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

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

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

PRICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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You don’t have to participate in the Collaborative to hear more about what these 22 cities are learning, what they’re sharing with one another, and what we’re all reading each week when it comes to the rapidly evolving world of urban mobility. Click the button below and tick the box for Smart Cities news before clicking submit.

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22 communities selected to participate in the second cohort of T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative

Transportation for America is pleased to announce the 22 communities selected to participate in the second cohort of the organization’s Smart Cities Collaborative program that will continue exploring how emerging technologies and new mobility options can improve urban transportation. Over the coming year, the Collaborative will once again bring together cities to cooperatively tackle the challenges related to implementing smart mobility policies and projects.

“Whether electric scooters, new dockless bikesharing systems, curbside delivery, or ridesourcing services, the pace of innovation is accelerating and these technologies and new mobility options are already on our streets and having an impact in our communities.” said Russ Brooks, Transportation for America’s Director of Smart Cities. “The cities participating in the Collaborative understand that they can’t sit by and let the private sector determine their fate. These cities are eager to engage proactively to ensure that the benefits of these technologies accrue to all parts of society and don’t create a new generation of transportation haves and have-nots.”

This year’s cohort will focus on how emerging technologies and new mobility options are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space, and changing the way we move through our communities.

“Cities have to move people and goods as efficiently as possible to thrive. Streets and curb space are some of the most important assets cities control, yet they’re often undermanaged. There is increasing demand for the right-of-way, and access to the curb is becoming the most desired piece of real estate in a city. Our goal is to empower cities to more effectively manage these assets at their disposal to solve their transportation challenges and become more efficient, safe, and equitable cities,” said Brooks.

Over 50 cities applied to be a part of the Collaborative this year, with 12 of the 16 cities in the first cohort of the Collaborative returning to continue in this second year. The inaugural cohort tackled challenges related to automated vehicles, shared mobility and how to use data to manage complex transportation networks.

“Seattle is excited to be one of the 12 cities returning to the Collaborative for a second year. The Collaborative is a terrific venue for cities to work cooperatively, share our thinking, and develop solutions to our common challenges. During the first year, the Collaborative helped us learn lessons from other cities as we advance and iterate our own new mobility strategies. We have directly employed what we learned from the Collaborative as we anticipate transportation disruption and continue to build a safe, people-centered, equitable, and carbon-free transportation system in Seattle,” said Evan Corey Costagliola, New Mobility Program Manager at the Seattle Department of Transportation.

The Collaborative will hold its first meeting in Denver on April 16-17. Throughout the year the communities will participate in a variety of interactive workshops, both with each other and with industry-leading transportation experts. From there, the participants will receive direct technical assistance and share the results of their projects with the rest of the Collaborative to drive best practices across the country.

The 22 communities participating in the Collaborative in 2018 are:

Atlanta, GA
Austin, TX
Boulder, CO
Centennial, CO
Gainesville, FL
Houston, TX
Indianapolis, IN
Los Angeles, CA
Madison, WI
Miami-Dade, FL
Minneapolis, MN
New York, NY
Pittsburgh, PA
Portland, OR
San Diego, CA
San Francisco, CA
San Jose, CA
Santa Monica, CA
Seattle, WA
Toronto, ON
Washington, DC
West Sacramento, CA

 

Sign up for news from the Smart Cities Collaborative. You don’t have to participate in the Collaborative to hear more about what these 22 cities are learning, what they’re sharing with one another, and what we’re all reading each week when it comes to the rapidly evolving world of urban mobility. Click the button below and tick the box for Smart Cities news.

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What have participants said about the Smart Cities Collaborative?

In 2016, supported by Sidewalk Labs, T4 America created the inaugural Smart Cities Collaborative cohort to help 16 cities proactively harness emerging technologies to improve mobility & quality of life. Here’s what some of the participants from that inaugural class of 16 cities had to say during that first year.

Smart cities proactively manage their partnerships to drive long-term outcomes

The second year of our Smart Cities Collaborative will tackle how new technologies and new mobility are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space via four key topics. Our third post in a series on these four topics examines how cities can develop public-private partnerships and use curb management strategies to drive long-term outcomes.

As we continue building a forum for collaboration and providing direct technical assistance to a new cohort of cities, the second year of the Collaborative will explore how new technologies and new mobility are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space. The content and curriculum will be separated into four sub-topics; design, measure, manage and price. Our third topic, manage, will cover best practices for establishing public-private partnerships, managing private providers in concert with public transit and using technology to manage curb space dynamically.

Manage

We’re in the midst of the most transformational shift in urban transportation in more than 50 years as new technology and mobility solutions are combining to change the landscape of cities. But, unlike that shift 50 years ago, spurred in part by the public creation of the interstate highway system, this transformation is largely being driven by the private sector. If cities are not mindful and intentional in driving the outcomes they seek, the benefits and costs of these changes will be unevenly and unfairly distributed.

Many cities, however, have often taken a “wait and see” approach. They have been unwilling, or someties unable, to use the regulatory authorities at their disposal to drive the outcomes they seek. To avoid a race to the bottom, cities need to lead the process, make deals, and negotiate with private mobility providers on their terms to ensure the benefits of these changes enhance opportunities for everyone.

Cities have also struggled to work with the private sector as these new models have been deployed in their communities. Much of this is due to the historical structures of cities and the experience gap between cities and the private sector. City governments have typically dealt with procuring multi-decade infrastructure projects and lack processes for regulating or permitting new modes such as transportation network companies, dockless bikeshare and others that want to operate in their jurisdiction and will have a measureable impact on their roads or transit networks.

Additionally, for services they do want or need such as an on-demand, micro-transit service or a data analytics platform, their procurement processes haven’t been designed for six-month pilot projects or rapidly updated digital products. This has been evident over the past decade as cities have signed agreements that don’t ultimately provide them with the data or services that meet their needs.

But, cities are beginning to realize that in addition to increasing their technical capacity in new and different ways, a cultural shift is necessary in order to design and manage these new projects and mobility options, drive the discussion with the private sector and maximize the positive benefits these tools can provide.

This year, the Collaborative will continue to serve as a forum for sharing strategies to effectively manage partnerships with the private sector and address how cities can get what they want and need. We’ll identify the carrots and sticks cities have at their disposal and can leverage in these discussions. We’ll work to standardize templates and agreements that can be shared across cities and adapted for their individual needs while examining some of the innovative procurement models that agencies are using to test new products and services.

