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COVID-19 threw a curveball at curb management. Here’s how cities adapted.

Transportation for America’s 2020 cohort of the Smart Cities Collaborative was always meant to focus on curbside management. But then came COVID-19, radically shifting all aspects of our lives—including how we use curbs. Our new report, COVID and the Curb, explores how cities adapted their curb management strategies to support public health and small businesses, and ideas for better curb policy at the local, state, and federal levels. 

A Shared Spaces street in San Francisco, organized by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

The following blog is adapted from our new report, COVID and The Curb. Read the full report—chock full of in-depth case studies—here.

Over the past few years, demands for curb space have skyrocketed. No longer just for personal car parking, curbs are where people board buses or streetcars; access app-based shared bicycles, scooters, or cars; and host block parties or parklets. Businesses send out and pick up deliveries at the curb, and unhoused community members, often without other options, use curbs as temporary living spaces.

In 2020, the curb was used for all those purposes and more. Local governments got creative to align curbside management with COVID-19 response efforts—at the same time the pandemic was accelerating some of the changing uses of and growing demand on the curb already underway. 

Click the image to read the full report.

Across the country, a number of cities reprogrammed curb and street space for retail, outdoor dining, and active transportation; working with communities to design curb pilots; and setting up temporary transit lanes and COVID-19 testing sites. Due to the urgent nature of the crisis, cities developed new approaches to a number of challenges (many rooted in issues that existed far before COVID-19) that should be revisited post-pandemic. We explored many of these new approaches in our new report, COVID and the Curb. 

The challenge to adapt curbside management to COVID-19 raised a host of questions for cities. How do you balance equitable community engagement with pressure to provide quick solutions? How do you revise permitting processes—like for outdoor dining—to be less arduous and more equitable? How do you clearly communicate new regulations and processes as they’re being changed and implemented?

These questions were made all the more significant because of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on certain communities, particularly Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color. In response, cities across the country piloted new solutions, swapped use cases with peers, stayed as nimble as possible, and reassessed how government assets could better and more equitably serve the public during this crisis.

Here’s what some cities did: 

  • The City of Boston waived and reduced outdoor dining permit requirements, which previously involved surveyed and engineered design drawings, a public hearing, multi-departmental permitting, and fees. The majority of these requirements were either waived or reduced, and the review and approval process was expedited to take a matter of weeks, rather than months.
  • In Ann Arbor, city staff developed a “parking space repurposing” program to allow 40 restaurants to use the on-street parking spaces in front of their properties for extended patio space at no cost to businesses. 
  • In San Francisco, as traffic started to slowly return after the initial lockdown, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) set up temporary transit lanes to ensure “that essential workers and transit-dependent San Franciscans do not bear the costs of traffic congestion.” By devoting lanes solely for buses, SFMTA reduced the amount of time buses spend in traffic, protecting public health by reducing riders’ travel time and hence their potential exposure to COVID-19.
  • …and more case studies featured in COVID and the Curb. 

Looking to the future of curb space

With residents, elected officials, and small business owners paying closer attention to the curb and how it can be strategically leveraged for the public’s benefit, cities now have a unique opportunity to shift management of their curbs in a way that’s equitable, flexible and innovative. Cities can set up curb guidelines to prioritize curb uses, ensure curb signage is understandable and accessible,  and address inequitable curb enforcement—and much, much more. 

While curb management largely occurs at the local level, there are a handful of policy actions states and the federal government can take to support local governments’ ability to efficiently and equitably manage their curb. For example, providing additional regulatory oversight on delivery vehicles and TNCs, and requiring data sharing between private operators and cities. 

Go deeper in these case studies and  policy ideas in our new report, COVID and the Curb. 

Cities’ priorities must be the heart of any universal curb standard. These 5 principles pave the way.

Cities and towns face a massive hurdle to managing their curb space: the lack of a  uniform way to define the curb and its users. Without a universal curb standard, it’s difficult for local governments to coordinate with each other and private entities and assess the effectiveness of their curbside management policies. Participants in our Smart Cities Collaborative joined together to develop five principles that should inform any universal curbside language and standards.

Click to download the PDF

Demands on the curb have skyrocketed in the last decade, while the amount of curb space has largely remained the same. Due to increased vehicle congestion, commerce delivery, the increase in parklets and outdoor dining, and access to modes like shared bikes and scooters and app-based ride-hailing, the curb has become a scarce and sought-after resource. 

Curbs are no longer simply for parking. They’re key to the movement of goods and people, and now even our COVID-19 response. The pandemic has only crystallized the importance of the curb, as an exponential amount of curb space has been needed for safe recreation, retail, restaurants, and more. 

Yet curbs are massively underutilized by cities and towns. Although many local governments have created or are in the process of creating strategies to manage curb space, there is no uniform way that local governments define the curb and its users. This makes it difficult for local governments to assess the effectiveness of their curbside management policies—to truly utilize curb space for the public good—because there isn’t a uniform way to evaluate data or share lessons learned with other municipalities. 

That’s why participants in our Smart Cities Collaborative joined together to create five principles that should inform the development of any universal curbside language and set of standards. These five principles for a national standard will ensure that the public interest is embedded within the standard and language itself, giving cities and towns a shared definition of the curb and its users while empowering them to customize curbside management to best serve the unique needs of their residents. 

Here’s a quick summary of our five principles for a universal curbside language and standards (UCLS). You can read much more in-depth on these principles and the need for a UCLS created by the public sector in our new report, “Principles for Universal Curbside Language & Standards.” 

PRINCIPLE 1 | LOCAL PUBLIC AGENCIES SET THE POLICY

A successful UCLS will be one that is shaped by the public agencies who manage the curb. 

Curbs within the public right-of-way are funded and regulated entirely with public funding and should serve community needs. For that reason alone, local public agencies—who are in charge of the curb—are best suited to lead this effort. 

While input and data from private companies—especially freight operators—is important, creating a language and standards that caters primarily to the needs of any one stakeholder would be a disservice to all users, especially the most vulnerable.

PRINCIPLE 2 | EQUITABLE 

The design of a UCLS is an opportunity to assist local governments in their effort to shift and reallocate curb space from being a free resource that serves few (primarily through car parking) to a resource that serves everyone—especially those who deserve better and more affordable access to curbs. This includes people with disabilities, people using transit; those walking, biking, or rolling; low-income people; Black, Indigenous, and people of color; and those not connected to the digital network. 

Equity must be embedded within any UCLS so that local governments can prioritize their most vulnerable right-of-way users and disadvantaged community members. You can check out our recommendations for incorporating equity into a UCLS in our full report.

PRINCIPLE 3 | OPEN & PUBLICLY OWNED DATA

Any UCLS needs to be developed with an open data approach where public agencies own the data and data is collected and shared in a secure and transparent manner that protects personally identifiable information. Open data provides transparency and ensures data can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone. Public agencies—or non-profits or academic institutions—need to be the stewards of any and all curbside data. 

You can read the metrics we recommend a UCLS track in our full report. 

PRINCIPLE 4 | EASILY TRANSFERABLE

To be truly universal, the language and standards must be easily accessible, understandable, and transferable to communities of all sizes, land uses and street typologies, and densities. A scalable and customizable UCLS based on a jurisdiction’s resources, tools, and capabilities ensures mass buy-in, giving local governments the ability to share lessons learned from curbside management in the same language. 

PRINCIPLE 5 | CLEARLY COMMUNICATED

There was a considerable shift in how the curb has been used in the last decade, and in the last two years in particular due to rapid changes like the growth in e-commerce. This presents a unique opportunity for local governments, as the stewards of the curb, to rethink how to internally and externally communicate the value and importance of the curb and the benefit of a UCLS. 

Internal and external curb stakeholders must understand—through a UCLS—the changing nature and value of the curb, as well as the short and long-term benefits of more proactive curbside management.

Final thoughts: it’s critical that universal curbside language and standards are created by the public sector, for the public 

The curb is public space and a public asset, and as such it should be utilized to the greatest benefit of the public. It is the responsibility of local governments to prioritize who can use the limited amount of curb space, for what and when. Because of the many demands on the curb, without regulating and prioritizing access, our curbs cannot reflect or respond to the rapidly changing needs of the city and its users. And without applying an equity lens to prioritization of curbspace, certain users (such as people who do not own, cannot afford, or are unable to drive cars) will continue to be left behind as they do not benefit from “free” parking. 

That’s why it’s critical that the public sector informs the creation of any universal language and standards. We hope that these principles can help shape any and every UCLS to come. 

If we want equitable smart cities, we need support from philanthropy

A close-up of the handlebars of a Lime electric scooter. The scooter has a small computer screen that reads "Scan to Ride". To the right of the screen is a QR code.

Everyone agrees that smart cities—places that deploy technology to deliver government services and improve quality of life—are the future. City leaders and staff are inundated with these new mobility products but have limited capacity to ensure that they are deployed in ways that lead to equitable and sustainable outcomes. Our director Beth Osborne explains why cities, states, and non-profit actors need philanthropic support to pursue policy research and projects that make equitable, sustainable smart cities a reality. 

Close-up of the handlebars of a Lime e-scooter, with “Scan to Ride” written on the scooter’s small computer screen.

Technology holds great promise to help cities monitor and allocate limited public space in ways that ensure safe, equitable, affordable, and sustainable access to jobs and services for everybody, no matter their financial means or physical ability. That’s where we should be heading as a country.  

We hear about the endless possibilities of new mobility technology—like flexible curb management tools and smartphone access to shared scooters, bikes, and cars—in the news and at transportation conferences. However, we know that technology can be deployed in ways that allocate these benefits only to those who can pay, or to the wealthiest neighborhoods, or in ways that benefit the technology provider more than the public. Historically, this has been the case. (Think: automobiles, broadband, and more.) 

To date, the power has been in the hands of those who develop and sell technology. Most of these companies are trying to produce good results for cities and people. But to survive, they have to pay attention to their bottom line. Plus, businesses can only really support cities that have the capacity to explain what kind of technology they need, and are then able to effectively manage that product once deployed and ensure that it supports broad societal benefits, like equity and sustainability. 

That capacity requires funding. Philanthropies are traditionally a powerful force for this support, ensuring that modernization and innovation are used to ways that connect to broad social goals. Philanthropy is already doing this in so many areas, from electric vehicle deployment, transit advocacy, housing affordability, criminal justice reform and more. However, they have been largely absent as cities and non-profits pursue policy research and innovations to make smart cities a reality. 

We learned this the hard way. For the past four years, Transportation for America has hosted the Smart Cities Collaborative, a year-long learning cohort where city transportation officials learn from each others’ efforts to use new mobility technologies in order to improve their transportation networks. The Collaborative has been a success: we’ve brought together  cities from across the country to discuss approaches to new mobility, curbside management, and city innovation, and have launched several useful resources like the Shared Micromobility Playbook.  

However, funding the Collaborative has been difficult. We rely on a combination of fees paid by cash-strapped cities, sponsorship agreements from new mobility and technology companies, and our advocacy peers. While we are so appreciative of the support we received from city participants and our private sector partners, there was a limit to what we could provide Collaborative members with this funding. 

It’s simple: there will never exist a world in which a 1:1 swap between philanthropic dollars and private sector dollars works. Private sector companies have their own priorities that rarely, if ever, line up with city government’s priorities. This is of no fault of the private sector companies. But it’s exactly why philanthropies need to provide funding for smart cities projects and research: philanthropic funding that doesn’t need to boost a company’s profit margins. 

Our Smart Cities Collaborative, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s short-lived Smart City Challenge (the seed that inspired our Collaborative), and similar non-business projects are where cities, states, the federal government, advocates, and philanthropists need to focus their efforts. Philanthropy will be essential for cities to have the capacity to deploy these technologies in ways that promote equity and sustainability. Without them, the future will inevitably be shaped by shorter term private sector interests and as yet unknown long term outcomes of these interests.

Curbside management in a recurring emergency scenario: A municipal perspective

A service lane in the Cleveland Park neighborhood in Washington, DC.

This post is part of a special series on curb management and COVID-19. A joint effort of the Institute for Parking and Mobility, Transportation for America, and the Institute of Transportation Engineer’s Complete Streets Council, this series strives to document the immediate curbside-related actions and responses to COVID-19, as well as create a knowledge base of strategies that communities can use to manage the curbside during future emergencies. Check out the last post. 

By Benito O. Pérez, AICP CTP, CPM; and David Carson Lipscomb, MCP

For all of us, 2020 will be the year the world changed. Seemingly overnight the hustle and bustle of life and commerce in our cities went nearly silent under government-mandated shelter-in-place orders aimed to stop the spread of COVID-19. Overwhelmed healthcare networks and essential businesses that help meet our most basic needs were thrown into crisis. This is a common reality after natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods. However, unlike those events, this is simultaneously a prolonged and global experience.

Municipal governments are vital to protecting our communities, tasked with coordinating resources to address this public health emergency while maintaining order and normalcy for residents. Curbside and parking professionals across the country have supported their municipal responses by ensuring prioritized, optimal transportation network operations in innovative, rapid-response ways including the following.

