of measuring performance along with using real-time data to inform operations and decision-making will prevent cities from getting lost in the web of information and help anchor projects in the service of achieving long-term outcomes.

Learn more & Apply for Year Two

The House takes its first crack at automated vehicle legislation

As self-driving technology advances toward becoming an everyday fixture in our lives, Congress is beginning to consider regulations to govern how they’ll be tested, how they’ll operate and how to ensure they’ll be safe for everyone. But are they taking the right approach?

Uber’s self-driving pilot program in Pittsburgh. Flickr photo by zombieite.

The House Subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection last week produced what they hope becomes the first federal law on automated vehicle testing and regulation, combining 14 bills that were introduced after a hearing in late June into one bill.

Legislators have been under tremendous pressure from the private sector (like automakers, for example), who say that legislation is necessary to increase safety, avoid a patchwork of state regulations and streamline, not stifle, innovation. While cities are generally both supportive and convinced of the long-term benefits that self-driving technologies could offer, many cities are also concerned by this rush to legislate without their input, potentially losing the ability to regulate their own roads, the lack of data provided by the private sector, the short-term threat to safety, and a lack of focus on long-term impacts to equity, the environment, congestion, land-use and a host of other critical issues.

What’s in the bill?

Among other things, the draft bill contained provisions that would:

  • Pre-empt cities and states from regulating the “design, construction, mechanical systems, hardware and software systems, or communications systems” of highly automated vehicles.
  • Allow automakers to self-certify the safety of both the vehicle and its software without an independent reviewer.
  • Increase the number of NHTSA exemptions to test automated vehicles on public roads from 2,500 to 100,000 vehicles per manufacturer.
  • Create an advisory council that would be devoid of any representation from cities, MPOs or states to study and advise on the effects of this technology.
  • Allow manufacturers and operators to keep secret “…situational information related to any testing or deployment event.”

What are our concerns?

While the bill addressed some of the most critical issues, much of the language lacked specificity and failed to consider the needs of local communities or the long-term impacts of this technology.

Members of our Smart Cities Collaborative were concerned. So last week, we partnered with the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), National League of Cities (NLC), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and other organizations to oppose the legislation as it was introduced.

We traveled to Capitol Hill to share our concerns directly with members of the committee and offer alternative language and amendments. Here are some of the specific changes we were seeking:

  • Clarify pre-emption language in order to guarantee that local communities will retain control of their streets.
  • Reduce the number of possible exemptions from 100,000 to a figure that cities and states can safely manage on their streets. We suggested 5,000 was a reasonable increase.
  • Require that the advisory council contain representatives from local governments (including states, MPOs and urban and rural communities) to participate in the conversation alongside the private sector.
  • Establish a third-party repository of data that’s accessible to cities, states, academics and safety advocates on the operational and safety performance of any automated vehicle granted a safety exemption for testing.

After a week of meetings and outreach from cities, states and other organizations, the committee released a substitute amendment last week that compromised on or addressed many of these concerns, improving the bill from the original version. This substituted version (H.R. 3388) was unanimously approved by the the Energy and Commerce Committee last Thursday and is headed to the House floor.

While legislators did improve the bill, much more needs to be done to ensure that the testing and deployment of automated vehicles are not just safe, but helps to drive cities and states towards the long-term outcomes they’re striving for.

What’s next?

As this bill continues to evolve in the House and as the Senate develops and releases its own bill (maybe as soon as this week), it will be important to continue pushing for changes to ensure that local governments can manage their roads effectively and provide the data and information to do so, and to guarantee that cities are proactively guiding the national conversation around the deployment of automated vehicles:

  • Ensure that data is shared and publicly available. The legislation increases the number of vehicles that can be tested on our streets, but fails to offer local governments (or anyone) access to data on their operation or performance. This is critical to assess vehicle safety as well as understand the policy and planning decisions necessary for full deployment.
  • Require a seat at the table for the public sector. State and local officials are permitted to be on the advisory councils, but that’s not enough. They need to be guaranteed representation. Congress cannot let the private sector drive this discussion on their own.
  • Stronger definitions and language. Much of the bill’s language is vague, open to multiple interpretations and has loopholes. For example, current language prevents a manufacturer from selling an automated vehicle, but does not address whether the company could use all 25,000-100,000 of their exempted vehicles in a commercially based “testing scenario,” such as how Waymo or Uber have operating in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Given the scale of the exemptions, these loopholes need to be clarified immediately.

We’ll continue tracking this legislation and this issue overall as it progresses, so stay tuned.

Columbus, OH takes center stage of national movement for transportation innovation – but cities nationwide are interested in connected streets

Earlier today the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) named Columbus, Ohio, the winner of its highly competitive Smart City Challenge. The win gains Columbus $40 million from USDOT, $10 million from Paul Allen’s Vulcan, Inc., as well as additional matching local public and private investments of $90 million to help the city become a national proving ground for intelligent transportation systems and a suite of new mobility-on-demand services.

Columbus’ application focused specifically on increasing social equity and access to opportunity. The city’s Linden neighborhood has “a high proportion of carless households, unreliable access to employment and health services, a lack of access to digital information, and a high portion of cash-based households,” said Mayor Andrew Ginther.

In its application, Columbus outlined plans for several significant transportation innovations: an autonomous vehicle test fleet that will connect a transit terminal to a job center; increasing travel options in poor neighborhoods to better connect expectant mothers to health services; expansion of electric vehicle infrastructure; a multi-modal transit pass payment system that will include transit as well as ride-sharing and -hailing services; and kiosks that can reload transit cards for low-income residents without credit cards or bank accounts.

Columbus is far from alone in wanting to use innovative technology to better connect disadvantaged populations to opportunity. The seven other Smart City finalists — Denver, San Francisco, Austin, Pittsburgh, Portland, and Kansas City — are all working hard on these issues, as are the 71 other applicant cities that did not make it to the final round, and many more.

T4America will be working with a number of these cities through our recently announced partnership with Sidewalk Labs and a new Smart Cities Collaborative that will help define how technology can meet cities’ pressing transportation challenges. T4America will also be helping cities win funding, tools, and authority to advance smart city initiatives. This will be a huge hurdle as current transportation policy at the federal level and within most states either underfunds or completely ignores local governments.

The collaborative network will also begin to define and design the “connected streets” of the future. Just as the popular Complete Streets approach gives leaders a framework for making streets safer for everyone, connected streets outlines tech-enabled interventions that can help create a truly balanced, multimodal approach to urban transportation that expands access to job opportunities and improves quality of life for all residents.

USDOT’s Smart City Challenge is emblematic of a giant wave of change that’s coming to cities. Technology, innovation, and new mobility solutions are changing the urban landscape and will have big implications for public transit systems, public works departments and how many of us get where we need to go. Vibrant, thriving communities are ones that provide access and opportunity for people of all incomes. Local business and civic leaders are quickly discovering that they need to get out ahead of the coming disruptions and shape the technology transforming their cities or else get shaped by it.

USDOT’s drive to innovation has generated tremendous excitement across the country — in Columbus and beyond. There’s been an explosion of cross-departmental and cross-community collaboration from both the public and private sectors. Many cities also know they’ll need to undertake a large shift in their internal cultures. T4America is here to help cities lean forward and embrace these changes and drive the discussion about what they want their cities to look like in 25 years.