As some of the primary assets under a city’s control, we’ll also take a deeper dive into managing road and curb space. Given that different city departments often oversee parking, ridehailing, or urban delivery and rarely collaborate, we’ll review the organizational changes some cities are making to meet this need. We’ll also examine the foundational data inventories that cities are creating to better understand their exisiting curb space, its current uses and how they’re determining demand. Coupling this work with the new street and curb space designs we explored in this post, we’ll help participants develop new strategies to effectively manage their road and curb space through various approaches such as flex-use and loading zones, performance-based parking and other context-sensitive strategies.

A strong component of these strategies will be dynamic pricing, so stay tuned for our next post on our fourth and last Collaborative topic this coming year — Price — and how cities can use pricing as a mechanism to manage demand, shore up municipal revenue streams and achieve their long-term goals.

And stay tuned — we’ll be announcing the cities selected to participate in year two of the Collaborative in just a few weeks.

Over 50 cities applied to join the second year of our smart cities collaborative

Over 50 local governments from nearly 20 states applied to join the second year of our Smart Cities Collaborative, a forum for collaboration and direct technical assistance to cities advancing smart mobility policies and projects.

From November 2016 to the end of 2017, the Collaborative helped 16 cities take a broader look at how these cities and others are grappling with automated vehicles, shared mobility and data analytics. Participant cities tested concepts to understand market potential, assess regulatory and political hurdles, address environmental and equity issues and help refine their approach to implementing smart mobility concepts.

For year two, we received applications from over 50 local governments in nearly 20 states to participate in the Collaborative. Applications came from cities of all sizes and all parts of the country, including places like West Sacramento, CA; Des Moines, IA; Woodstock, VA and New York, NY. We were heartened to see that 14 of our 16 first-year cities reapplied and that many of them are hoping to bring in additional participants, both from their cities but also from other regional agencies and surrounding communities in order to better cooperate on these issues.

Applying cities were asked to reflect on the challenges they are facing as new mobility options such as ridesharing, ridehailing, microtransit, dockless bikesharing and more have come to their communities. Applicants also shared the various approaches they’re taking to design projects to test and understand the impacts of these new models and determine strategies to use them to achieve their long-term outcomes.

All of the applications underscored the continued desire to learn from their peers, develop policies, launch pilot projects, form partnerships across cities and agencies and determine how to maximize the transformational potential of new and emerging technologies. This coming year we’ll sharpen our focus and address how these changes are reshaping the right of way and curb space. Our content and curriculum will be divided between four sub-topics; design, measure, manage and price.

We’ll be announcing the participating communities in the coming weeks and will continue to share what we’re learning through the Collaborative, starting with our first meeting in April. We’re excited to work with these communities and help them collaborate with each other as they develop policies and projects that best use these technologies to achieve their long-term goals.

Helping cities use data to measure progress and outcomes

The second year of our Smart Cities Collaborative will tackle how new technologies and new mobility are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space via four key topics. Our second post in a series on these topics examines the concept of using data to measure progress and outcomes.

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

As we continue building a forum for collaboration and providing direct technical assistance to a new cohort of cities, the second year of the Collaborative will explore how new technologies and new mobility are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space. The content and curriculum will be separated into four sub-topics; design, measure, manage and price. (Read the first post on design here.) This second topic will examine the importance of utilizing data to measure project and system performance to ensure that new technologies and mobility options are implemented in ways that help cities make progress on their long-term outcomes.

Measure

A heat map of biking trips logged in Seattle using the Strava app. Via https://labs.strava.com/heatmap/

Automated vehicles, shared mobility options, and innovations in transit have tremendous power to transform both the way we move around our cities and how our cities are designed. Yet, as these technologies become increasingly available, the possibilities for both positive and negative impacts for our communities grow in parallel.

And, although the tools are new and perpetually changing, cities must remain steadfast in pursuing their community’s vision.

These advances in technology are providing a wealth of detailed, real-time data that cities can and should use to measure their daily operations and inform their decision-making. Many cities recognize the value of this data and the impact it can have, but have struggled to find the right way to gather and utilize it effectively. As a result, even though they have access to more raw data than ever before, they are struggling to quantify how particular projects or initiatives are helping—or hurting—as they develop and test new solutions to their major challenges.

By using a robust set of performance metrics, cities can evaluate the impacts of pilot projects and better calibrate them to drive the outcomes they’re seeking. This data-driven approach ensures that cities implement new technologies in ways that tackle regional priorities, are anchored to long-term community goals and mitigate potential negative impacts of new technologies.

This focus on data tied to outcomes helps cities stay rooted and grounded in a climate where technologies are changing every single day.

This year, the Collaborative will continue to refine existing metrics that best indicate success across numerous priorities, such as equity, access to employment, safety, user experience and system performance, while working to develop new metrics and indicators for things such as curb utilization or street redesigns.

We’ll also endeavor to develop shared standards, allowing cities to compare the success of projects across jurisdictions, discover the best applications of innovative technologies and better determine how to affect positive change in their own community.

With these metrics firmly in mind, the Collaborative will introduce participants to the fundamentals of data science and cover best practices in data collection and analysis. We’ll focus on how internal governance can change to reflect a data-driven approach and ensure that resulting analyses are fed back into planning and real-time dynamic operations. We’ll also explore efforts across the country to create third-party repositories of mobility data—like Seattle’s, for example—that include both public and private transportation providers, and how cities are aggregating, anonymizing and utilizing these data.

Stay tuned for our next post on our third Collaborative topic this coming year—manage—and how cities can develop public-private partnerships and use curb management strategies as tools to drive long-term outcomes.

Get more information about year two of our Smart Cities Collaborative

Earlier this week, we held a webinar to explain and answer questions about year two of our Smart Cities Collaborative. Catch up with a full video of the short informational session here and apply soon — the deadline to apply is next Friday, February 16.

Transportation for America launched the Smart Cities Collaborative to build a forum for collaboration and provide direct technical assistance to 16 leading-edge cities advancing smart mobility policies and projects. Applications are open now for year two.

Learn more and apply

 

The second year of the Collaborative will focus on how emerging technologies and new mobility are reshaping the right-of-way. Content and curriculum will be separated into four sub-topics; design, measure, manage and price. We’ll cover how the right-of-way and curb space are evolving; measuring and analyzing project, modal and system performance; managing public and private mobility providers in tandem; and pricing road and curb space in service of long-term outcomes.