  • Restaurant pick-up zones. With dine-in operations banned, restaurants shifted to takeout/delivery models resulting in congestion at the curb for customers and couriers. Originating in Seattle and propagating rapidly across the country, municipalities reprogrammed segments of their curbside with temporary signage coupled with information campaigns (like the District of Columbia map) showing curbs prioritized for pick-up activity. This ensured curb turnover while supporting local restaurants.
  • Relaxed curbside enforcement. Shelter-in-place orders led to more stationary vehicles, which put them in violation of policies encouraging turnover. Cities like Miami, Pittsburgh, and others relaxed parking enforcement to discourage unnecessary community movement.
  • Suspended parking space payment. Some communities suspended parking payment, though they did not make that decision lightly. In many jurisdictions, parking revenue is the operational funding lifeblood of their organizations. For the District, it’s about 10 percent of its annual contribution to the regional transportation system. However, costs to maintain parking payment far outweighed anticipated revenue. Additionally, reducing potential sources of infection, i.e., parking payment kiosks, was also of concern for municipal operators.
  • Prioritized/designated essential service provider parking. Hospitals have been the front lines of this pandemic, with many facilities converting off-street parking lots and garages to triage and community testing sites. With limited public transportation services and scarce access to for-hire vehicles as drivers limit their exposure, some healthcare providers are resorting to private vehicles. With on-site parking gone, municipalities have designated curbsides near medical facilities for healthcare facility employees. New York City has issued healthcare provider parking permits to allow them to park wherever is most convenient. This may become an extended concern for other essential service staff in dense, urban areas with limited transit.
  • Expanded sidewalks. In urban areas in particular, sidewalks are constrained by historical rights of way. That means there may be sidewalks narrower than the minimum six feet recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “physical distancing” guidelines. Places like New York City have cleared the curb, if not the entire roadway, to facilitate unimpeded, “physically distant” pedestrian routes.

These are but a few strategies that are part of cohesive and holistic community responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. If you have a good story, please share it with benito.perez@dc.gov. 

Benito O. Pérez is the curbside management operations planning manager at the District Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C.

David C. Lipscomb is a curbside management planner at the District Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C.

The parking and mobility industry comes together in a time of need. Here’s how.

This blog is part of a special series on curb management and COVID-19. A joint effort of Institute for Parking and Mobility, Transportation for America, and the Institute of Transportation Engineers, this series strives to document the immediate curbside-related actions and responses to COVID-19, as well as create a knowledge base of strategies that communities can use to manage the curbside during future emergencies.

There is an enduring human spirit that persists in crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has put that spirit to the test, forging stronger bonds within and between our communities, our industries, our nation, and our humanity. Lately, I have been struck by how closely connected we all are.

I don’t need to tell you how strange, trying, and scary these weeks have been. But what you might not know is while everyone was figuring out how to work from home, keep their business afloat, or protect their loved ones, professionals across the parking and mobility industry were hard at work trying to support those activities. 

Our communities are normally test beds for ongoing transportation innovation, but this pandemic has accelerated the need for creative use of our resources and emphasizes the importance of collaboration between colleagues. Although every community has unique features, hopefully practices that work well in one community rapidly multiply across the country. The past few weeks have seen that concept accelerate to hyper speed.

As communities enacted new policies to protect citizens by minimizing the spread of the coronavirus, their parking and mobility programs adapted curb management and parking policies to address emerging priorities. Rapid installation of temporary loading zones for restaurant curbside pickup and paid parking and enforcement policy changes to help homebound residents were needed to support business and residential communities. Supportive parking policies for healthcare and other essential workers were critical to ensuring safe, efficient, and quick access to parking as hospitals expanded triage areas into their parking lots.

Behind these changes was an amazing network of professionals connecting in rapid fashion to share ideas, discuss challenges, and offer support. A few resources that truly helped to connect folks included:

  • City groups functioning through International Parking and Mobility Institute (IPMI), the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), and Transportation for America’s 2020 Smart Cities Collaborative came together in a grassroots fashion to help discuss, test, implement, monitor, and triage curbside changes. Through a variety of channels – emails, Slack, and good old phone calls – policies implemented on one side of the country quickly made to the other side. 
  • The IPMI Forum, an online IPMI member resource, provided a place for professionals to ask questions, compare ideas, and discuss how to adapt policy. As bigger cities created their policies, they trickled down through this network.
  • Transportation for America’s Smart Cities Collaborative Slack channel provided a simple, effective forum for member cities to discuss and share responses and solutions to COVID-19. 
    • Smart Cities Collaborative member Chris Iverson from the City of Bellevue, Wash., shared that, “Once restaurants were mandated to shift to delivery and pick-up operations only, we reached out to the Collaborative to see what curbside best practices other cities were implementing. It helped immensely that everyone in the Slack channel was already focused on curbside management practices, and the transition to crisis mode was made easier with the help of the Collaborative.”
  • The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) launched a Transportation Resource Center public tool for cities to share information and develop effective responses to this evolving global crisis. It provides actionable examples of how cities around the world are addressing critical tasks, such as:
    • Helping healthcare and other essential workers get safely where they’re needed while protecting transit operators and frontline staff.
    • Creating pick-up/delivery zones to ensure that residents can access food and essential goods.
    • Managing public space to encourage physical distancing.
    • Deploying effective public communications and signage.
  • The American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO) is collecting a variety of transportation data to assist in understanding recent changes to travel of people and goods in response to COVID-19

Collectively, this network helped keep businesses running, supported stay-at-home orders, and facilitated the needs of healthcare systems. In a joint effort, IPMI, Transportation for America, ITE, and other partner organizations are documenting these actions and their impacts. They plan to provide summary blogs, articles, and peer reviewed white papers to help communities understand, plan, mitigate, and forge ahead through future emergencies.

If you have a good story, please share it with brett@woodsolutionsgroup.com. 

Brett Wood, CAPP, PE, is president of Wood Solutions Group.

Transportation is changing, but curbs are not: Lessons from the first Smart Cities Collaborative 2020 meeting

The third year of the Smart Cities Collaborative is off to a strong start. Last week, Transportation for America brought together the three pilot cities in the Collaborative to work through devising and designing strong curbside management pilots.

A break-out session at the first Smart Cities Collaborative meeting in Boston.

In 2018—when the last Smart Cities Collaborative wrapped up—electric scooter-sharing was brand new. Now, scooters, bikeshare, rideshare, and other mobility trends have gained stronger footholds in cities, becoming important features of the transportation ecosystem. 

But while these new technologies are changing transportation, one thing has stayed the same: the way we use curbs. 

Curbs are magical places where land use and transportation collide, often times making them cities’ most valuable assets. Which is why the 2020 Collaborative—which kicked off last week in Boston—is focused on developing better curbside management strategies through pilot projects. 

Three of the 17 cities participating in the 2020 Collaborative—Bellevue, WA; Boston, MA; and Minneapolis, MN—will launch curbside management pilots later this year. These cities’ teams met with us in Boston to brainstorm how they can make their pilots successful and scale what they learn across their cities. 

The current state of the curb

Managing curb space can be a work-in-progress. A city official puts “pedestrian zone” signs that had been moved back in their rightful places.

Curbs are more valuable now than ever before, according to Cityfi’s Camron Bridgeford. T4America teamed up with Cityfi to create the curriculum for the Collaborative—which inevitably began with what makes curbs so special in the first place. 

It comes down to simple economics: The fixed supply of curb space and the number of competing demands increases curbs’ value. For example, curbs are key to the movement of goods and people, as well as used for transit, storage, short-term parking, construction, streetscaping (like street trees), tactical urbanism, and snow removal, but there are only so many curbs. With the recent (and growing) number of new mobility technologies, it is a critical moment for cities to better leverage their curbs to advance the public good. 

For cities considering curbside management pilots, Camron recommends considering the following factors: pricing, design and way-finding, demand and access, operations and enforcement, partnerships, data, and performance measures. 

The importance of outreach

In many places, demands on curb space are increasing faster than public perception of what curbs are and what they could be. This poses a huge hurdle for cities considering changing their curbside management policies: explaining what they’re doing to people accustomed to traditional uses of curb space, such as on-street parking. 

Communicating the importance of rethinking streetscapes that haven’t changed in decades calls for more than just one public meeting. Cities need to show people what different uses of curb spaces look like, and for that they need creative communication strategies. 

The Collaborative came up with a few communication ideas, such as prioritizing stories over data (what’s more compelling: statistics or a tale of someone who could now get to work safely because of a protected bike lane?) and using pilots themselves as an outreach tool—because what’s a better way to explain what you want to achieve city-wide than showing people how it works on one block? 

Outreach is critical to successful pilot projects and policy implementation. If the public isn’t on board, your project will never leave the station. 

Data with a purpose

Smart Cities Collaborative co-director Emiko Atherton assists a team in a brainstorming session.

The advent of new mobility technologies is a huge opportunity for cities to learn more about how people get around by all modes of travel. But data is useless if cities don’t determine what they want to achieve with it. 

T4America’s director Beth Osborne took Bellevue, Boston, and Minneapolis on a rhetorical journey to determine why they want to collect mobility data in the first place. That journey started with identifying a problem. 

For example: many cities experience traffic back-ups that occur when a delivery vehicle double-parks. Most people take for granted that back-ups are bad, but Beth asked our three cities: why are these back-ups a problem? 

The cities answered: back-ups are bad because they increase vehicle and bus travel times and make streets unsafe for people walking and biking, as drivers double-parking or stuck in traffic might behave in unpredictable ways. That led the cities to their problem statement: We need to reduce incidences of double-parking in order to improve safety and travel times. 

By always asking “why,” cities can make sure that the data they collect aligns with their goals. 

What’s next for the Collaborative?

Between now and May, Bellevue, Boston, and Minneapolis will work on launching their curbside management pilots. This spring, we’ll gather with them and the 14 “peer” cities in the Collaborative in Bellevue to learn more about strategies for leveraging curb space. 

T4America selects 3 cities to launch curbside management pilots

The three pilot cities. From left: Boston, Bellevue, and Minneapolis

WASHINGTON, DC – Transportation for America (T4America) is thrilled to announce that it has awarded three cities with funding and support to complete curbside management pilot projects. The three cities are Bellevue, WA; Boston, MA; and Minneapolis, MN. 

The awards are a new component of T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative. Now in its third cohort, the Collaborative is a year-long program for public sector transportation leaders to share their experiences with new mobility technologies and develop best practices to ensure that these services improve city life. 

“The demands on curb space are rapidly increasing, but the policies and tools on how to share this limited resource are not, said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “We’re excited to work with these three cities to put what we’ve learned from the past two cohorts into practice and identify best practices and guidelines for better curbside management.”

T4America believes that peer-learning is the most valuable part of the Smart Cities Collaborative, which is why the three “pilot cities” will be joined by participants from over 10 other cities. The final list of cities participating as these “peer cities” will be announced next week. 

“We are proud to be selected as one of only three cities nationwide focusing on how to best manage curbside space so that it meets the current and future needs of all users of city streets,” said Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh. “I am encouraged that several of our recent efforts, such as piloting pick up and drop off space for rideshares and implementing performance parking, proved Boston’s willingness to find innovative solutions to our transportation challenges and helped to secure our participation in this joint effort.”  

“With rapidly increasing job and population growth in Bellevue, managing the city’s curbside space is becoming increasingly important,” said Transportation Director Andrew Singelakis. “Participating in the Smart Cities Collaborative will help us meet this challenge. We’re honored to be selected as a pilot city and grateful for the strong support we received from King County Metro, Bellevue Downtown Association, Bellevue Chamber of Commerce and others.”

“Minneapolis is proud to continue our partnership with T4America and the Smart Cities Collaborative, which has helped us develop capacity to harness technology to reach our transportation goals, “ said Robin Hutcheson, Minneapolis Public Works Director. “We are excited to be selected as one of three pilot cities in the 2020 cohort.  With this partnership and assistance we will develop and implement strategies to address the changing nature of curbside use, as well as learn from and share our learnings with the other participating cities.”

The third round will officially begin in February 2020. Learn more about the Smart Cities Collaborative. 

The best thing about the Smart Cities Collaborative is the peer-learning, says Oakland’s Warren Logan

Next January marks the third cohort for T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative. This time around, a steering committee of former Collaborative members is helping us shape the program. Warren Logan, the Policy Director of Mobility and Interagency Relations at Oakland Mayor’s Office, talked with us about what makes the Smart Cities Collaborative so valuable to city officials. 

Transportation for America: What’s the hardest part about working on new mobility at the city level? 

Warren Logan, Policy Director of Mobility and Interagency Relations at Oakland Mayor’s Office

Warren Logan: *Laughs* There are two major challenges. One is that city government isn’t equipped to manage innovation. We’re good at working slowly to maintain safety, order and equitable access. New mobility companies challenge the city, and sometimes actively try to avoid regulation. 

Secondly, the people who work in government are not the target audience for these kind of mobility services. This is a huge cultural challenge. If you look at the demographics of people who use scooters, bikeshare, or any kind of mobility through their smartphones, it’s people between the ages of 21 and 35. These people are more affluent, more flexible, and they live downtown—they’re the new urban class that we’re seeing shift into cities in the greater part of America. 

The people who you might assume work in high levels of government are older, more conservative, and more averse to risk. I saw this frequently in San Francisco, where I used to work: people who have never ridden a scooter but want to regulate them a particular way. This fundamentally underscores the challenge. If you haven’t used it, you should try it out first before regulating. In Oakland, where I now work, our scooter permitting policy requires that city staff test them out. We need to understand scooter users.

T4America: What part of the Smart Cities Collaborative did you find most valuable? 

