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Tag: Mobility

Capital Ideas 2018 Conference— Call for session proposals now open

Mark your calendars for the 2018 edition of Transportation for America’s national conference for those interested in forward-looking state transportation policy and funding solutions.

In light of the Trump administration’s rhetorical and policy shift away from direct federal funding for transportation investments, the spotlight again turns to states and localities when it comes to policy and funding for transportation. Over 30 states have stepped up and passed new transportation funding legislation since 2012. An unfortunately much smaller number of states have passed smart policies to reform how those dollars are spent.

Capital Ideas 2018, will offer a highly interactive curriculum of model state legislation, campaign tactics, innovative policies, and peer-to-peer collaboration to help participants advance successful proposals to raise new funding for transportation and ensure those dollars are wisely spent to accomplish tangible goals and help states stay competitive in the 21st century. Our 3rd biennial national conference to be held in Atlanta, GA on Wednesday, December 5, 2018 and Thursday, December 6, 2018.

Call for session proposals now open

Transportation for America invites cutting-edge proposals for conference roundtable sessions and general plenary sessions that pertain to the emerging paradigm shift characterizing our transportation landscape today—disruption and uncertainty. The plenary and roundtable discussions at Capital Ideas 2018 seeks to address the following questions:

  • How will states manage their role in transportation funding & policy during this time of dramatic transition and change?
  • What is the appropriate role of state government in a disruptive world of transportation policy?
  • What can states do to ensure that our transportation network is equitable, accessible, safe and affordable?
  • Are our investment decisions today ensuring stronger local economies, greater access to opportunity and jobs, cleaner environments, healthier populations or better mobility for everyone in the future?
  • With a continually shifting and uncertain future for federal transportation funding, how can states successfully fund transportation investments and how will they demonstrate the value of their investments?

All plenary and session proposals are due on June 15, 2018 at 8 p.m. EDT.  Submitted your plenary and or session proposal here. Also remember that as a T4America member you get a discounted member ticket price. Conference registration opens on May 8, 2018. Learn more here.

 

Applications are open for T4America’s smart city collaborative

Today, Transportation for America opened the application process for our national, multi-city collaborative with Sidewalk Labs. This partnership, announced back on June 1st, will help cities use technology to meet their pressing transportation challenges.

sidewalk lab music

When USDOT kicked off the Smart Cities Challenge and over 70 cities from across the country scrambled to put together applications detailing their smart city ambitions, it was clear that Secretary Anthony Foxx at USDOT had tapped into something vital unfolding in cities of all sizes across the country.

As we read through all 78 of those applications this spring, one thing became very clear: It’s really hard to put a finger on precisely what a smart city is right now, and what it means to be one. There are cities that have been opening up massive sets of municipal data to citizens for years allowing them to create apps or brainstorm ways to improve government services. Some cities have found new ways to use their own data to determine where transit services should be provided, but aren’t, and adjust accordingly. Some cities are testing partnerships with shared mobility providers to experiment with adding transit coverage or providing valuable last-mile connections.

Yet there are other cities that are clearly just dipping their toes into this arena, and are swept up to some degree by the availability of the grant money or enamored with technology as an end unto itself — often not yet certain of the specific problem that they’re trying to solve.

So what’s the norm? Where should a city be in relation to their peers?

To help establish a baseline and get a more organized sense of where cities are in this evolution, we’ve also distributed a State of the Smart City benchmarking survey to gather data from cities on the technologies and strategies they currently employ along with the tools they have at their disposal. T4America will use this survey as a baseline to measure the implementation of smart city technologies at both the national level and for individual cities in the coming years.

Whether or not your city is planning to apply to join the collaborative, you can help us get a better picture of your community by completing the State of the Smart City survey.

Our new national collaborative will bring cities into several working groups, each focusing on one aspect of a smart city, such as how to create a level playing field where a tiny startup of students can compete with a massive technology firm to create a new civic mobility app, ensure that new mobility options also serve the unbanked or low-income communities, or deploy congestion pricing in a way that helps provide more transportation options to more people.