Last week we held a short informational webinar to provide an overview of how cities can apply for year two, discuss our planned curriculum and recap our lessons learned in year one. We also answered questions on the types of cities that can apply (all sizes!), pilot projects that were implemented in year one and the types of projects we anticipate cities will be working on in year two. Watch the full session below

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

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

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

LEARN MORE

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

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

Design

Wikimedia photo by SounderBruce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more & Apply for Year Two

Reflecting on all we learned during the first year of our Smart Cities Collaborative

After wrapping up the first year of our inaugural Smart Cities Collaborative at the end of 2017, we look back on all the progress cities made and reflect upon how they’re all collectively shaping the future of transportation by working together.

The day after the presidential election in November 2016, a roomful of strangers who collectively guide transportation decisions in cities small and large gathered in Minneapolis to begin unpacking one fundamental question together: “How can we proactively shape our cities through transportation and technology?”

We started that meeting in Minneapolis with a simple goal: help participants build relationships with others from their peer cities, establish the core problem or problems that they’re trying to solve and then start developing an action plan for a specific pilot project. For two days, we heard lively discussions as the participants described their inspiring views on what kind of cities they want be in the future, exactly what they want to accomplish during this yearlong Collaborative, and how technology can help them achieve their goals.

With the answers to those big picture questions firmly in mind and a spirit of collaboration already bearing fruit, we gathered in Washington, DC in early 2017 and spent two days going deep with notable experts on key issues like using technology to improve equity, accessibility and access to economic opportunity; performance measurement; data-sharing between cities and transportation network companies (TNCs like Uber and Lyft); modular contracting and flexible procurement, to name a few.

Gabe Klein with CityFi and formerly director of Chicago and DC’s transportation departments, walked a group through his experience with procurement.

During the summer meeting in Miami, we turned the focus back on the cities and devoted a full day to each city sharing presentations on their particular pilot project, the specific outcomes they’re driving towards, and the challenges they’re facing as they design and implement their projects. These challenges included the ongoing struggle to develop productive partnerships with the private sector. In an effort to bridge this gap and serve both sides’ needs, we organized an “industry day” with representatives from leading mobility and data companies like Sidewalk Labs, Uber, Urban Insights, Ford, Via and more to discuss how they could work together to achieve shared outcomes and collaboratively shape the future of transportation.

For our final meeting in Los Angeles a year after gathering in Minneapolis, we kicked things off with a discussion of the core principles of a smart city. What makes as city “smart?” How does one define it? We started with the basic premise that “smart” cities are those that guide themselves by a set of core values that inform the foundation of their work and how they approach challenges and opportunities as they come along. We’re putting the final touches on a final set of these values to be shared publicly, so stay tuned here on the blog.

In many cases, cities are also going to need help from their states to make some of their experiments or pilot projects possible, so in preparation for legislative sessions ramping up in the beginning of 2018, we also discussed a specific set of policy proposals that could or should be developed at the state level to enable these cities to harness new and emerging technologies in service of their residents.

Reflecting on the first year

We capped off the last day in L.A. with a small panel discussion where members spent some time reflecting back on all they’d learned since that November day in Minneapolis. And the biggest takeaway across the board, from nearly every participant, was realizing the collective power they have to shape the future — if they work together.

“The biggest a-ha moment was discovering that cities want to collaborate,” said Karla Taylor with the City of Austin. “The USDOT Smart City Challenge felt like warfare and zero sum. But here, we’ve been able to share our knowledge and it has really opened up a whole new realm for our cities.”

“We are all facing the same challenges and we are all in the same boat,” said Adiam Emery, an engineer with the City of Seattle. “The fact that we’re all trying the same thing and leveraging the others expertise is really a good thing.”

When cities cooperate and collaborate with one another, they’re able to learn and fail and iterate faster than they could ever do on their own.

“This is going to change everything about how we live and work. And no one quite knows what that impact will be,” said San Jose’s Shireen Santosham during the D.C. meeting. “It’s a pretty big revolution and having this brain trust of cities get together with experts really adds a tremendous amount of value as we embark on this. And frankly, we’re all going to be stronger together and benefit from the thinking if we work together — rather than all trying the same things and not sharing.”

Hear more from our initial cohort in this short wrap-up video.

“They want so much more from our streets”

Over the last year, we’ve been struck by watching how these local leaders have begun to crystalize a vision of the kind of city they want to be, determine how best technology can get them there and begin to implement their vision. And we’ve seen projects unfold in some of the cities, like the projects in Centennial and Lone Tree, Colorado that we’ve profiled here, and LA’s microtransit pilot that’s coming soon, for example.

As technology changes rapidly and affects how so many people get around in our cities, it’s truly a decisive moment.

As Seleta Reynolds, the LADOT director, told all of us at the close of the LA meeting, “we have to get people excited and inspired about a new vision. They want so much more from our streets than just moving cars back and forth. This moment allows us to be creative and reach other people who don’t normally care about transportation.”

The inaugural Collaborative helped make a tangible difference in the future of these 16 cities, and we’re eager to help others do the same in 2018.

The inaugural Smart Cities Collaborative was funded by Sidewalk Labs. 

Applications are open for the second year of our Smart Cities Collaborative

Last year, Transportation for America launched the Smart Cities Collaborative to build a forum for collaboration and provide direct technical assistance to cities advancing smart mobility policies and projects. Today we’re announcing the launch of a second year of the Collaborative and calling interested cities to apply.

The Collaborative was launched in an effort to capture the momentum created by the US Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge and help cities test concepts, understand market potential, assess regulatory and political hurdles, address environmental and equity issues and refine their approach to implementing smart mobility concepts.

This past year was a tremendous success and the Collaborative evolved into a close-knit network of 32 agencies from 16 cities that enabled participants to learn from their peers, develop policies, help launch pilot projects and form partnerships across cities and agencies.

To build on the lessons we’ve learned and expand to include other leading-edge cities, we’re excited to launch the second year of the Smart Cities Collaborative and open the application process today.

Learn more & apply

 

Over the past year, the Collaborative focused on the core topics of automated vehicles, shared mobility and data analytics. During this work an overall theme emerged: how emerging technologies and new mobility are Reshaping the Right-of-Way. This will be the theme and focus of the Collaborative for the coming year.

Our content and curriculum will be separated into four sub-topics; design, measure, manage and price. We’ll cover how the right-of-way and curb space are evolving; measuring and analyzing project, modal and system performance; managing public and private mobility providers in tandem; and pricing road and curb space in service of long-term outcomes. Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish more in-depth posts on each of these topics and how we’ll approach them over the coming year.

If you and your city are interested in participating in the second year of the Smart City Collaborative, please read and fill out the online application.