WL: The Collaborative is one part therapy, one part workshop. It’s really helpful to be in a room full of people facing the same challenges and working towards the same goal. 

Warren Logan talking with former colleagues and staff from the Bay Area during the 2018 Smart Cities Collaborative.

One thing that’s really challenging about new mobility is that each city has three full-time staff—at best—working on this subject. It’s challenging for the one mobility person embedded in parking management to know what the right, innovative answer is when they’re surrounded by people focused on only parking. 

That’s what makes the Collaborative so valuable: The diversity of cities—blue, red, big, small, coastal, southern, Midwestern—results in a wealth of information and an incredible alumni network. It’s amazing to be able to call up someone from another city, talk about the problem you’re experiencing for 30 minutes, and then solve it, right there. 

T4America: How did you bring what you learned at the Collaborative to San Francisco? And now to Oakland?

WL: San Francisco is on the cutting edge of a lot of new mobility issues, so there’s this understandable mentality that we have to be the first ones to solve a problem. But what’s interesting is that since shared mobility launchd in a lot of places really quickly, we’re not the biggest fish in the pond. 

More importantly, as I participated in the Collaborative for a while, we found that this model—this permitting structure that we all backed into as the way to manage shared mobility—might not be perfect. Maybe we would have been better off if we chose a public-private partnership or a franchise model. What I brought back to San Francisco, and now to Oakland, is a way to explore questions that I never thought of before, and the very rich contacts from all these cities to explore these solutions. 

Interesting in sponsoring the Smart Cities Collaborative? Learn more here. 

Some scenes from the final meeting of the 2018 Smart Cities Collaborative

Exclusive Resources from T4A Micromobility Playbook

Produced in collaboration with 23 cities, Transportation for America released a new “Playbook” in January to help cities manage shared micromobility services like dockless bikes, electric scooters, and other new technologies that are rapidly being deployed across the country. The Shared Micromobility Playbook is intended to help cities better understand their policy levers and explores the core components of a comprehensive shared micromobility policy for local governments.

If you want the information from the playbook in a more digestible form, or are delivering a presentation to others about this issue, use our slide deck. If you want a T4A staffer to help you understand the playbook, or are interested in having someone do a presentation about it in your community, reach out to us!

Walking through questions about our new Playbook for Shared Micromobility

With the help of representatives from two cities, T4America staff a few weeks ago walked through our new Playbook for effectively managing shared micromobility services like dockless bikes, electric scooters, and other new technologies.

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

Almost overnight, shared scooters and bikes have rapidly proliferated in cities across the country. T4America’s new Playbook for Shared Micromobility is helping cities find their footing. We walked through the new guide a few weeks ago in an online presentation. (Watch the full presentation here)

Our sincere thanks especially to Francie Stefan (Santa Monica) and Josh Johnson (Minneapolis) for their time and especially for openly sharing about their experiences and lessons learned so far. Here’s a collection of some of the questions we weren’t able to answer during the presentation, compiled from T4America staff with input from our guests. Any mistakes or errors are T4America’s alone. 

GEOFENCING

Is constituent/resident input considered when forming geofencing?

Cities should engage constituents including residents, employees, businesses and visitors when considering the boundaries for operations as well as any specific areas where operations would need to be controlled in a different way, including restrictions on operations, specific parking areas, or speed differentials. Cities and operators together will need to work together to ensure an appropriate level of engagement, communication, and education around these areas.

In Minneapolis, public input was actually the primary consideration for 2018’s geofencing (of two areas), based on feedback received via our 311 system. Going forward in 2019, Minneapolis’ intention is to tie the monitoring interface with daily mapping of 311 complaints and try to more quickly react or anticipate where it is needed.

We have a policy in our city that does not allow any e-bikes or pedal assist bikes on any of our greenways or trails. How can geofencing help us avoid constant issues with e-bike use on the greenways?

At least thus far, geofencing technology for many devices has not always been precise enough for detailed enforcement. Improved equipment could address much of the issue but is not widespread. But geofencing can help alert riders to operating restrictions in specific areas. Larger areas with buffer zones around them like a trail system may be large enough to enable geofenced speed reduction, parking prohibition, or other tools. Robust communications by the city and in-app by operators can help deter riding or usage in restricted areas.

How well did the geofencing technology work? In Santa Monica, specifically in restricting devices from working in specific areas (Santa Monica city vs Santa Monica College).

The geofencing is working well in larger areas like the Marvin Braude Beach Bike Path. That zone is wide enough to enable effective location-based speed reduction down to 5 mph for all scooters. The city works regularly with the operators to ensure that all versions of the devices are set up to reduce speeds, and to ensure that parking limitations are in place.

FEE STRUCTURE

Good protected infrastructure is very important for shared micromobility users, but it’s also a vital element of more sustainable and equitable cities, whoever ultimately owns the vehicles. What is the fair share for micromobility providers to pay, given that more active transportation is already an element of most T4A cities’ transportation goals?

Unfortunately there is not a clear cut answer at this point, however Minneapolis is exploring a research project to determine the fair share across all shared modes. In the meantime, we are thinking about the infrastructure portion of fees related to costs of improving the existing system to more comfortably accommodate new modes through added bike lane protection (delineators), markings/signage, and additional striping for parking zones.

Santa Monica adopted an interim fee that was calculated based on the PROW square footage used by devices. The study looked at the average footprint of a device in the PROW when stationary (bike/scooter/vertical/horizontal), and then applied the per-square foot fee used for outdoor dining in the PROW. The staff report for fee adoption can be found here.

Do you see cities moving from a fee structure to a subsidy structure for these services? Shifting to a higher penalty for SOVs and rewards rather than fees on lower-emission modes.

Given the ongoing debate in cities across the country and how to appropriately tax and levy fees on everything from TNCs to micromobility operators to freight and urban delivery to private vehicle use, it’s still unclear how to best assess the impacts of various transportation users and service providers on our shared infrastructure. Ultimately, T4A would like to see fair user fees supported across all modes that truly represent the positive, and negative, impacts of each user and use case.

What is a reasonable cost that cities can expect to spend as a result of allowing dockless vehicles/shared micromobility to operate in their cities? (Including everything that goes into it: reviewing permitting applications, dealing w/ picking up rogue vehicles if the operator does not, etc.)

These new services are in their infancy and the exact costs that are being borne by cities to administer and manage them are not yet clear. In developing an overall fee structure, cities will need to think holistically to calculate the full and actual costs—including everything from staff time to software management platforms to daily operational needs to outreach and engagement. While cities can take some cues from each other, these costs also vary from city to city given the nature of their regulations, labor costs and other local factors. Conducting a cost analysis study can help determine the true costs.

FLEET SIZE

Should there only be a single operator per community or can there be competition in this arena? Also should a cap be set for the industry or individual operator?

It’s still unclear what an appropriate number of permits or overall fleet size should be as it relates to population, density or other community factors that will appropriately serve individual communities and the city as a whole—while still creating an attractive and profitable market for operators. Between permit caps and fleet size caps, cities should probably focus more on managing the overall fleet size effectively to create a program the whole community can benefit from. Cities should use dynamic, performance based caps that establish clear, utilization-based formulas for the expansion of operator fleets.

Minneapolis is also thinking about—in terms of the differences among companies—whether it’s a different product (such as a sit down scooter) or potential differences in operating structure (vendor hiring practices, fleet activities, etc.) and also how closely vendors align with city goals for transportation and mobility. With rapid growth and continued consolidation in the scooter industry, there is also the idea of maintaining continuity of service, should a vendor be acquired or leave the market.

How did the City of Santa Monica decide on their initial fleet size for providers?
In Minneapolis, any hints on the actual ratios of people/scooter you’re examining? Any preliminary findings you can share on those numbers? Formulas?

Santa Monica interviewed eleven operators before crafting the the scope of the pilot program and Administrative Rules. One of the questions asked was regarding the optimal number of devices with which to start operations of a fleet that would serve the whole city. Answers all hovered around 500 devices, and there was interest in flexibility. That informed the starting point for the pilot program. The city has owned a 500-bike bikeshare fleet since 2015, and it has worked well for the city’s size and layout.

In thinking about ratios of people per scooter, Minneapolis has been discussing and comparing with a variety of other cities, and comparing that to last year’s results based on the population that was generally served by the distribution of scooters. Minneapolis is also talking to some of the vendors who’ve expressed interest in Minneapolis to see how they determine ideal fleet size. Those calculations are still being firmed up but Minneapolis is hoping to use 2019 as the starting point to establish the idea and then evaluate performance from there.

INFRASTRUCTURE

I would love to hear more about the Minneapolis idea of dedicated fees to advance protected bike infrastructure! Did you set up designated parking areas for scooters anywhere? Does the $1/day PROW fee fund something related to streets (or even active transportation infrastructure?)?

Minneapolis has set aside the fees from the 2018 pilot and is thinking about establishing some testing of this idea in 2019 in places with low-hanging fruit such as adding delineators on bikeways (with no current protection) which connect equity focus areas to core parts of the city. Minneapolis is also looking at testing lane markings and dedicated parking, particularly in dense areas with narrow sidewalks. Equally important to this effort will be communication of how and why this is being done.

EQUITY

Were these set up with any particular group in mind? Are these focused on ensuring the best interest of the broad public and of special-needs group?

The was developed as a result of a collaboration between Transportation for America and the participant cities in T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative as well as industry stakeholders including Lime. T4A conducted additional research and held conversations with cities across the country developing regulations and managing pilot programs. The Playbook also builds on the effort by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and their member cities to develop their Guidelines for the Regulation and Management of Shared Active Transportation.

DATA

How do you think about requiring operators to provide public feeds in GBFS format so real-time info is visible to the public and trip-planning apps? These feeds were missing in some early pilot programs, but cities like DC require them from new mobility operators, which are already commonplace for existing systems like Citi Bike, Breeze bikeshare and Nice Ride MN.

This is perhaps a notable difference between a publicly owned and operated system (often through contract) and a service that’s privately owned and operated. Systems owned and managed by public entities (such as those listed in the question above) have mostly been making their data publicly accessible. But, while some cities are requiring data be provided by (private) dockless operators, not many have required it to also be publicly available. So far, private operators have typically been comfortable sharing data with regulators for enforcement and operations, but have been opposed to being required to share their data publicly to the benefit of other private sector companies.

PERFORMANCE METRICS

Are there recommendations for the most effective performance metrics?

Great question! We include a list of potential metrics that cities can use to measure performance in the playbook. But, given that we’re still very early in the development of these services, it’s not clear yet which metrics may be best. And, since each city will likely have different goals and outcomes that are most important to them, it will be important for each city to determine which metrics best track the outcomes or impacts they’re most interested in.

Relatedly, that type of ethos governed our overall approach to the playbook. T4America wanted to provide a framework that any city could use to advance their specific goals, while also recognizing that cities will bring vastly different big-picture goals to the table. Some cities might be more committed to shifting more trips to cleaner modes, for example. The important thing is for cities to understand how measuring performance is (and should be!) connected to accomplishing specific goals, and then to find the metrics that best get them where they want to go.

Question for Minneapolis: How would your population density-based distribution requirement work?

This idea is still being explored in Minneapolis, but essentially it would be establishing a goal ratio of people per scooter, based on population and including commuters as well as students (where applicable) to try to include the groups using scooters regularly. That would then be used to establish some distribution minimums or maximums, to ensure broader distribution and availability. Minneapolis essentially allowed the market to determine distribution in 2018, and we are thinking about how we can make it more equitable and position it as an option for all in 2019 and beyond.

GENERAL

For cities that have conducted RFA/review processes for selecting operator companies, what criteria is used (metrics, performance measures, etc.) have been used to rank, evaluate, and determine which company is most competitive and also the best fit for both the city and the overall community?

Last summer, the San Francisco San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) created its Powered Scooter Share Permit and Pilot Program. Their application process invited proposals that prioritized the city’s concerns around safety, equity and accountability and they rated everything from public safety and user education to equitable access to collaborating with the city. You can find the details, applications and their public review on their website.

The RFA process for Santa Monica is documented on the pilot project Application & Selection Process website.

The enabling ordinance for the pilot project specified some of the selection process, including “Each qualified applicant shall be evaluated based upon objective criteria including: experience; proposed operations plan; financial wherewithal and stability; adequacy of insurance; ability to begin operations in a timely manner; public education strategies; relevant record of the applicant’s or officers’, owners’ or principals’ violations of Federal, State or local law, or rules and regulations; and any other objective criteria established by Administrative Regulation.”

Minneapolis : How is your ridership in winter versus summer?

Minneapolis didn’t get much snow or ice in November prior to the end of the pilot last year, however temperatures did drop in the last 3-4 weeks of the pilot, which caused a steady decline from roughly six trips per scooter per day to about three trips per scooter per day by the last week. At the peak in early summer, we were seeing about seven trips per scooter per day.

Is Santa Monica’s eScooter industry review publicly available? If so, could you share it?

All available program documents are posted here.

What is a typical day-in-the-life of your Code Enforcement Officer?

Code enforcement tasks are both in the field investigating issues and documenting conditions, as well as in the office responding to phone calls, e-mails, and submitted complaints. Time is split roughly 50/50 between field and office, inclusive of work entering reports and evidence into a document management system in the event that a complaint ends up in a hearing. Code staff investigate complaints in the field, and if confirmed will follow up with additional investigations which may lead to citations from violated municipal codes. Once a complaint is confirmed, code staff investigate the problem daily or even weekly until the problem is resolved.