The cities in the collaborative will work to develop pilot projects, share successes and failures, and engage with one another to come up with new, creative solutions to the problems at hand. If you and your city are interested in participating in the Smart City Collaborative, please fill out a short application here.

As we build this collaborative over the next few months and hear back from cities that are on varying points of this spectrum, we’ll be starting to coalesce around an idea of what a “Smart City” truly is. We have ideas, but no one has 100 percent of the answers at this point as this idea evolves, and cities should likely be skeptical of anyone who says they do.

We think a smart city is one that uses technology to discover where people are going and where they want and need to go, learns from that information and uses it to create safer, more efficient, and affordable transportation options that accelerate access to opportunity for all of their residents.

Those are our thoughts, but we’re eager to hear your feedback as well. 

So what do you think a smart city is? What does a smart city look like? How would you define one in a sentence or two?

Seniors and transit report generates widespread coverage and discussion

Last week, we released Aging in Place, Stuck without Options, documenting the more than 15.5 million Americans 65 years and older who, by 2015,  will live in places with poor or non-existent public transportation.

The report ranked metro areas according to the percentage of seniors projected to face poor transit access, and asked: How do we address the shrinking mobility options of baby boomers who wish to stay in their homes and “age in place?” What happens when people in the largest generation in American history outlive their ability to drive for everything?

The discussions we saw in the comments of blog posts and newspaper articles were very interesting. It’s an immediately relatable story, because almost everyone has a parent or grandparent currently dealing with or facing the prospect of getting older and staying mobile.

Accommodating seniors who want to age in place  — most of them do — will be a challenge for our nation’s transportation system. But there is a lot that we can do. We can increase funding for bus routes, paratransit, vanpools and ridesharing. We can provide incentives for community non-profits to operate their own systems. We can encourage states to involve seniors more intimately in the planning process and ensure officials are still able to “flex” federal dollars for transit projects. We can also prioritize “complete streets” that meet the needs of all users, including older Americans on foot, in wheelchairs or on their way to a transit stop.

All of these ideas can — and should — be folded into the next transportation bill currently being drafted in Congress.

The report generated widespread coverage and discussion. In response to the report’s findings, the San Francisco Bay Area gave itself a pat on the back for its top rank, with the San Francisco Chronicle referring to the region as “a good place to retire the car keys,” while the Kansas City Star reacted to its region’s poor ranking. The Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money offered a nice summation of the report’s overall findings.

Some argued that our recommendation to meet seniors where they are is backwards. Rather than extending transit out, they said, we ought to encourage older adults to move to places that already have robust transportation systems. Tanya Snyder surveyed both sides of the debate, which also played out in the comments section and on Twitter, at Streetsblog Capitol Hill:

Those recommendations might help geographically isolated seniors reach services, but is it really the responsibility of the taxpayer to subsidize the decisions people have made to live in places that explicitly reject transit accessibility? Should those inefficient, low-density, sprawling areas be retrofitted with transit now that their populations are aging?

Cristina Martin Firvida, who works on these issues for AARP, said helping seniors marooned in those areas helps everybody. And besides, the suburbs were built through federal policies encouraging outward development after the second world war, she said – it’s not just that one person built a house on top of a mountain and then demanded that taxpayer-subsidized transit come to them. “The suburbs is where our economy and our entire society has moved to since the fifties,” Firvida said.

No one took more umbrage with our report and conclusions than the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole, whose response to the growing mobility needs of America’s seniors was a glib: “So what?” While O’Toole is dismissive of the desire for greater options, AARP’s research found that public transportation use among older Americans increased by 40 percent since 2001 (see graphic below). And this is despite the fact that many live in areas with spotty and less-than-reliable service to begin with. T4’s David Goldberg responded to O’Toole last week.

You can still check out the full report and see how your area ranked here.