Learn more & apply

Helping 16 cities navigate the tech-driven transportation revolution

In 2016, T4America launched the Smart Cities Collaborative, a learning and support network to help leaders from 16 cities proactively use technology to make their cities safer, more accessible, equitable and prosperous for all.

Seventy-seven cities applied to the US Department of Transportation’s Smart Cities Challenge, but 76 of them walked away empty-handed when Columbus, OH nabbed the winner-take-all $40 million prize. It became clear to us: cities across the country want help dealing with the explosion of new tech-driven transportation services like microtransit, ride-hailing and automated vehicles; and help harnessing all of them to create better places to live. Over the last year, our Smart Cities Collaborative has done just that.

Will you help us continue working with more cities in 2018? Donate to T4America

Listen to what five of the participants from our initial cohort of 16 cities had to say about their experience. Watch the short video.

“This is going to change everything about how we live and work. And no one quite knows what that impact will be. It’s a pretty big revolution and having this brain trust of cities get together with experts really adds a tremendous amount of value as we embark on this. And frankly, we’re all going to be stronger together and benefit from the thinking if we work together — rather than all trying the same things and not sharing.”

– Shireen Santosham, City of San Jose

These new technologies could make it easier to get around, make jobs more accessible, and ensure that low-income residents benefit from increasingly prosperous cities. But cities have to be intentional and proactive to make sure the technologies work for the people and not the other way around.

Our Smart Cities Collaborative made a tangible difference — help us do more in 2018 by donating today.

 

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Wrapping up an amazing year with the 16 cities in our Smart Cities Collaborative

A few weeks ago, leaders from 16 cities met in Los Angeles for the last of four meetings in our inaugural yearlong Smart Cities Collaborative.

Automated vehicles are testing without drivers as we speak on the streets in several cities. Five separate bikesharing companies that don’t require docks launched in Seattle and Washington, DC (and several other cities) this summer. New toll roads have started dynamically pricing their rates to ensure free flowing traffic. Transit ridership is down slightly in many major metro areas as they’re struggling to adapt their services to a world where anyone can hail a ride with their smartphone. But all of those cars are also adding up — clogging curb spaces and making traffic even worse, according to recent research from UC Davis.

We’re in the midst of the most dramatic shift in urban transportation since the advent of the interstate system. And for more than a year now, transportation leaders from 16 cities — ranging in size from small suburban communities all the way up to Los Angeles — have been gathering together to find ways to collaboratively tackle these challenges and harness all of these changing technologies to enable better, safer, more equitable cities.

At it’s core, that’s what the “Smart Cities” moniker is really about.

But that term is tricky. It’s a clever marketing term that means little, or worse, means something different to everyone. In this meeting (and our last meeting in Miami), we started discussing what makes a city “smart.” Inspired in part by how smart growth was codified and defined by the movement, but also more recently by cities like Seattle who released their groundbreaking New Mobility Playbook earlier this year.

Like Seattle, we started with the premise that “smart” cities are those that guide themselves by a set of core values. These values inform the foundation of their work and how they approach challenges and opportunities as they come along. People-Oriented. Entrepreneurial. Connected. Equitable. Those were some of the values we started with and through these long conversations we developed a much better sense of what each of these values meant to our participants, which values are the most important, and some of the actions cities can take to illustrate their commitment to them.

One of the other realities facing cities is that they don’t always control all of the policy levers required to take those actions and shape this technological transportation revolution.

With many state legislative sessions ramping up in the beginning of 2018, we talked about the specific policies that could or should be developed at the state level so these cities can harness new and emerging technologies in service of their residents. What authorities do cities need to test out new pricing or tolling projects on roads controlled by their states? How can procurement processes be changed to be more flexible and adaptive? How do motor vehicle codes need to be updated or adapted to test and deploy automated vehicles?

Much of that conversation centered on how cities can drive the discussion and lead at the state level on those policies that will have the largest impact on our cities. Keynote speaker Seleta Reynolds, the head of the LA Department of Transportation, reminded the participants that, no matter what policy levers are controlled by the state, cities still have an enormous amount of leverage — if they’re willing to work together and think outside of the box.

“We’re cities — we move markets,” Reynolds said. “If we’re all together and we’re pushing together, we can get the change we seek. But we can’t get it in the ways we’ve normally been accustomed to doing business. …It’s not enough for us to say it or to state our principles. We have to find ways to nudge the markets in the ways we have at our disposal.”

After the last day of the convening, we gathered up the whole crew and headed over the LA Arts District where the LACoMotion event was taking place later that week.

Transdev invited our participants to take a ride in their new autonomous EasyMile EZ10 shuttle. While the route was fairly simple — traveling back and forth in a straight line — it was a stirring reminder of how quickly these new technologies will be on our roads and how much there is to do to prepare.

Throughout the course of this year, it has been powerful to see the collaborative spirit that started on a cold morning in Minneapolis on the day after last November’s election continue to grow. These cities have realized that, unlike USDOT’s Smart City Challenge where they were all hiding their applications from one another in the quest for the winner-take-all prize of $50 million, working together with other cities is actually the most powerful recipe for success.

We’ll have more to share about that as we conclude the year with a few reflections before the end of 2017, so stay tuned.

House abdicates methodical policymaking for new regulations on automated vehicles

Congress has taken the first major legislative step to encourage & govern the roll-out of automated vehicles, passing the SELF DRIVE Act of 2017 by a voice vote today. Unfortunately, the House only consulted a narrow range of stakeholders like automakers and technology companies to produce this flawed legislation.

GoogleCar-selfdriving

House policymakers were eager to move quickly after facing heavy pressure from private sector groups like automakers, mobility providers (such as Uber or Lyft), and tech industry groups that are working on self-driving technology.

“This bill was produced quickly and voted upon in committee within hours of replacing the entire bill text with an amendment,” said T4America interim director Beth Osborne. “As a result, the unanimous subcommittee and committee votes are less about bipartisan agreement and more the product of a lack of interest in thoughtfully producing sound policy on a critical issue with the potential to reshape our towns, suburbs, and cities dramatically.”

“Without bringing mayors, city or state transportation officials, law enforcement, and others to the table, the House hastily legislated on an issue about which they’re poorly informed, with impacts that will be felt for decades primarily by people and groups who were never invited into the room,” Osborne said.

Cities aren’t opposed to producing legislation to govern how automated vehicles (AVs) operate on our streets — far from it.

But many are concerned by this rush to legislate without their input. They’re convinced of the long-term benefits that self-driving technologies could offer, but want a legislative framework that allows them to experiment, innovate and bring these new technologies to the market in their cities in flexible ways that help them meet other goals.