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Thanks again to our guests for their time. View the full Playbook at playbook.t4america.org

T4America’s new “playbook” provides an evolving guide for how cities can manage shared micromobility services

Produced in collaboration with 23 cities, Transportation for America today released a new “Playbook” to help cities think about how to best manage shared micromobility services like dockless bikes, electric scooters, and other new technologies that are rapidly being deployed in cities across the country.

View the complete Playbook at http://playbook.t4america.org

Over just the past few years, shared micromobility services (scooters, bikes and others) have exploded in cities across the country, transforming the mobility landscape and challenging the ability of cities to manage them. Since the initial introduction of dockless bikesharing systems in Seattle in the summer of 2017, dozens of companies have rapidly launched their services in hundreds of cities, served thousands of users and completed millions of rides—in just a little over a year.

“The rapid emergence of these new micromobility services has created new clean and convenient options for people to get around, and they certainly offer a wealth of potential benefits. But there’s still so much to learn,” said Russ Brooks, T4America’s Director of Smart Cities.

“They can help advance city goals related to equity, access to jobs and services, climate, and more. But in order to achieve these goals, cities have a major role to play in thoughtfully managing them to ensure that the benefits accrue equitably to everyone. This Playbook is intended to be an extension of T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative and serve as the start of an ongoing conversation where cities can share their experiences and identify best practices as the results of the first pilot programs across the country come in.”

No cities were even considering the prospect of shared electric scooters two years ago, and now in 2019, hundreds of them are. This incredibly rapid pace of change is unlikely to slow anytime soon, and it highlights the need to create flexible regulatory frameworks that will help cities integrate new technologies and contribute toward their preferred long-term outcomes.

The Shared Micromobility Playbook is intended to help cities better understand the variety of policy levers at their disposal and explores the core components of a comprehensive shared micromobility policy for local governments as they consider how best to manage these services.

“Santa Monica has been at ground zero for the micromobility revolution, having to learn—in real time—what works and what doesn’t as scooters appeared in our city virtually overnight,” said Francie Stefan, Acting Chief Mobility Officer and Assistant Director of Planning & Community Development for the City of Santa Monica.

“But we didn’t have to find our way alone. By being part of the T4America Smart Cities Collaborative, we were able to quickly tap into the experiences of over 20 other cities, including ones who had just gone through the first wave of dockless bikeshare regulation. With e-scooters now operating for a year in Santa Monica, we were happy to share our experiences as T4America produced the Playbook which crystallizes in a systematic way what the key policy questions are, what we can control, and the pros and cons of various approaches to regulating these new services.”

The Playbook was started during a September convening in Pittsburgh, PA with the 23 cities participating in T4America’s yearlong Smart Cities Collaborative. The Playbook was written as a result of that collaboration, additional conversations with cities across the country working on regulations, industry stakeholders including Lime, and research conducted by T4America.

The convening of the Smart Cities Collaborative in Pittsburgh, PA where the Playbook was started with feedback from staff representing 23 cities.

“Whether docked or dockless bikes, electric bikes or scooters, the pace of change with these new mobility offerings has been astonishing. In Minneapolis, we’re not just trying to keep up, we’re working to shape these services to provide safe, reliable, and sustainable mobility options for all people,” said Josh Johnson, Advanced Mobility Manager for the Minneapolis Department of Public Works. “Thankfully, we don’t have to try to figure this out on our own. Being part of producing the Playbook with T4America and other cities in the same boat has required us to think through these issues in a deliberate way, while remaining proactive and keeping our ideal vision of mobility in Minneapolis in the front of our minds.”

The Playbook is divided into eight policy sections:

General Provisions - Operations Equipment & Safety - Parking & Street Design - Equity - Communications & Community Engagement - Data Metrics

Each section identifies key policy areas to reflect on, highlights the various options in each policy area, reviews the pros and cons of each level of action, and provides case studies of cities that have enacted certain policies. Sections also include suggested national standards across cities, areas for cities to make local choices, and key considerations when deliberating policy options along with recommendations.

T4America will continue to refine and expand the Playbook as we learn more about the ongoing results of the efforts to manage these services and ultimately the impact that shared micromobility is having in our communities.

View the Playbook at playbook.t4america.org.

Reminder: Join us on Monday, January 28th at 3:00 p.m. EST for an online session explaining the Playbook, how to use it, and how members of the Collaborative helped shape the content.

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Seven things to know about our last Smart Cities Collaborative meeting of 2018

Last week in Atlanta, Georgia we wrapped up our second cohort of the Smart Cities Collaborative with the fourth meeting of 2018. Once again, staff representing cities, counties, transit agencies and other public sector agencies from 23 cities gathered together to share their experiences and learn how others are using technology and new mobility to become better places to live. Here are seven things we learned or heard last week.

1. Atlanta has a tremendous amount of momentum and potential

As someone said during the week at one point, it’s much harder to affect significant change if you’re not growing, and Atlanta (both the city and the region) have been booming. In fact, after losing population for nearly thirty years, the rate of population growth in the city proper has been near the top of the list within the (massive) region over the last few years. Which also means that the city and region alike are struggling to keep those people moving and well-connected to jobs and opportunity. Atlanta City Councilman Amir Farohki and Planning Director Tim Keane shared a little of the Atlanta story and how they’re working hard to keep people and residents at the center of their city’s efforts to improve mobility and access.

Atlanta Councilman Amir Farokhi, left, and Planning Director Tim Keane speaking to the Collaborative in Atlanta.

One of the best illustrations of that effort is the Atlanta BeltLine, an unprecedented and multi-decade project to add trails, parks and transit to old railroad corridors that form a ring around the core of the city. We were fortunate enough to get out of our meeting space in downtown (provided by the Atlanta Regional Commission) long enough to get a terrific tour of a small portion of the BeltLine, and it’s truly a transformative, people-centered project that will have immense long-term benefits for the city.

Touring the Atlanta BeltLine with staff from Atlanta Beltline near the Ponce City Market on the city’s east side, and on bottom right, touring a just-opened portion of the west side trail with the portion set aside and prepped for transit on the left side of that photo.

2. This was the last meeting of the second cohort of the Collaborative

This meeting wrapped up our second yearlong cohort of the Collaborative, putting a bow on a year that kicked off with 23 cities in Denver way back in the spring, traveled to Seattle over the summer, and then met in Pittsburgh near the beginning of the fall. We’re planning to reflect a little more later on in another post about a year spent learning with these cities, but suffice it to say we covered an immense amount of ground over a net total of only about a full week of time together, and we will miss working together with them every few months.

3. Arcadis sponsored the meeting and made an interesting offer to the cities

Data. Daaaaaaaaata. We all hear about it nonstop.

And it’s true: new technologies and mobility options are providing a wealth of detailed, real-time transportation data to planners and managers across the country. This is creating new opportunities to analyze historical data and better measure operations, understand network conditions and trends, and ultimately help cities make better decisions about how to manage their transportation networks.

But, despite all this wonderful new data, most cities haven’t been able to fully realize its benefits, update their models or turn it into meaningful action. It’s certainly possible to use this data to better understand what’s actually happening on the ground with present and future travel demand, but it’s a tough job for any city—especially the small and mid-sized cities—to do this on their own.

Arcadis, a large global planning and design firm that sponsored this meeting, came with an interesting proposal: They offered a three-month data analytics pilot project of nearly any kind to Collaborative cities for free. But they don’t want to just roll ahead with an idea of their own—they wanted to collaborate and work together with cities to figure out what would be most helpful. So their team, and others from Sam Schwartz Engineering, HR&A and Cityfi, met with the cities in small groups for a half-day to better understand their specific challenges and identify key areas to include in potential data analytics pilots, craft the scope for coordinated pilots across multiple cities, and highlight a few options for differing outcomes in each community.

4. We heard a lot about tangible projects happening on the ground right now

The Collaborative has always intended to be about action and real, tangible efforts to improve mobility and experiment with new technologies and tools. While a lot of our time was taken up with some big picture issues, we also heard short presentations from other cities that are forging ahead about how specific pilot projects are faring, with the hopes of sharing lessons and experience with the other cities that might want follow—or chart their own path.

Dan Hoffman from Gainesville, Florida shared about the automated vehicle shuttle pilot that they’re hoping to get rolling in early 2019. He explained the goals of the pilot, where and how it will operate and all of the hurdles they’ve cleared along the way to try to put a real AV shuttle on the ground connecting downtown and the University of Florida, providing a useful test case for other cities hoping to obtain a NHTSA waiver for AV testing or how to partner effectively with the state.

Robin Aksu from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation also joined us to speak on mobility hubs and how their project is progressing. Robin shared what they’re hoping to accomplish by creating mobility hubs, the focus on primary and satellite hubs and how the design will reflect those differences, and how they’re approaching implementation along with communications, marketing, and their community outreach program.

Mark de la Vergne from Detroit, Michigan joined us to share more about Night Shift and some of their other transit programs. Night Shift is specifically designed for late night and service workers to help connect them to transit and improve access to jobs. Mark shared about the process his team has gone through to conduct engagement and outreach in their local community to not only design the service, but ensure it meets the community’s ongoing needs. Detroit’s pilot is an excellent example of how cities can think about improving access from the ground up with the user’s perspective in mind and without a predetermined solution.

5. Mobility as a Service will definitely be one of 2019’s hottest topics — but it won’t end there

We’ve talked a lot here about Mobility as a Service and that this is where most of the companies like Uber or Lyft or Lime are ultimately headed: not a provider of one specific mode, but a mobility provider allowing multiple options for however you choose to get around. It’s likely part of the reason why Lyft bought Motivate and Uber bought Jump (both are bikesharing companies), and why we’ll continue to see more moves like that in the future.

So what will it mean to roll all these services into a single platform offering multiple modes of travel. Who would control the data? What would the role of the city be in helping to plan for travel demand? How would cities ensure that it improves access for everyone?

We had two representatives from the public side (Warren Logan from San Francisco and Alex Pazuchanics from Pittsburgh) discuss the topic with two reps from the private side (Lilly Shoup from Lyft and Matt Cole from Cubic.) And the back-and-forth that ensued (moderated by Cityfi’s Gabe Klein) was a terrific, open, and honest discussion that pulled no punches.

5. LADOT’s Mobility Data Specification is already shifting the conversation

There have been a lot of conversations over the past year about LA DOT’s Mobility Data Specification (MDS) and how cities can better use data to actively manage their operations. Starting with shared active transportation services operating in Los Angeles, Marcel Porras from LADOT shared more about their short- and long-term goals along with the topic of how cities manage the right-of-way today physically and how they will need to manage it in a digital future.

Apparent from the beginning of the conversation was significant interest from the participants to use MDS in their communities to accomplish similar goals. And, there was also a stated desire to work with Los Angeles to further co-create and build out MDS to help manage the other challenges they’re facing such as managing curb space, carsharing, ridesourcing and eventually automated vehicles.

One of the most poignant parts of the conversation was a deep dive into how MDS is being administered and governed today, how cities might work together to evolve MDS into a national standard, and how a governance structure might take shape that could foster its development long into the future. It was one of the best conversations we’ve had in the Collaborative this year and highlighted the growing need for cities to evolve their structures, capacities and capabilities as data management becomes paramount for mobility management.

6. We turned the tables and tossed the private companies into the Shark Tank

Cities get pitched all day long from private companies and providers. But it’s rarely in a forum where these maxed-out city staff can really engage in a thoughtful way and certainly not one where they can benefit from the expertise of their colleagues from other cities. So we tried to turn the tables a little bit and take a page from TV by creating the Smart Cities Shark Tank where private companies were given ten minutes to pitch a panel of reps from a range of cities about Mobility as a Service and curb space management solutions, and then take some tough questions from the panel as they tried to assess whether it would be a good fit for their cities. And then the panels huddled to evaluate the presentations and pick a “winner” with the best pitch for the cities.

Photos from the Smart Cities Shark Tank, including a picture of the location at Monday Night Garage on the BeltLine in West End.

The night was a lot of fun but it was also a useful exercise that forced the private companies to meet the cities on their terms and also allowed the cities to tap into the expertise of their colleagues from across the country—something they don’t typically get to do when one of these companies shows up in their office with a pitch.

Thanks to the International Parking & Mobility Institute for helping host the Shark Tank.

7. Year two is done, and we’re already looking ahead to year three

It’s hard to believe we’re already wrapping up the second yearlong cohort of the Collaborative, but we’re already looking ahead to another cohort of cities for year three in 2019.

We would never have been able to make the Collaborative happen without the hard work and leadership of Russ Brooks, who has been T4America’s Director of Smart Cities for the past three years (and has been part of T4America in some fashion for seven years in total.) He helped conceive of the program and pull together the initial group of cities that met on a fairly surreal day in Minneapolis after the 2016 presidential election, and he’s contributed his blood, sweat, and tears to build the relationships required to bring almost 150 participants from 27 different cities together throughout the first two years—and the private industry—to the table for such a productive and useful forum.

We’re especially grateful for the representatives from the 23 cities who came to one or more of these meetings this year and contributed their time and their wisdom and made the Collaborative, well, truly collaborative!

We’re actively looking for the next Director of Smart Cities to guide year three, and we’re hoping for someone with some experience on the ground within a city or agency to run the show. Read the job description here.

The second cohort of the Smart Cities Collaborative at our first 2018 meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Kicking off the first year of the Collaborative in Minneapolis on November 7, 2016.

“Deciding what kind of city we want to be” with the Smart Cities Collaborative

While fighting to stay ahead of a transportation and mobility landscape that changes by the day, 70+ people representing 23 cities gathered in Pittsburgh last week for the third meeting of our Smart Cities Collaborative to band together to solve problems and learn from each other.

While we were in Pittsburgh, Seattle Department of Transportation’s Benjamin de la Peña gave an interview to Seattle Business Magazine about automated vehicles that nails what the Collaborative is all about: “We do not want the technology to decide what kind of city we want to have. We need to decide what kind of city we want and have the technology adapt to that city,” he said.

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto

This is the core mission of the Smart Cities Collaborative, and why we gathered again for three days in Pittsburgh last week. We were incredibly fortunate to have Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto kick things off for us with a stirring reminder of the aim for all of this work, which was embedded in the motto for their application to USDOT’s Smart Cities Challenge from 2016: “If it’s not for all, it’s not for us.”

Thanks to support from AARP’s Public Policy Institute and Jana Lynott, we started trying to put that maxim into practice right out of the gate with a tour of two particular intersections in Pittsburgh that could stand to have some major improvements made to better serve everyone who needs to use them.

As biking rates continue to go up and eventually shared bikes or scooters from companies like JUMP or Lime roll out, the city will continue having to carefully navigate the tension between allowing a market to develop and thrive, while also ensuring that new options also help the city accomplish their very ambitious goals. Goals like eliminating all traffic fatalities (Vision Zero), giving everyone access to fresh food within 20 minutes without having to use a car, and making every trip under a mile most enjoyably achieved by walking or biking, to name just three.

As the rain poured down, Karina Ricks, the director of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, described some of the challenges with a particular intersection in Pittsburgh to the Collaborative members.

So we toured these two intersections above (during a crazy week of floods in metro Pittsburgh) and then spent some time in a charrette discussing practical design changes for them, the endless tradeoffs that have to be made, and how to prioritize the city’s stated goals and values. How can cities make value-based decisions about what to prioritize? And how do you engage the public when making those difficult decisions?

All too often these days, city transportation departments are just like the surfer desperately fighting just to stay ahead of the break of a mammoth wave. As we heard during one session about e-scooters, they’re here, the cities didn’t ask for them, and it often feels like the challenge is best stated as “they’re here and we have to find a way to deal with them.”

But instead of merely “dealing” with these new services, how can cities work to harness their potential—whether ridesourcing, automated vehicles, bikes and scooters—to accomplish something good and advance their city’s overall values, rather than just avoiding the bad outcomes? And how can cities create flexible regulatory frameworks that can be applied broadly across new mobility models as they develop?

The pace of change is perhaps the biggest part of the challenge. The best way to describe the process when cities roll out a new transit service, for better or for worse, is pretty slow and methodical. Years can pass between the day when someone first drew a new line on a map and the day that a new bus or train starts picking up passengers. But with new mobility options, it feels like the time between ideation and rollout is measured in days, not years.

To better prepare for these new services and this pace of change, we spent the better part of half a day working in groups trying to craft an ideal, holistic policy for shared active transportation—the docked or dockless bikes and scooters that are popping up rapidly in cities from coast to coast.

We were glad to be supported by Emily Warren and the team from Lime, one of the biggest companies in the U.S. providing shared bikes and scooters, to kick things off with a look at some of the hot button issues like fleet size, requirements for locking technology, and how to proactively ensure that their services are available to everyone in a community.

Broken up into small groups, Collaborative members chose two policy topics they wanted to develop, like equipment and safety, operations, data standards, and equity, to name just a few. Over the space of half a day, Collaborative members explored the core components of a comprehensive policy and identified key policy areas to consider, set a recommended policy floor (a fundamental basic level of policy that all cities can and should adopt), and highlighted a few options for differing levels of action in each policy area.

The exercise illustrated the power of cities coming together to solve problems, learn what’s working (or not working), and learn from each other. This is the true strength of the Collaborative and the reason we’ve continued this work for nearly two years now.

With the help of our colleagues at Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, we closed out the three-day meeting with a look at each city’s equity guiding policy and examined how they translate those policies into action in their projects.

Each participant shared their department’s or agency’s equity policy—or their lack of one—what that policy meant to them and how they’ve tangibly incorporated it into their projects. Participants worked to identify gaps and areas for improvement as they move forward with their projects to ensure equity and access for everyone. It was a refreshing discussion that illuminated the ongoing difficulty in applying ambitious principles to policies and then to actual projects on the ground.

Participants getting a tour of some of the experiments going on in downtown Pittsburgh, including a painted bus lane through the incredibly busy corridor, parklets along the curb lane, artistic interventions, and a raised bus bump-out to make bus boarding easier.

The Collaborative reconvenes this December in Atlanta, just before Transportation for America’s Capital Ideas conference, which will also tackle this issue of new mobility. At Capital Ideas (open for registration now!), we will be focusing on the states’ role and how they can lead the way while also working in partnership with the providers and cities to create a transportation system that works for everyone.

Join us in Atlanta for Capital Ideas this December! Psst, find out what’s on the agenda here.

Focusing on the positives of dockless bikes and scooters

Cities are quickly passing policies to manage the influx of dockless bike share and scooters in their communities. How can they craft policies to achieve the outcomes they want, rather than simply avoiding the ones they don’t?

We’re more than halfway through 2018 and shared active transportation services such as dockless bike share and stand up electric scooters continue to expand, often without warning, to new cities across the country. As a result, cities are beginning to pass policies and regulations to manage the demands and challenges these new services create.

But, instead of shaping these services in a way that maximizes their positive impacts, so far, their policies seem to be more focused on simply preventing potential negative outcomes. In order to unlock the full benefits of these vehicles, they’ll need to craft policies that address both.

One of the starkest examples of this is how cities are allocating space for these vehicles, both when they’re in use and not. To prevent dockless scooters and bikes from blocking sidewalks and creating chaos in the right-of-way, Denver, for example, has passed requirements for operators to install and maintain painted parking zones throughout the city.

Creating parking spaces is a great way to ensure these vehicles aren’t making city streets less safe when they’re not in motion. But, this should be paired with efforts to create a safer environment for these vehicles and their users when they are in motion. In order to foster the adoption of these services and truly make their streets safer, cities should clearly articulate where these vehicles should operate and carve out protected spaces for people to ride.

The need for protected infrastructure has been apparent for years with bicyclists and pedestrians and is quickly becoming clear with scooters as well. Last month, Jenasia Summers, a 21-year-old woman in Cleveland, was struck and killed by a car while riding a scooter in a six-lane road with no dedicated space for active transportation users. Stories like this are far too common and are directly related to the low rates of active transportation users—half of Americans would like to ride bicycles more, but are afraid of interactions with motor vehicles.

To help create additional space and infrastructure for active transportation users, cities could use the fees they receive from private mobility providers to build out new bike and pedestrian infrastructure that will foster the adoption of these services.

But, even as scooter companies such as Bird are offering to give cities $1 per vehicle per day for cities to use for better bike infrastructure and safety measures, cities aren’t actually codifying this in policy.

A city’s budget reflects its priorities. If cities are truly committed to increasing active transportation, they should include provisions to directly allocate revenue from these services toward providing better infrastructure as these vehicles increase in popularity. Even if the total amount of money isn’t much, it’s an opportunity for cities to carve out space for their stated priorities.

A greater focus on the positive impacts of new mobility options can go beyond safety. In its updated Free Floating Bike Share Permit Requirements, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has incentivized providers to offer adaptive cycles as part of their fleets. Adaptive cycles include a range of two- or three-wheeled vehicles, such as tricycles, hand-pedaled cycles or recumbent cycles where the rider leans back in their seat, that can be used by individuals who are unable to operate a two-wheeled bicycle. To put more of these on the road, SDOT will allow operators to expand their fleets if they provide a certain share of adaptive cycles.

Additionally, SDOT has specified in their policy that they will allocate $50,000 from permitting fees toward developing and leveraging community partnerships to increase adaptive cycling ridership and access. While it still needs to clarify some of the specifics of how these partnerships will work, SDOT has clearly outlined its priorities to increase access by providing incentives to private mobility providers and has allocated additional resources to engage people with disabilities to increase ridership.

It’s very early in the process of determining how to regulate these new shared active transportation services and there’s still much to learn about how best to utilize these new mobility options in service of our long-term outcomes. But, as cities integrate them into their communities and are generating revenue from their operations, there’s an excellent opportunity to chart a new course and develop regulations in way that truly advances their long-term positive outcomes, rather than simply trying to prevent their negative impacts.

At our next Smart Cities Collaborative meeting in Pittsburgh, we’ll discuss these challenges and explore policy provisions for shared active transportation services that maximize their benefits. Stay tuned for an update on what we learn, what the biggest challenges are, and what a model policy could look like.

Moving from theory to practice with the Smart Cities Collaborative

Many of the 24 cities in our Smart Cities Collaborative are currently knee-deep in pilot projects or a flood of new mobility services. Their direct and ongoing experiences helped shift the conversation from theory to practice during a two-day meeting of the Collaborative in Seattle last week.

It’s only been three months since we were in the same room together, but the rapid introduction of new mobility services has continued rapidly across the country. A whole new batch of cities—including Atlanta, Austin, and Minneapolis within the Collaborative—have been managing the introduction of dockless bikeshare systems and electric scooters. Cities like New York and Washington, DC have introduced new ways to regulate transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft, and others—like West Sacramento—have launched microtransit pilots.

During this meeting at the Seattle Central Library in downtown Seattle, it quickly became clear that the tone, pace, and feel of this year’s Collaborative is much different than last year’s. In part because of the size of this group—over 75 participants from 45 agencies representing 24 different communities—and in part because of the diversity of their projects and because of where each city is in their process. During our first year, many cities were still wrapping their heads around these new mobility options and trying to better understand emerging technologies.

This year, almost every participant, agency, and city has at least one project, policy, or permitting process they’re managing, developing, or have recently passed. This direct experience has helped moved the conversation from theory to practice with more in-depth, detailed discussions on performance metrics, data sharing, street design, pricing, and more.

Getting the ball rolling with data

Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) kicked things off in Seattle with a session about their Transportation Happiness metrics, a new process they’re piloting in an effort to measure user experience across the city’s transportation network and help them bring a human-centered focus to their decision-making process. LADOT released draft metrics last month and used this meeting to host small group discussions with other cities to review their goals and guiding principles, refine their proposed metrics, and help them brainstorm additional sources of data that would speak to each metric.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is in the midst of reevaluating its own data processes. Benjie de la Peña, SDOT’s Chief of Strategy and Innovation, explained how they are starting with a thorough accounting of all the information that’s flowing in and out of the department, and using that to inform where and how it needs to evolve or adapt for new mobility services.

This conversation spurred an important and necessary discussion about developing data-sharing standards for new mobility services. These services—like TNCs, scooters, and automated vehicles—often launch and scale rapidly, affecting everything from congestion to safety to equity. But, local governments often aren’t receiving the right data (or any data) from private mobility providers, resulting in a lack of information and insight into how these modes are truly impacting the community.

One of our goals during this meeting was to help cities identify data these modes are generating and then articulate which data would be most useful for cities to better understand their impacts. To start, we broke participants off into small groups and identified a comprehensive list of data being generated by each service, determined which data is most important to collect, and which metrics these data apply to in order to better decipher the impacts of these services.

Over the course of the next few weeks, T4America will compile this information, identify the consistencies across each service, and codify a set of shared data standards that any city can use with public and private mobility providers as they operate, procure, or permit mobility services.

Like the Denver meeting, we’re continuing to prioritize equity in every project

While new mobility services have the potential to make cities more equitable and improve accessibility for everyone (as we explored in this post), if cities aren’t careful, they could instead make matters far worse.

To learn more about proactively harnessing the positive potential of new mobility platforms, we were fortunate to have Naomi Doerner, Seattle Department of Transportation’s (SDOT) Transportation Equity Strategist, along with two members of our own team, Emiko Atherton, the Director of the National Complete Streets Coalition and Ben Stone, Smart Growth America’s Director of Arts & Culture, to lead a conversation on equity strategies in transportation.

Ben and Emiko spoke about the importance of engaging the community at every step of the planning and implementation process, and challenged participants to think about how their communities think about equity and what they could be doing better. Naomi provided an overview of Seattle’s Transportation Equity Program, which conducts outreach on how the city can provide affordable and accessible options to communities that need it most, provides discounted carshare, and helps residents access transit through discounted fare cards.

Closing it out with street design and pricing

The morning of our second day focused on the impacts of new mobility services on street design. We heard about how cities around the country are updating their processes to account for all the new demands on the right-of-way. Participants from Santa Monica, Boulder, and Pittsburgh shared how they are implementing new street designs, how they’re handling community engagement, and what to do when a street, arterial, or corridor doesn’t easily fit into these traditional categories.

It was a good lesson in how important it is to engage the community, understand their desires and concerns, and involve them in the hard choices necessary when redesigning the street. Adding to this discussion, Dongho Chang, Seattle’s Chief Traffic Engineer, detailed the work he’s led over the past decade and shared specific examples of how they’ve used new street designs to increase safety, reduce accidents and fatalities, and increase transit and other mobility options. (Check out his twitter feed, by the way, it’s superb!)