While no one wants to see a patchwork of regulations that stifle innovation, one of our primary concerns — and that of many of the cities — is that this legislation will preempt local authorities from managing their own streets and fail to give local leaders the confidence that manufacturers and operators will be aware of and follow local laws and regulations.

As written, depending on how certain terms are interpreted, any state and local laws could be at risk if they are found to be an “unreasonable restriction.” This vague language will almost certainly lead to costly legal battles to determine what that term even means when the rubber meets the road.

AVs absolutely need to be tested in real-world situations. But they also need to be tested in manner that ensures public safety and builds public confidence in the technology. Allowing huge levels of safety exemptions per manufacturer each year, increasing from the current level of 2,500, to 25,000 in the first year, up to 100,000 in just three years, is too much too fast. Especially considering that this technology is still very much in its infancy and these vehicles are likely to be clustered in urban centers and not evenly distributed.

What if three manufacturers all want to test the bulk of their vehicles in one or two cities? Shouldn’t federal safety watchdogs like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have some role to play in assessing their safety along the way and deciding whether or not exemptions should increase based on actual results from testing?

When it comes to safety, cities (and others) also need access to the data on how these vehicles are performing on their own streets. While the bill does require manufacturers testing AVs to report all crashes to NHTSA, it doesn’t require data-sharing on disengagements, near misses or other vehicle movement, safety, and performance indicators. There are also no requirements to share any data with cities, states, academics or relevant parties such as safety advocates for independent review and wouldn’t be subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) either.

This legislation ensures that no one other than the private companies doing the testing will be able to learn anything from the massive amounts of data produced by the tests. In order to create more hospitable conditions for all modes of travel, especially AVs, cities and states need these data to inform and optimize their planning, policymaking and operations to prepare for the coming wave of automation.

It’s important that Congress take this issue more seriously and bring all the stakeholders together to produce thoughtful legislation that balances the needs of private industry with the public’s desire for safety, transparency, and improved mobility.

The next step will be a Senate version of the bill and we’re eager to work with them and bring cities to the table to produce something stronger than the House’s first attempt.

A Colorado city in the Smart Cities Collaborative partners with Uber for a “quicker way to deploy transit to our residents”

Lone Tree, Colorado, one of the 16 members of our Smart Cities Collaborative, successfully launched a new pilot project last week. The small Denver suburb is evolving their existing fixed-route circulator served by four small buses by adding an on-demand component through a partnership with Uber.

Screenshot from the Lone Tree Link’s “How to Ride” video. http://www.lonetreelink.com/link-on-demand

For nearly three years, the city of Lone Tree southeast of Denver has been operating a fixed-route shuttle line every ten minutes on a loop that connects a Denver RTD light rail station with most of the city’s major employers. The Lone Tree Link has been funded through a unique public-private partnership that includes some of those employers. This helps cover the cost and provide the rides for free to customers, but running four buses on a predictable loop and maintaining ten-minute headways also limits the reach of the service.

In an evolution for the service, last week the city launched Lone Tree Link On Demand, which pairs Uber’s technology with the city’s vehicles and drivers to expand that service to more residents and increase accessibility. Now through the end of December anyone can use the Uber app to hail a Lone Tree Link shuttle for a free ride between any two points within the City of Lone Tree.

Screenshot from the Lone Tree Link’s “How to Ride” video. http://www.lonetreelink.com/link-on-demand

“We wanted to extend the reach of the successful circulator,” Seth Hoffman, the city manager of Lone Tree, told T4America last week. For the fixed-route service, “to get the headways we wanted to achieve, we had to keep the initial route narrow in scope. But that meant that it served employers but didn’t really serve retailers or residents. Putting it on demand makes it available to every address in the city.”

The genesis of Lone Tree’s partnership with Uber came about through the Smart Cities Collaborative.

“Our inclusion in the Smart Cities Collaborative got us in the door with Uber,” said Jeff Holwell, the economic development director of Lone Tree, referring to the ‘Industry Day’ portion of the Collaborative. “That connected us with Uber’s Denver office, which is what made this happen.”

“We were really floundering before that meeting,” Hoffman told us, but the connection with Uber at the Collaborative meeting helped them clear the final hurdle.

“Early on, we thought we’d find someone to help us develop our own app and start from scratch. But what we realized based on others’ experiences in the Collaborative, and through our contacts with T4A, was that smartphone real estate is really hard to compete with. If we could find someone that’s doing it and doing it well, that’s a quick path to our pilot.”

This partnership with Uber — which is as much a pilot for the private company as it is for the city — has simplified some of those tech issues. For example, as Holwell noted, adding one of the city’s extra shuttles to the service is “so easy with Uber’s technology — [the service] is as scalable as Uber is and they have incredible technology that we don’t have to create or update.”

The Denver Post covered the launch last week, and included a story that illustrates how the expanded service allows the city to connect residents and visitors to even more destinations in the city of about 10,000 people:

Divya Sheshathri and her friend Mugdha Maneesh used the service on Tuesday to get from Sheshathri’s home on Park Meadows Drive to her husband’s office on the Charles Schwab campus. They used it again to get from Schwab to Park Meadows mall for afternoon shopping. “It’s a very good service,” said Sheshathri, who does not own a car. “Without this it would be very hard to get around. We’re comfortable walking, but not in this hot sun.”

For the pilot, Holwell said that they removed one of the four buses from the fixed route and reassigned it to the on-demand service, allowing the city to better calibrate their service with the need. And the returns have been positive thus far.

“There was an immediate effect on day one,” Holwell said. “We’re already getting more ridership on that one vehicle than it was providing on the fixed route.”

While operating the fixed-route service is still their “bread and butter,” according to Holwell, with an additional RTD light rail station slated to open in 2019 just to the south that will replicate a portion of the fixed route service, shifting all of their resources to an on-demand service could be the roadmap for the future.

“We only operate during weekdays during office hours because it doesn’t make sense to run on weekends through empty office parks,” Holwell said. And even then, the fixed-route Link shuttles are obviously more heavily used at certain times like the start and end of the workday, leaving excess capacity during the day while they carry fewer passengers. With an entirely on-demand service, the city could better utilize their capacity and reduce empty miles traveled, which is one of their broader goals for the new on-demand service.

Lone Tree’s leaders are proactively using technology to become the kind of place they want to be long-term. And finding ways to better utilize their existing resources to serve residents, visitors and employers — whether transit vehicles or roadway space — is what this project is all about.