We wrapped up by talking about pricing, facilitated by a number of experts with experience leading projects that utilize dynamic pricing models. They shared the political, technological, and operational challenges each pricing program has faced throughout their development and operation.

Next stop, Pittsburgh

Seattle proved a perfect backdrop for the meeting—myriad new mobility services operating alongside a heavy commitment and investment to high-capacity transit, and cutting edge street design. And this meeting showed why the work of the Collaborative is urgently necessary: so many cities are knee deep in pilot projects or scaling up new services and the pace of change is continuing to accelerate. But these leaders from 24 cities are clearly ready to continue tackling these challenges and are committed to working together to do so.

Based on the enthusiasm they have shown during the first two meetings, we have no doubt it will be the same when we meet next in Pittsburgh this September where we’ll dive even deeper into these topics once again.

Using new mobility models to increase access

New mobility services have enormous potential to change the transportation landscape and increase access for all residents. But, only a few projects are actually focused on that.

As new mobility models continue to have an impact on our transportation system and shift how our cities are designed and operate, cities and transit agencies are launching new pilot projects to test everything from microtransit to ridesourcing to automated vehicles and understand how these services can best function in and benefit their communities.

One of the most promising areas to capitalize on new mobility services is around increasing access for people most in need; people who live in areas that are currently underserved by transit, do not have bank accounts or cell phones, require wheelchair access, or commute during off-peak hours. Depending on how they’re deployed, these services could help community members more easily reach jobs, school, medical appointments, grocery stores, or wherever people need to go.

Many of these individuals are already dealing with a transportation network that has often been designed without their needs in mind—whether it’s infrequent transit, a lack of affordability, or inconsistent paratransit options. This has grown worse in recent years as many lower-income individuals, faced with the high cost of living, have been forced to move from city centers to inner and outer ring suburbs, with fewer jobs and resources and where reliable, affordable public transportation is even less likely to exist.

New mobility services have the potential to provide additional access to these communities, but have to be designed with those goals in mind. Often, projects across the country are sold on these outcomes, citing increased access to opportunity as a direct benefit, but simply piloting an automated vehicle shuttle or a microtransit service or setting up permitting processes for scooters or dockless bikeshare won’t produce these outcomes. Without careful deployment, these new services won’t help communities realize the potential benefits and could even exacerbate current inequalities.

For example, some cities have chosen to subsidize transportation network companies (TNCs) like Lyft and Uber to save money on fixed-route transit or used TNCs in place of transit altogether. While these experiments claim “improved access” as a benefit, few are designed with this as a primary goal or measurable outcome. In other cases, cities and transportation agencies design projects around the shiny new technology, next select a pilot area, and only then focus on the problem it could solve—the problem (and people being served) should come first.

For a city to truly solve its mobility challenges and actually create additional access for its residents, it needs to focus on its long-term outcomes, make thoughtful decisions about why and how it will deploy a new service, and understand how it will lead to those outcomes. This requires starting with a thorough understanding of the problems a community is facing, particularly its most disadvantaged residents, and then developing potential solutions from there.

We spoke to two communities that are currently running pilots designed to increase access to better understand how they developed their project scope, what their outcomes are, and where they think other cities and agencies could emulate their efforts.

Pinellas County, Florida—TD Late Shift

Pinellas County sits on Florida’s Gulf Coast, just west of Tampa, with a population of nearly one million. Given that beaches, tourism, and nightlife make up a major part of the county’s economy, a large share of local workers have hours that run late into the night or start early in the morning—when many transit services (including Pinellas County’s) don’t operate.

“We don’t have the density or funding to operate fixed-route service overnight, but we do have a lot of workers in the service industry,” said Bonnie Epstein, Senior Planner for Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA), the county’s transit provider. “We have beach bars and hotels and restaurants that stay open pretty late, so there’s a huge need for [additional] service.”

Understanding this challenge and with their problem clearly defined, PSTA launched the TD Late Shift pilot program in 2016. For $20 per month, many low-income county residents can purchase a monthly bus pass and also receive 25 free on-demand trips, through Uber, United Taxi, or Wheelchair Transport, to or from work anytime regular bus service isn’t running. The pilot is targeted at anyone who qualifies for the Transportation Disadvantaged (TD) program, a state-funded initiative. To qualify, residents must lack reliable transportation options and have a household income no greater than 150 percent of the federal poverty line.

Much of the thinking for TD Late Shift came out of PSTA’s Direct Connect Pilot, another ridesourcing project the agency launched earlier in 2016 that provides $5 discounts on rides to and from bus stops from the same providers as TD Late Shift. Direct Connect is open to anyone, but is only during regular transit service hours. After the Direct Connect pilot launched, the agency recognized that while it was increasing access during the day, late night and early morning commuters were still in need.

TD Late Shift was designed fill this need. According to Epstein, the goal is to improve job access by allowing people to work later shifts and know they can get to and from work, work additional shifts at different hours, and increase safety. Before the pilot, residents with late night or early morning hours didn’t have many options. “Some couldn’t get to work, some rode their bikes at 2am [often without adequate bike infrastructure], and some often had to wait late at night for someone to pick them up,” said Epstein. “With these on-demand, late night rides, residents have more time to spend with family, can sleep longer and are safer since they don’t have to wait outside late at night or walk or bike on potentially dangerous streets.”

So far, the program has proved popular as ridership has grown since its launch in 2016 and is slated to run through the end of June 2019.

Detroit, Michigan—Woodward 2 Work

The City of Detroit’s Department of Transportation (DDOT) launched a similar project in early May of this year that is also focused on increasing access for late shift workers. While Detroit does not have the beaches of the Gulf Coast, it has many residents working late shifts who lack reliable and safe door-to-door commuting options.

The Woodward 2 Work (W2W) pilot provides discounted Lyft rides to anyone going to or from an eligible bus stop on the Route 53-Woodward bus line. Route 53 runs 24 hours a day, beginning just south of Eight Mile Road at the northern edge of the city and connecting straight to the heart of downtown, an almost nine mile trip. DDOT chose Route 53 because of the large number of riders it could reach, especially those working later shifts.

To use the service, potential riders need to text “W2W” to the project hotline between 12am and 5am. In response, riders receive a code they enter into the Lyft app—or use over the phone through Lyft’s Concierge service—for a $7 discount on any ride.

This is the first partnership for DDOT with a TNC and the department wanted to make sure they got it right. Before the pilot started, DDOT conducted community outreach through surveys and personal interviews in order to clearly identify community challenges and build a project from those needs. “We didn’t want to pose a solution before defining the problem,” said Stacey Matlen, Senior Mobility Strategist at DDOT. “We knew there were a number of challenges for people walking to and from the bus stop at three in the morning, so we conducted interviews with late shift workers and created personal journey maps to understand everything these customers encounter.”

DDOT came up with a number of possible pilot ideas from the information they gathered during their outreach. Then, they took these concepts back to the community to see how well they might fit. “We saw that a lot of people were carpooling, so we thought about that [as a pilot], but received feedback from users through scenario testing that that’s not necessarily what either group of employees (riders and drivers) wanted,” said Kenny Fennell, also a Senior Mobility Strategist at DDOT. Through these conversations, DDOT developed W2W as a pilot that would make more sense with the community’s needs and desires.

Designing with access in mind

DDOT’s pilot is a great example of how cities can think about improving access from the ground up with the user’s perspective in mind and without a predetermined solution. Unfortunately, many cities develop pilot projects with a specific technology or service they want to deploy, such as automated vehicles or microtransit, and then go searching for problems it could solve. There is often no process of outreach and community engagement to determine how the service can best help improve access for their residents.

Instead of starting with a potential solution in mind, or a particular technology, PSTA and DDOT used a robust community engagement process to ensure the end user was involved from the beginning. They focused on their communities’ needs and put together a project that would best serve them.

With DDOT, the department made a clear decision from the start to bring these new services to the people who have the most to benefit from them. “To ensure equity, the design and decision making process should take into account how the most under-resourced user will be affected,” said Fennell. Matlen echoed this view, noting that “getting out of the building and interviewing stakeholders to know what their problems are and how our projects can help” is the most essential component of the process.

Both PSTA and DDOT did an excellent job of identify local mobility challenges, sourcing ideas from the community, and then designing an appropriate solution. For DDOT, the most important metric they’re tracking for the project is how many riders they’re getting to work and continuing to conduct interviews with riders in order to refine the pilot along the way.

With TD Late Shift, PSTA also designed the service specifically around the needs of its users that did not have access to fixed-route service or the Direct Connect pilot to get to work and made sure it was accessible for lower-income individuals, individuals without a bank account or credit, and wheelchair users. The agency has continued to learn from its efforts and has worked to continuously improve the pilot to better serve its users. As ridership continues to grow, PSTA is hoping to make it a permanent fixture of its service.

With both pilot projects, there are still plenty of questions over how best to gauge how well these pilots are meeting community needs, how they can improve service to include more riders, and how to more directly link them up to other long-term outcomes. But what’s most important is that they’re engaging with their communities to ask these questions and actively look for answers.

Vancouver mobility pricing study reveals why pricing is such a hard sell

One of the main themes in this year’s Smart Cities Collaborative is how communities can price roadway and curb space as part of their strategy to achieve their long-term outcomes, such as reducing congestion, lowering emissions or shifting trips to transit or other mobility options. A recent study out of Vancouver reveals some of the main challenges communities face as they consider these new pricing strategies.

While there are a number of different pricing strategies that cities can apply, one of the most frequently discussed is congestion pricing—which broadly refers to charging vehicles a fee based on where they’re traveling, distance, time of day and more.

Given the myriad negative impacts of congestion on the local economy, the environment and everyone’s quality of life, effective pricing strategies can help reverse these trends by reducing single occupancy vehicle trips, encouraging pooling of rides and shifting trips to transit or other modes such as walking or biking, resulting in lower emissions and leading to faster, more reliable travel times for everyone, including those driving. This has been the case in cities such as Stockholm, London and Singapore where congestion pricing has produced the intended results. But, for various reasons, pricing has struggled take hold here at home in the US.

This April, for the second time in a decade, a fully-fledged plan designed to reduce congestion in the busiest parts of Manhattan fell short of being implemented. The most recent plan addressed some of the major challenges the city is currently facing; a growing population, increasing congestion in its core business district and a transit system losing ridership—one that Governor Andrew Cuomo declared was in a state of emergency last summer. The plan proposed a charge on vehicles entering the downtown area to alleviate congestion and would then largely use that revenue to invest in transit maintenance and upgrades to provide greater options.

But even when the need for, and benefits of, congestion pricing are clearly articulated it still takes a big political lift to pass into law, let alone discuss as a serious policy proposal. Failure to enact often comes down to a lack of political will. This can be especially difficult, as it was in New York, where both of its proposals required state authorization, as the city does not have authority to implement pricing on its own. Like any new policy or technology, cities will need to take time to figure out how it will work best for them and determine how they will address any potentially negative impacts. But, based on the need for it in New York City or the benefits it’s provided to cities abroad, it’s a conversation worth having.

Understanding these potential benefits, Vancouver, BC has begun to study congestion pricing as well. The Metro Vancouver Mobility Pricing Study, released last month, highlights a number of challenges cities and regions face as they consider implementing a pricing scheme.

Vancouver today

Vancouver, situated a few miles north of the Canadian border over Western Washington, has a population of over 630,000 and is roughly akin to Boston in its density. The region has slightly fewer than 2.5 million people and is expected to add one million new residents and 500,000 new jobs by 2040.

The majority of this growth is happening outside of the City of Vancouver to the south and east in regional centers such as Surrey, Burnaby and Richmond. Since downtown Vancouver also sits on a peninsula, most trips in and out require crossing a bridge or using a tunnel. These turn into chokepoints, especially during morning and afternoon commuting hours.

Congestion is already having a significant impact in Vancouver today, costing between $500 million and $1.6 billion per year, according to the report. If new residents moving in bring the same proportion of cars as residents today it will be an increase of 600,000 cars and would likely increase congestion 40 percent by 2030, causing further negative impacts to the regional economy and residents’ quality of life. And, despite planned investments in transit, they’re worried it might not be enough to mitigate all the coming growth.

Metro Vancouver Mobility Pricing Study

With an eye to managing this growth and pushing it toward their desired goals of creating more dense, walkable neighborhoods that are connected by transit, the Mayors’ Council—composed of the 21 mayors in the Greater Vancouver Region who review and approve TransLink’s (the regional transportation authority) transportation plans, established the Mobility Pricing Independent Commission to study how congestion pricing could work in the region.

The report itself was not intended as an argument explicitly for or against congestion pricing, but to serve as a feasibility study to assess the potential impacts of a pricing strategy and identify areas for further research. As a result, the report gives a thorough and sober account of the challenges associated with implementing congestion pricing along with a host of questions that need to be asked in order to comprehensively address these concerns.

But, while the report identifies the necessary challenges with congestion pricing and provides a clear idea of how much residents would have to pay, it’s far less clear in describing the benefits and what residents will get in return. The report notes the potential reduction in congestion and the larger economic benefits of pricing, but doesn’t articulate the tangible benefits to individual households or how it will help the region achieve its long-term goals, whether it’s safety, equity, emission reductions or something else.

The process: setting a vision

The report begins by re-establishing the outcomes agreed to in the region’s long-range transportation plan, Metro 2040, which calls for continued development of diverse and dense neighborhoods that are walkable, connected by high-frequency transit and with successful demand management strategies.

With congestion pricing suggested as a possible solution, the Commission set out to solicit feedback from the community to understand possible concerns and questions about, and goals for, a pricing strategy. Over 17,350 residents and over 300 stakeholders and government officials participated in online public engagement and in-person workshops. Through polling they also learned residents are evenly split on congestion pricing—one-third are opposed, one-third are in favor and one-third are undecided. Much of their stated concerns largely revolved around the potential equity implications and how the revenue would be managed.

From these conversations, the Commission established a set of three core principles while developing a coordinated regional mobility pricing policy: reduce congestion, promote fairness and support transportation investment.

While these principles do not include explicit goals such as reducing single occupancy vehicle trips or shifting more trips to transit or other modes, this is still a good example of clearly identifying problems and developing outcomes—something that many communities have struggled with as they look to implement everything from automated vehicles to microtransit pilots to pricing schemes. By identifying their problems, setting outcomes and engaging the community, the Commission sets a strong example for how other communities should approach new policies and projects that they’re considering for themselves.

Recommendations

With its principles laid out, the report recommends two different charging mechanisms to reduce congestion throughout the region along with policy options for each.

The first is a point-based charge where drivers pay a fee when passing certain fixed points in the region, with the fee varying depending on the time of day and the direction of travel. These charge points would primarily be located on the bridges and tunnels leading in to downtown areas, which turn into congestion hot spots. These charges are reflective of what the report calls the user cost principle, where drivers pay based on how much they contribute to congestion.

The second is a distance-based charge, where drivers are charged based on how far they travel, with fees varying depending on the zones they travel between. These are aimed at what the report calls the user pay principle, where drivers pay based on how much they’re using the road network. In order to address congestion in the worst areas, prices increase the closer drivers get to the core city and during peak commuting hours. To promote fairness, the report suggests getting rid of the fuel tax if a distance-based charging system is implemented.

In addition to the two charging mechanisms, the report also lays out two price thresholds: the lowest charge necessary to realize any meaningful impact of congestion reduction and a slightly higher charge that would realize additional benefits and congestion reduction. Depending on the pricing mechanism and the threshold for congestion reduction, the report proposes a fee schedule that would result in a median cost per family of anywhere from $1,000 to $2,700 per year.

This is a significant fee, and the report authors don’t downplay it. Instead, they argue that this is the scale at which a charge needs to be implemented to have a real impact. In the report’s opening letter from the Commission Chair, it states, “it is easy to characterize a decongestion charge as a ‘money grab’ or ‘just another tax.’ The paradox is that the less you charge, the more it would be just that. The charge needs to be set at a level sufficient to unlock the considerable benefits of reduced congestion and more efficient mobility.”

Addressing equity

One of the biggest questions for any pricing program, both operationally and politically, is the impact on equity. The report clearly identifies that this will be an ongoing challenge. This is especially important as the report notes a charge of $2,700 per year would be up to 8 percent of some household incomes. This is a major concern with any congestion-pricing program, as lower income families tend to pay less in total, but a much larger share of their total income.

While this shouldn’t be a deterrent for congestion pricing in general, it does mean that there needs to be a comprehensive plan in place to address or correct the issue to avoid disproportionately impacting those who can least afford it. The report does not shy away from these concerns and suggests a number of measures that could correct the imbalance including tax credits, eliminating the fuel tax and reducing transit fares, but doesn’t recommend a specific solution and states the need for more research to understand what approach is best.

Selling the benefits

While the report makes it clear how much congestion pricing will cost the average household, it’s not as clear what the tangible benefits will be, both for the individual user and the region. The report identifies estimated travel time improvements from the charge, but congestion charging is about more than just a reduction in travel times, it should be a tool that can help a city or region achieve its long-term goals, everything from safety to health to access to resources and amenities.

Convincing a skeptical public about pricing, as with any policy or technology that’s new or different, isn’t about selling just a shorter commute time, it’s about articulating the personal benefits to them (and their community) in a way that connects with their core values and communicates the clear benefits for their quality of life. With a report in hand that does a poor job on this count, various officials from local mayors all the way to the British Columbia Premier have been reluctant to signal their support or say much more than that the idea needs more study.

Congestion pricing is a critical step we need to take in our cities in order to reduce the negative economic and social impacts of traffic congestion, emissions and much more. With this report, Vancouver has laid the foundation for what pricing might look like in their community. The report should do more to outline the tangible benefits of pricing or reducing car trips and investing in transit, but the commission has done a good job at starting the conversation, raising some of the necessary questions in an open and objective way and setting the region on a path forward.

They’ve started a dialogue that few cities have even considered that will hopefully provide lessons for others to learn and lean on in their own deliberations.

Setting effective data standards for new mobility providers

When transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft came into cities earlier this decade, they refused to share data with cities, which has presented a major challenge for cities trying to assess their impacts. As new modes such as bikeshare, microtransit, and automated vehicles enter our communities, will this happen again?

Transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft have been operating in many cities for the greater part of a decade. Though they’ve changed the face of transportation, cities are still trying to determine whether (or how) TNCs are adding to congestion, cannibalizing transit or active transportation, or affecting equity. This is principally due to the fact that these companies have largely refused to share data with the communities they’re operating within. Without this clear understanding, cities haven’t been able to respond accordingly and mitigate any negative impacts of these technologies—or foster beneficial ones.

Whether it’s protecting trade secrets, consumer privacy or fear of public data requests, or even that it’s cumbersome and cities don’t know how to use the data, TNCs have provided countless justifications for withholding this information. Unfortunately, this approach has set the tone for other startups and new mobility operators.

As cities consider how to permit, procure, and deploy new mobility options such as microtransit, bikeshare, or automated vehicles (AVs), strong data-sharing requirements will allow cities to better understand and adapt to their impacts and proactively plan for their future. It’s also a critical tool for collaborating and sharing their experience with other communities as cities collectively determine best practices for implementing these technologies.

Through tools such as General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS), cities have been able standardize and share data with each other and improve their internal operations. At the same time, organizations such as Shared Streets are working to develop a universal language so cities, private companies, and others can be assured they’re talking about the same things in the same way.

To enable more consistent data sharing between the public and private sector and across communities, during our next Smart Cities Collaborative meeting this July in Seattle, we’ll start developing a set of data sharing standards for new mobility options. This process will begin by determining the outcomes cities want from these new modes, and then identify what data cities will need to track, the data they’re currently collecting, and which data are being created by each new mode that they’re not currently collecting. From this we’ll determine a baseline set of data that cities should be requiring from each of these modes.

What are cities in the Collaborative already doing? We spoke with a few of our member cities to see how they’re approaching data collection for bikeshare, microtransit, and AV pilots and what they’ve learned so far.

Bikeshare

While cities have struggled to negotiate data sharing contracts with TNCs, they’ve found more success with new modes when they’ve been able to set the tone of these conversations with a clear vision of what they want.

Cities have done a good job of this with bikeshare providers. In Washington, DC, for example, the city began its Capital Bikeshare program with fairly robust data collection, but hadn’t figured out how to use it yet. Often this had to do with data reporting that was not refined to be most helpful to the city, or that the city did not have a consistent standard for talking about the specific data it was receiving. Over the course of the program, “we’ve gotten better at sharpening our pencil to define, for example, what counts as a trip,” says Kim Lucas, Bicycle and Pedestrian Program Specialist at the District Department of Transportation (DDOT). “We’ve used an iterative process to tweak our methodology over time and understand those nuances,” in order to improve data collection practices.

In 2017, when DDOT began to develop terms for a dockless bikeshare pilot program, it applied its lessons learned for these new operators, but also took the opportunity to look at additional data that could be gathered as well. “We’ve gotten a lot out of freely available data with Capital Bikeshare. With dockless, we knew there was a desire to have publicly available data from our community, so we took suggestions to understand the data they want and how they would want it,” says Lucas. Both in the city and the community at large, open data from bikesharing had become part of the culture, and DDOT leveraged their past experience and current community needs to set a clear standard for the data new providers would have to share.

DDOT isn’t alone in using its authority to set clear and consistent data standards for new dockless bikeshare operators. The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) published its bike share permit requirements last June, which set out a clear framework for their operations and established what data companies would need to provide. Since then, cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have created their own permitting processes that similarly govern data collection and sharing, often similar to Seattle’s model.

Microtransit

While cities are comfortable setting the terms for deployment with bikeshare and are learning and borrowing from one another, this comfort has not fully crossed over into other modes.

The City of West Sacramento, CA launched a microtransit pilot in May with Via. Through the pilot, the city receives data on pickup and drop-off location requests, the number of passengers per ride, travel time and distance, fares paid, whether a wheelchair accessible vehicle was used, and aggregated data on ridership trends.

In determining the data to collect, the city “developed an agreement for a discrete dataset that we knew we wanted, but also built in language committing Via to work in earnest to provide additional data (or a sufficient proxy) as other available data emerges over time—whether unforeseen or otherwise excluded—which could inform broader transportation planning and investments decisions,” says Sarah Strand, Assistant Transportation Planner for the City of West Sacramento. The city set out initial terms for data collection, recognized that it would need more, and built that into the contract in order to enable the program to evolve to further help it understand the impact of this new mode.

If the provider isn’t willing, setting these terms isn’t enough. Last year, Lone Tree, CO launched its Link On-Demand service in partnership with Uber to provide shared, on-demand rides throughout the city. While the pilot was one of the first of its kind, it only got off the ground because the city backed down on its data concerns.

“We had to make a choice—were we going to let data stop us from doing the pilot?” says Jeff Holwell, Economic Development Director for the City of Lone Tree, recalling initial conversations with Uber. While the city was able to launch a pilot, and is able to receive some data because pilot vehicles are city owned, it’s not getting the necessary information to fully understand how well the pilot is operating and how it might be improved, scaled, or iterated over time.

This is a problem not only for the city, but for the many other communities interested in similar pilots for on-demand, dynamically routed vehicles. These are brand new technologies that both the public and private sector is still figuring out how to operate. Without this data, cities won’t know how to replicate similar projects in their own communities or modify them to unlock the positive benefits of these technologies. Instead, companies know cities want these technologies in their communities and use the leverage to bully them into agreements that are entirely on their terms.

Automated vehicles

Like many TNCs and some microtransit providers, AV companies have also been extremely reluctant to share their data.

Some cities, such as San Jose, CA, are working on AV pilots with robust and flexible data sharing agreements. Last year, the city released a Request for Information (RFI) for an AV demonstration project. Since the release, the city has worked with potential providers to clarify its goals of increasing transit and reducing single-occupancy drivers, while addressing the larger question of how well AVs operate in the right-of-way. “The question we’re asking is, what impact will AVs have and how can we make it positive?” says Jill North, Innovation Program Manager with the City of San Jose.

To answer this, San Jose is prioritizing providers that are willing to help by sharing their data. “We want to collaborate and figure things out together,” says North of the city’s plans for data collection. “We want a provider we can learn with and help us understand the correlations we’re not thinking about.” With clear outcomes in mind, the city will keep its data sharing open and fluid to learn and adapt along the way.

Information from San Jose’s pilot will help other cities design their own AV projects. And while San Jose has been very intentional in using its authority to get the data it needs, unfortunately this represents a stark difference from other cities with AVs testing in their communities.

In Tempe, AZ and Pittsburgh, PA, where data sharing wasn’t required as an initial part of testing agreements, they have struggled to understand how and where these vehicles are operating in their communities, as evidenced by Uber’s refusal to share data in the immediate aftermath of the crash that killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, AZ in March 2018.

Refusing to require or share data, especially on disengagements and crashes, not only harms the communities developing best practices and considering street redesigns to accommodate these vehicles, but also prevents other operators from learning from potentially fatal crashes.

Preventing a race to the bottom

Private providers are gathering data and learning everywhere they’re testing, but cities are not. When cities don’t get data from these private providers, it not only hamstrings their own ability to adapt to these modes, but it hurts other cities when they’re unable to learn from each other. Even if they don’t know the entirety of the data they want from private providers, they can begin the conversation with clear outcomes in mind and set the stage for success.

Additionally, in order to increase their leverage, cities, transit agencies, and others need to stand together on the need for data in their regulations, permitting processes, and procurement to realize the potential and understand the impacts of these new modes.

Working together will also prevent a race to the bottom where companies run rampant through our communities and share zero data. Cities like Lone Tree should not have to be in a position where they are forced to choose between running a pilot and receiving helpful data. Private providers need to be partners in the cities they’re operating in, and they should not be able to freely roll into cities, testing their products in the public right-of-way without providing any data in return to local governments.

This requires the public and private sector to come together on data sharing and determine a way forward that benefits both parties. Local governments need to truly understand what’s happening in their communities and work to optimize and harmonize these new modes. Private sector companies will also benefit as providing data can help cities tie these new modes to transit, upgrade the appropriate infrastructure, develop new policies for curb management, encourage modal shift, and more.

Recently developed dockless bikeshare and scooter permit processes and regulations are showing that cities and the private sector can work together effectively and in a way that meets both their needs. In order to realize the full benefits of this technology, and to enhance safe, equitable, and affordable transportation access in communities across the country, cities and the private sector will need to replicate these lessons for additional modes.

Ding, Ding! Round one of dockless scooters

The deployment of dockless, electric scooters in cities across the country has been hectic to say the least. What’s been happening, what lessons are cities learning, and how can these systems be deployed in ways that serve the public and the cities’ goals?