“Our big picture goal is to leverage the assets that we already have,” Hoffman said. “We can’t build additional lanes to fit more cars, so we’re going to try to use the lanes we have more efficiently. People are taking it to restaurants and taking it shopping, which helps out the local economy. As a medium dense suburban community, the density isn’t there in a way that would make a [larger] fixed route system work efficiently. This is a quicker way to deploy transit to our residents.”

T4America and LA CoMotion partner for a week-long discussion on urban mobility challenges and solutions

Transportation for America is delighted to partner with LA CoMotion, a unique five-day event bringing together the global leaders of the urban mobility revolution this November. 

The first edition of LA CoMotion takes place in Downtown Los Angeles’ vibrant Arts District from November 15th through 19th, 2017. The immersive event features cutting-edge discussions, demos, test drives and exhibitions – an exciting glimpse into our urban future. 

John Rossant, Founder and Chief Curator of LA CoMotion said:

“The urban mobility revolution is set to transform every city in the world. Robust urban transport is indispensable to making cities more inclusive, connected, healthy and vibrant. LA CoMotion is pleased to partner with Transportation for America, an alliance of community leaders working to build stronger economies through better transportation networks. We look forward to working with T4America to deploy mobility solutions for all communities, large and small.”

LA CoMotion will also dovetail with the next meeting of our Smart Cities Collaborative, which we’ll be hosting in Downtown Los Angeles, November 14th and 15th. 

This meeting will close out the first year of our Collaborative. As they have throughout the past year, participant cities will collaborate to develop policies and projects enabling them to test and pilot automated vehicles, shared mobility and other emerging technologies. Additionally, cities will explore innovative procurement and contracting models, how best to partner with private mobility and data providers, and will work together to create state level policy frameworks in preparation for the upcoming 2018 legislative sessions across the country.

We’re looking forward to our partnership with LA CoMotion and to an inspiring week of dynamic conversations around the future of smart mobility this November. 

Friends and members of Transportation for America can request a special discount code for LA CoMotion here.

Catch up with the recording of our online discussion of a Colorado city’s partnership with Lyft

Last week we held a webinar with the city of Centennial, CO, one of the 16 members of our Smart Cities Collaborative, about their six-month partnership with Lyft to connect more residents to their existing transit service. Catch up with the full recording of the session right here.

Centennial is a mid-sized suburb southeast of Denver that has connecting light rail service, but it’s difficult for many of the residents of Centennial to reach the stations from their homes. This pilot project provided free Lyft rides between between the Dry Creek light rail station and nearby homes within a 3.75 square-mile service area with the aim of incentivizing transit use and reducing congestion for trips into downtown Denver.

Did you miss the webinar? Catch up with the full recorded presentation below, and download the accompanying slide presentation here. (pdf)

The pilot project was of the first of its kind in the nation and ran from August through February of this year. The city recently finalized its final report with detailed project results, lessons learned, and next steps. Melanie Morgan, a Data Analyst for Centennial’s Innovation team and the pilot project manager, presented on the report and fielded participant questions on funding, payment, data reporting, scalability, paratransit, and more.

For more on the pilot project and to download the full report, visit http://go.centennialco.gov/.

Hear from a city that partnered with Lyft to increase access to their public transit network

Join us on July 13th to hear about how one Colorado city in our Smart Cities Collaborative has been experimenting with connecting more residents to their transit service by partnering with Lyft.

Updated 7/19: If you missed the webinar, you can watch the full recording here.

One of the major challenges faced by the members of our Smart Cities Collaborative is figuring out how to improve first- and last-mile connections to existing transit hubs in order to leverage existing transit service and connect more people to quality service that might not live within walking distance of it. Over the course of the Collaborative, cities have considered a number of pilot projects to solve this issue, from microtransit options, to on-demand transit shuttles, to partnerships with ridehailing companies like Uber, Lyft and others.

One of the cities in the Collaborative, Centennial, CO, recently completed their own first/last-mile pilot project. (The launch was covered here last August by Laura Bliss in CityLab.) Centennial is a mid-sized suburb southeast of Denver that has light rail access to downtown Denver, but it’s difficult for many of the residents of Centennial to reach the stations from their homes.

To help residents take advantage of this service, the city entered into a six-month partnership with Lyft to provide free rides between the Dry Creek light rail station and nearby homes within a 3.75 square-mile service area. The aim of the project was to incentivize transit use, enhance regional transportation, and reduce congestion for trips to and from downtown Denver by shifting some of those trips to transit.

One of the core principals of our Smart Cities Collaborative is encouraging cities to thoughtfully test new technologies and share those results with other cities to inform their pilots and help them learn from another city’s progress — or mistakes? So how did this pilot turn out? What was the response from their residents? Was the partnership with Lyft successful? Transportation for America and guests from the City of Centennial, CO will host a webinar on July 13th at 3 p.m. Eastern to discuss the results of the GoCentennial pilot.

REGISTER HERE

 

The team from Centennial will present on its final report, which includes metrics, lessons learned, and next steps. Full text of the report can be found here. (pdf) We’ll also provide participants with the opportunity to pose questions to Centennial on the results of their pilot, their evaluation tactics, and their plans for future projects. If you would like to submit a question ahead of time to ensure your question is answered, please share it with us via email (smartcities@t4america.org) at least 48 hours before the webinar.

Our Smart Cities Collaborative rolls on as cities get down to the nuts and bolts

During the third meeting of our Smart Cities Collaborative in Miami-Dade County, FL, earlier in June, our 16 member cities continued working to develop projects that harness innovation and technology to solve their transportation challenges.

We’re just past the halfway mark of the yearlong Smart Cities Collaborative we launched last fall in partnership with Sidewalk Labs. And, thanks to support from the Knight Foundation, The Miami Foundation, and Miami-Dade County, teams from all 16 cities gathered in person for the third time to discuss their pilot projects, meet with new mobility vendors, and continue collaborating with each other as they seek to leverage new technologies to improve mobility and quality of life in their communities.

In Miami, we turned the focus back on the cities and devoted a full day to each city sharing a ten-minute presentation on their particular pilot project and action plan.

With seven months of work under their belts at this point, cities have a wealth of information to share and were eager to interact and learn from each other. Whether designing an automated vehicle pilot, experimenting with mobility hubs or improving first- and last-mile connectivity to transit, every city shared their progress and their upcoming plans. Other cities then asked questions, shared similar experiences and provided constructive criticism to sharpen those pilot projects.

In a world chock-full of conferences focused on passively listening to others discuss emerging trends, the Collaborative creates a venue for cities to actively cooperate and learn from one other in a focused way. And this full day of presentations was a golden opportunity for cities to do so.

Their presentations showed us not just the outcomes they’re driving towards, but also some of the challenges they’re facing as they design and implement their projects.

One of those challenges is an ongoing struggle to develop productive partnerships with the private sector. When it comes to private companies, up to this point in the Collaborative, we’ve tried to create an environment that’s largely been free of vendors and products so cities can talk openly and determine their goals first.

But over the past few months, cities have expressed their desire to better understand the benefits and consequences of specific technologies and transportation models, how vendors operate and what their real operational capacity is and how they can craft agreements that serve their outcomes. We’ve also heard from the private sector that cities often don’t know what they want; and that they [vendors] struggle to understand government structures and processes and are frustrated by often slow and difficult procurement processes.

In an effort to bridge this gap and serve both sides’ needs, we organized an “industry day” with representatives from leading mobility and data companies like Sidewalk Labs, Uber, Cubic, Urban Insights, Ford, Via and more. More than a dozen companies joined us to discuss how they could work together to achieve shared outcomes and collaboratively shape the future of transportation.

Instead of listening to another pitch deck or panel discussion, we were determined to cultivate intimate and productive conversations. To foster strong relationships between participants and vendors, we organized rotating, small groups comprised of a single company meeting with just 3-4 participants, providing a setting for them to speak openly and honestly about their respective struggles and identify where common solutions can be developed.

One city participant shared that they had a “fascinating discussion with a [private] firm about the challenges of innovating within a bureaucracy.” And another participant valued the ability to have a discussion with the vendor at the same time as other cities, describing it as a “great opportunity to engage with a bunch of companies at once and learn about each other’s desires and challenges.“

The vendors also relished the opportunity to “meet in the middle” with these cities. Sidewalk Labs, our partners in the Collaborative, participated in the industry day as well. “We benefit from understanding the real-world challenges and use cases that cities wrestle with on a daily basis, and public agencies can benefit from the technology and development capacity of their private-sector partners,” Rohit Aggarwala, the co-head of labs for Sidewalk Labs, told us after the meeting. “The best outcomes are going to occur when cities and technologists meet in the middle to address tough problems.”

Last summer as we launched, calling this yearlong project a “Collaborative” was an aspirational term. Almost seven months after a roomful of strangers gathered in a Minneapolis hotel and worked to break the ice in our first meeting, those same city leaders walked into a meeting room at Florida International University, greeting each other by first names with warm handshakes, catching up on the progress being made across the country and making extracurricular plans to talk further.

While it’s worthwhile to see these former strangers getting along, what really matters is how they’ve begun to treat their peers from other cities as extensions of their own teams, almost like extra staff for their own city — certainly an added benefit in a time of strained local resources. They’ve leveraged others’ knowledge, weighed in on each others’ projects, and learned from the progress (and mistakes!) made by other cities.

With everything moving and changing so fast, the decisions these cities are making will go a long way toward shaping the smart city movement overall, making their individual efforts more valuable as part of a whole to make all of our cities more affordable, connected, enjoyable, and livable places for everyone.

A highly cooperative spirit is taking root within the 16 cities in the Smart Cities Collaborative

Just a few blocks from the Capitol dome in Washington, DC, the 16 members of our Smart City Collaborative gathered together again two weeks ago to learn, share wisdom and find ways to collaborate on thoughtfully solving their transportation challenges with new and emerging technologies.

During the last in-person meeting in Minneapolis on the day after the election, we spent a good chunk of the time trying to help the cities back out a bit from the minutia of day-to-day, specific problems like, “which payment vendor should I use for X?” and “What technology do you use for Y?” and think more about the big picture problems they’re trying to solve. Existential questions like, “what kind of city do we want to be in ten years? How can technology help us get there?”

With the answers to those big picture questions firmly in mind and a spirit of collaboration already bearing fruit, we focused on three things during our second two-day meeting: Going in-depth on key issues with notable experts, discussing the action plans for the cities’ specific pilot projects, and a working session on specifically how to measure and quantify success.

One of the highlights of the first day was a terrific discussion about equity and accessibility in our changing digital world. The superb panel, led by Shin-pei Tsay from the Gehl Institute, discussed how technology is rapidly changing equity, accessibility and access to economic opportunity in cities — with an eye toward how Collaborative members can ensure that their projects help solve these challenges, rather than contributing further to the problem.

The first day’s panel discussion on how technology is transforming access to opportunities, with a focus on equity.  From left, Shin-pei Tsay, Executive Director of the Gehl Institute, Anita Cozart, Senior Director at PolicyLink, Tatiana Peralta-Quirós, Transport Economist at the World Bank and Rani Narula-Woods, California Program Manager for the Shared-Use Mobility Center.

Members got to hear directly from those involved with other interesting pilot projects elsewhere, like Pittsburgh’s self-driving Uber pilot, driverless shuttles in Contra Costa County, and on-demand transit projects in Oakland, CA and Salem, OR.

We brought in over a dozen outside experts with deep knowledge on issues like performance measurement, data-sharing between cities and transportation network companies (TNCs like Uber and Lyft), modular contracting and flexible procurement, to name a few. City reps participated in intimate, small group discussions where they could ask questions and try to fill gaps in their knowledge.

Gabe Klein with CityFi, formerly the director of Chicago and DC’s transportation departments, walked a group through his experiences in procurement.

Within the three working groups that we created based on what the applying cities were most interested in —automated vehicles, shared mobility and data analytics — a key goal of the year-long collaborative is for each city to launch a pilot project. But how should cities measure and quantify the success or failure of these projects that they’re hoping to get off the ground? For example, for a city that’s trying to run a small, automated vehicle pilot project, what should they be measuring? And what data points can actually be measured?

Doing real-time voting on some proposed metrics for measuring the performance of the cities’ pilot projects.

These are tough nuts to crack, but we all made progress at finding answers — all while trying to keep our eyes on how these pilot projects can help cities get ever closer to their answer to the “what kind of city do we want to be in ten years?” question.

One of the most illuminating comments we heard from a participant was that the Collaborative is creating the opportunity to get out of the day-to-day — where they may have scores of other unrelated responsibilities — to come together with like-minded peers to think long and hard about this one topic or their pilot project in a focused way.

With so much uncertainty right now with regards to federal transportation policy under a new administration and a new Secretary of Transportation, cities will be best served by working together to solve these challenges and avoid producing a new generation of transportation haves and have-nots.