Dockless, electric scooter-sharing systems are exploding in popularity since first arriving in U.S. cities nine months ago, and for good reason. Along with dockless bikeshare, scooters have highlighted the desire by many residents to cover short distances quickly and easily.

In April, the scooter-sharing company Bird released ridership data showing that over 30 days and 100,000 rides, its users averaged 1.5 miles per trip in San Francisco. With 35 percent of U.S. vehicle trips two miles or less in length, there’s not only market potential, but also a clear opportunity to shift many of those trips to a cleaner, more sustainable mode. Frankly, they’re also fun.

Just like Uber or other new providers, the scooters have also come with their fair share of controversy. Often dropped overnight in cities in huge numbers without any regulations in place and without approval, they’ve been scattered across sidewalks, blocking the right-of-way and even found discarded in rivers and fountains.

These issues and others are forcing cities to develop regulations on the fly to manage their impacts and also to integrate them into their transportation networks — another strain on cities and transportation departments across the country. In the past two months, both San Francisco and Austin have passed emergency ordinances to begin the process of setting up regulations and set caps on how many scooters can operate in their communities.

The rapid pace with which new transportation technologies are being introduced into our cities not only highlights the need to create flexible regulatory frameworks that can be applied broadly, but also the need for private sector companies to come to the table as true partners and work with cities.

When companies don’t take this approach, it’s often more expensive, takes longer and is less productive for everyone. To say nothing of the distrust this behavior creates or the negative precedent they set for long-term cooperation or partnerships between the public and private sectors.

Whether scooters or something else, as new technologies multiply and private sector companies continue to operate with a “move fast and break things” ethos, cities will need to proactively develop flexible, but consistent, processes that will help them integrate new technologies into their communities on their own terms.

Nine of the 24 cities participating in our Smart Cities Collaborative this year already have scooters operating in their communities. We spoke with three of them to get a better sense of how they are dealing with scooters and summarize their experiences into a few clear lessons for other cities.

Santa Monica, CA

The first system of dockless scooters in the U.S. launched in Santa Monica in September 2017. Like many scooter launches to follow, Bird had spoken with city officials beforehand and the city responded by asking for Bird’s help in determining what changes to their city code would be necessary to allow them to operate. Unfortunately, soon after this conversation, but before any regulatory changes could be made, Bird deployed their scooters on city streets.

After a few months of scooters clogging sidewalks, causing safety hazards and failing to acquire a business license, Santa Monica passed an emergency ordinance. Through the ordinance, the city created a temporary framework to allow scooters to operate. “We modified our existing vending permit since this was the most applicable permit as it is usually issued to businesses selling anything mobile,” said Francie Stefan, Mobility Division Manager with the City of Santa Monica. This gave Bird, and other companies, the ability to operate on private property, but also allowed the city to impound and collect a fee on scooters parked in the public right-of-way.

But, that doesn’t mean the city is actively impounding all scooters parked on sidewalks. “Council directed staff to enforce when there were immediate ADA or safety risks—but, this has also created some difficulty around enforcement, especially when the scooters are moving around more quickly than officers can get to them,” according to Stefan. The ordinance is temporary—it will expire on January 1, 2019—and the city is currently developing a pilot for these scooters to inform a final permitting process.

San Francisco, CA

Similarly to Santa Monica, in March, San Francisco was suddenly confronted with scooters from Bird, LimeBike and Spin on their streets and sidewalks. While many residents were excited, complaints also poured in about scooters blocking the right-of-way and creating unsafe conditions on streets and sidewalks. After the San Francisco Attorney General sent out a cease and desist letter, the Board of Supervisors quickly established a requirement that any scooter would need a permit to park on a sidewalk.

In response, the city set up a new pilot program for permitting. The one-year pilot regulates the number of scooters each operator can have and the type of data operators need to share, requires operators to provide membership options to low-income individuals, and gives operators clear instructions on how these vehicles can operate safely.

San Francisco got all of this done in a couple of weeks, but according to Warren Logan, Senior Transportation Planner at the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA), it wasn’t a choice. But, given their history of other mobility providers deploying on their streets without permission, they were prepared.

“Our hand was forced to move very quickly on this issue,” says Logan. “Everyone is trying to be the next Uber, but it’s a different landscape now that we know the playbook.”

Austin, TX

While the city was in the middle of developing a pilot program to regulate both dockless bikes and scooters, Bird—and later LimeBike—launched in early April without receiving approval. The challenge facing Austin was a loophole in the city’s code giving scooters the ability to legally operate and left the city with no authority to impound them. “We had outdated ordinances that were originally designed for vending in the right-of-way,” says Karla Taylor, Chief of Staff at the Austin Department of Transportation. “These ordinances were written 20 years ago and were not written with dockless in mind.”

To fix this, the Austin City Council pushed back its proposed pilot timeline and passed an emergency resolution banning the presence of dockless scooters in the right-of-way until a permitting process could begin and gave the city the authority to impound vehicles. After the resolution passed, Bird and LimeBike promptly pulled their scooters from Austin’s streets until they could go through the permitting process, which will now begin on May 15th.

What can other cities learn from these cities’ experiences?

Be proactive

Whether cities are ready for them or not, scooters are coming. Fast. Over the last few weeks alone, other systems launched in Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte despite receiving a cease and desist letter in Nashville and a forced shutdown in Charlotte.

While cities like Austin and San Francisco were caught off guard when scooters launched, they were able to act quickly in part because they were already thinking about how to address these issues—and related ones. “We know the playbook,” as SFCTA’s Logan said. Austin was actively working on an implementation plan and San Francisco had a proposed resolution to create a permitting process just a few weeks before the launch.

According to Karla Taylor in Austin, the best move for cities is to open up their code. “Cities should look at their governing ordinances. A lot of cities will not have the legal capabilities to manage this.” Taylor notes that if the city doesn’t figure out where the holes are, the private sector will. “These companies know where there’s a weakness, and they’ll exploit this weakness,” as they deploy into new communities. Without an understanding of what their options are to regulate, cities won’t be able to effectively manage them.

Even with preparation and planning, both cities were forced to be reactive when scooter systems launched. This should be a signal to other cities to begin this process now. There’s no longer an excuse for being caught off guard.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

These cities were on their own when it came to the first wave of dockless scooters. But, given that they’ve had to figure out how to approach this problem, other communities should start with a much better understanding of what will be necessary and learn from them. While no city claims to have the perfect formula yet, they’ve tried and tested various approaches and each of the cities we spoke with expressed a willingness to help others.

And, as these cities start to gather data on how their operations are affecting the mobility landscape, they’ll learn more and more about the impacts of scooters on access, safety and modal shift giving them more information and tools to hone their regulations.

Develop flexible frameworks that can govern any new mode—not just scooters

When one scooter company deploys, others tend to follow. “We’re being circled actively by every other provider I can think of,” said Francie Stefan in Santa Monica about the constant push to deploy more scooters since Bird’s launch last year. San Francisco reflects a similar sentiment. “If one of these companies launches, they all have to launch,” says Warren Logan at SFCTA.

When cities show they’re open for business, other companies come knocking at the door as well. And while some the challenges that have come with the introduction of scooters are unique to scooters, they’re also reflective of what cities face with the introduction of new mobility options and technologies.

Being clear about long-term outcomes (such as safety, equity, or mode shift) and how new technologies can contribute to those goals is a great way to get started. It’s also important for cities to understand what they want and need out of any new technology or company (such as placement, data or fare structures) as the regulations are developed. Collaborating with and learning from other cities’ experiences can help crystalize the issues at hand and accelerate the process.

As cities manage the introduction of dockless scooters – and other new mobility options in the future – they’ll need clear, flexible processes to ensure it’s on their own terms and helps achieve their outcomes.

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Smart Cities Collaborative hits the ground running in year two

Returning in a bigger fashion than the first year with 23 cities instead of 16, our Smart Cities Collaborative picked up where we left off with the launch of year two last week in Denver, CO.

It’s only been a few short months since we wrapped up the first year of the Collaborative, but we’ve still seen significant developments in how new and emerging technologies are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space. One instructive example is what’s currently happening in cities with dockless bike- and scooter-sharing systems—and how fast it’s happening.

When our first cohort of 16 cities gathered in Minneapolis on the day after the presidential election in 2016, there wasn’t a single dockless bikesharing system operating in any of these 16 cities. As pilot projects launched in Seattle, Washington, DC, and others in 2017, it became clear that dockless would have huge impacts in the year to come.

Nine months later and dockless is certainly a growing fixture in scores of cities. This might have been an obvious prediction, but even we didn’t quite see the scooters coming so fast. Less than 18 months after that first Collaborative meeting, dozens of cities are now scrambling to develop new approaches to dockless scooters (as well as the bikes) that are rapidly expanding on their streets and fighting for scarce curb and sidewalk space, but also providing popular new mobility options for getting around our congested cities.

In 2016, Uber (and Google’s Waymo) were just dipping their toes in the water on testing automated vehicles (AVs). Lured to Arizona by a friendly (i.e., mostly just non-existent) regulatory environment, they both started testing AVs in mid to late 2016 with relatively small fleets of cars, which have quickly grown to hundreds on the road in Arizona (and elsewhere). But now, cities (and states and Congress) are determining how they should proceed in the wake of the first fatal AV crash in Tempe, AZ.

This is the pace of change that cities are dealing with when it comes to urban mobility and technology: Completely new mobility models from concept to widespread rollout in less than 18 months.

Standing still or just waiting to see how things develop simply isn’t a viable strategy for cities that want to harness this change for the benefit of their cities and their residents. They have to be proactive.

That’s why over 60 participants from 43 agencies representing 23 cities came to Denver last week for the kickoff meeting of the Collaborative’s second cohort.

Though this new cohort brought scores of new faces to the Collaborative (thirteen cities from last year returned), the spirit of collaboration and cooperation carried over in full. From the moment participants arrived from the airport in to Denver’s Union Station, they quickly and easily engaged with one another about the challenges they’re facing in their cities, the projects they’re working on, and started getting to know each other.

Similar to our first kickoff meeting in Minneapolis last year, the goal of this meeting was to get participants to know one another, identify the challenges they’re trying to solve, and develop tangible action plans for the year — not just to set goals, but also to identify areas for collaboration with other cities.

We were incredibly lucky to have Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock stop by to welcome everyone to the city, and also ground us with a reminder that the core purpose of this work is to make our cities better places to live for everyone — not just for a privileged few.

“This is much broader than just ‘what does the road look like,’” Mayor Hancock said. “It’s also an opportunity for us to lean in and lead with our values and be inclusive. And making sure that those people who are most challenged in our communities have an opportunity to raise themselves up by lifting those burdens of the cost of housing and transportation off of their shoulders,” he concluded.

Unlike last year, where some cities were still figuring out their projects during our kickoff meeting, many of the participants arrived in Denver with a much clearer idea of what they plan to work on over the course of this year.

But instead of diving straight into the details of these projects, we took a step back to get participants on the same page for talking and thinking about these projects, and to make sure their projects had a clearly identified problem and outcome in mind. That’s why we’re perpetually asking, “What problem are you trying to solve?” because we all too often rush straight to the solution or a specific piece of technology.

Throughout the first day, the experts and panel discussions and conversations focused on the bigger picture of where technology is going, what trends are real (or not real), and why collaboration is vital for having any chance to stay ahead of the curve. Participants also identified the long-term vision for their city and, reflecting Mayor Hancock’s comments above, discussed strategies for improving equity through their projects, and hard-coding that goal into all of their processes.

Having set the tone in day one, teams from each of the cities spent the bulk of the second day developing their action plans for the coming year. But in keeping with the modus operandi of the Collaborative, they started hashing out their action plans in a cooperative format with 10-12 people from other cities who are working on a similar specific issue, such as a dynamic curb management pilot project.

This helps connect them directly with their peers who are working on similar issues and see where opportunities for greater collaboration exist. And it’s hard to overstate how valuable these structured (and unstructured) opportunities are for connecting with peers facing similar challenges in other cities.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If one particular city has made progress in rolling out a new strategy to better manage curb space, or a new pilot program for flexible delivery zones, for example, other cities can and should replicate their successes and learn how to avoid the pitfalls others encountered along the way.

They only had a few hours to develop them, but the cities’ action plan presentations were sharp, focused, and calibrated to tackle their real problems with real outcomes in mind over the next year. Presentations covered a wide range of topics: permitting processes for dockless bikeshare and scooters, loading zone pilots for ridesourcing and delivery vehicles, first-mile/last-mile microtransit pilots, new performance metrics to assess “transportation happiness,” and much more.

Like last year, this year’s cohort has an enthusiasm and excitement to collaborate with one another and collectively shape the future of transportation. It was a busy two days, but participants stuck around at the end of the meeting to weigh in on their projects with one another, ask questions, and exchange information for future conversations.

Representing metro areas that are collectively home to almost a full third of the US population (and a huge chunk of Canada via the inclusion of Toronto), the decisions these leaders are making will affect how we think and talk about transportation for years down the road. After this first two-day stretch with this new group of 60+ leaders, we’re confident that they are headed in the right direction when it comes to navigating the rapid changes coming to urban transportation.

We’re looking forward to being part of this conversation and to our next in-person meeting of the Collaborative this July in Seattle.

This post was written by Transportation for America’s Rob Benner and Steve Davis.