It’s been an incredibly productive few months so far, and we’re eager to see what continues to come out of these cities as they work to ensure that this monumental, epochal shift in transportation is harnessed to shape their cities into places that are more sustainable, equitable and accessible.

The Smart Cities Collaborative is supported by Sidewalk Labs.

Our Smart Cities collaborative kicked off with an inspiring two-day gathering

On the morning after the presidential election, thanks in part to the support of the McKnight Foundation, representatives from 17 cities gathered in Minneapolis for two days to kickstart our yearlong collaborative focused on proactively shaping cities through transportation and technology.

Smart cities collaborative meeting wide group shot

Members of the collaborative give a thumbs-up following the close of the two-day meeting in Minneapolis.

In the wake of an election that focused a lot on what divides us, it was inspiring to be with such an amazing collection of leaders from 17 cities, large and small, and watch them begin to develop connections and sow the seeds of collaboration during the inaugural meeting of T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative, which has been supported by Sidewalk Labs.

We had three main goals for the meeting: help participants build relationships with others from their peer cities and get to know one another, establish the core problem or problems that they’re trying to solve, and then start developing an action plan for a specific pilot project.

For two days, we heard lively discussions as the participants described their inspiring views on what kind of cities they want be in the future, exactly what they want to accomplish during the Collaborative, and how technology can help them achieve their goals.

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Most encouragingly, a palatable “me-too” vibe saturated both days as people started talking and realizing that other cities — whether much smaller, larger or far away — are dealing with many of the same issues.

“It really helps to talk to peers with similar issues who understand the concept of shared mobility,” one of the participants told us afterward.

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And instead of getting down into the weeds with questions like, “Which payment vendor should I use, or how do I build this smartphone app?” we tried to back up to a bigger picture view, starting with questions such as, “What transportation challenges are your city struggling with? What outcomes would you like to see in 10 years? How can we ensure that new transportation models and digital tools are inclusive of everyone?”

That’s not about technology, that’s about vision.

After all, a smart city isn’t the one with the most technology. A truly smart city is one that understands how they can utilize technology to help them get where they want to go.

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But the collaborative isn’t only about goal-setting or big-picture concepts — it’s also about real-world projects. Over the course of two days, each city was responsible for the initial development of an action plan for a specific pilot project. The participants worked together in small groups organized around topics like shared mobility, automated vehicles and others to identify what political and policy considerations, financial hurdles, project metrics, and community engagement strategies they’ll need to consider along with what technical assistance needs they have.

“I feel like we walked away with an actionable 12-month plan,” another participant told us.

These cities are eager to ensure that this monumental shift in transportation doesn’t shape their cities without their input and produce a new generation of transportation haves and have-nots. And with so many new questions looming over federal transportation policy, working together to solve these challenges will be crucial.

We had a tremendous two days with these cities and are eager to see what comes next.

Want to know more about smart cities and why all of this matters? Read this post for more background:

16 cities join T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative to tackle urban mobility challenges together

In a new collaborative supported by Sidewalk Labs, cities will work together to create policies, pilot emerging technology & share insights to improve transportation in cities small and large.

Washington, DC; New York, NY – Transportation for America (T4A) and Sidewalk Labs announced today the sixteen members of a new T4A Smart Cities Collaborative to explore how technology can improve urban mobility, creating a tangible new opportunity for the scores of ambitious cities that did not win or weren’t eligible for USDOT’s Smart City Challenge. Over the coming year, the collaborative will bring together these cities to tackle the challenges related to implementing smart city policies and projects — sharing best practices and technical assistance, and piloting new programs.

Nearly 60 cities applied to be a part of the collaborative, which will hold its first meeting in Minneapolis on Nov. 9-10, 2016.

“We’re in the midst of the most transformational shift in urban transportation since the start of the interstate era more than 50 years ago. And just like that era, cities have enormous potential to help or harm their residents with the decisions they make,” said James Corless, Director of T4America. “It’s incredibly encouraging to see this long list of cities proactively shaping the future to ensure that this monumental shift in transportation doesn’t shape their cities without their input and produce a new generation of transportation haves and have-nots.”

“We have spent the past several months speaking directly with cities across the country, and what we’ve heard is mobility is a major issue across the board. Cities know that technology offers ways to improve mobility, but exactly how to realize its potential isn’t obvious,” said Sidewalk Labs Chief Policy Officer Rohit T. Aggarwala. “Cities understand that they need to work together, but the question has always been how best to band these municipalities in partnership. This collaborative will be an unprecedented step in unifying these urban areas and accelerate solutions that provide affordable, efficient ways to get around.”

Through the collaborative, the member cities will form working groups that will focus on three core areas:

  • Automated vehicles, and their potential impact on urban transit systems, congestion, transportation equity, and the environment.
  • Shared mobility, and how it could help cities provide equitable, affordable, and more sustainable transportation choices.
  • Performance measures and data analytics, and how to use data to manage complex transportation networks and achieve transit equity and environmental goals.

Initially, the cities will participate in a variety of information-sharing meetings, both with each other and with industry-leading transportation experts. From there, the groups will receive direct technical assistance, create pilot programs, and share results with the rest of the collaborative to drive best practices across the country.

The collaborative is the result of the partnership T4A and Sidewalk Labs announced in June to engage cities in developing efficient and affordable transportation options for all. The partnership builds on T4A’s experience collaborating with state and local governments to develop forward-looking transportation and land-use policy, combined with Sidewalk Labs’ expertise working with cities to develop digital technology that solves big urban problems.

The sixteen cities participating in the collaborative are:

  • Austin, TX
  • Denver, CO
  • Centennial, CO
  • Chattanooga, TN
  • Lone Tree, CO
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Miami-Dade County, FL
  • Madison, WI
  • Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
  • Nashville, TN
  • Portland, OR
  • Sacramento, CA
  • San Francisco, CA
  • San Jose, CA
  • Seattle, WA
  • Washington, DC

ABOUT TRANSPORTATION FOR AMERICA:
Transportation for America is an alliance of elected, business and civic leaders from communities across the country, united to ensure that states and the federal government step up to invest in smart, homegrown, locally-driven transportation solutions — because these are the investments that hold the key to our future economic prosperity. T4America is a program of Smart Growth America.

ABOUT SIDEWALK LABS:
Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company that works with cities to develop technology that solves big urban problems across transportation, housing, energy, and data-driven management. It’s the result of a partnership between Alphabet and Daniel Doctoroff, the former Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and Rebuilding for the City of New York and the CEO of Bloomberg LP.

For interview requests, please contact: