Something New Under the Sun: The Mobility Revolution in Southern California
(Author’s note: This essay is adapted from Renewing the Dream: The Mobility Revolution and the Future of Los Angeles, edited by James Sanders and featuring contributions by Frances Anderton, Donald Shoup, and Mark Valliantos. Order a copy from Rizzoli here.)
- Save Our Sidewalks
The story of Los Angeles, like that of most cities, is a tale of changing mobility. — JOHN ROSSANT AND STEPHEN BAKER, 2019
One night in September 2017, electric scooters mysteriously began turning up on the sidewalks, bike paths, and boardwalks of Santa Monica, California, a compact oceanfront city on the west side of greater Los Angeles. The unmarked vehicles belonged to Bird, a local start-up renting them by the minute via a smartphone app. Though the scooters were placed in public outdoor spaces, Bird chose not to seek approval from — nor even inform — any city or county officials before scattering their devices around town, a decision inspired, presumably, by Uber’s policy of “permissionless innovation”: transgress first, seek forgiveness after. (“After,” in this case, meaning months or even years later, once a stream of revenue had begun to flow in, a substantial customer base had been established, and high-powered lobbyists could be brought in to influence government officials and agencies.) Sure enough, the little two-wheeled devices — which could be picked up and left almost anywhere and were easy and intuitive to use — immediately began to catch on with residents and visitors alike, and within months thousands of them could be found strewn all over the sidewalks. Despite a popular backlash and the threat of bans, a sizable piece of public space had been colonized, overnight, by a new and privately operated form of transportation.
Unlike previous start-ups, Bird tossed a bone to cities in the form of “Save Our Sidewalks” (SOS), a pledge to contribute $1 per scooter per day toward building dedicated bicycle and scooter lanes. Like a toy version of the fabled 1940s General Motors streetcar conspiracy — in which, it has long been claimed, the giant automaker deliberately acquired and dismantled Los Angeles’s aging but still-popular electric streetcar lines to encourage a switch to gas-powered buses and cars — Bird openly dared public officials to transfer street lanes and curbside parking away from its chief competitor: automobiles.
The company quietly sank the SOS program in early 2019, claiming cities misspent the funds. By then, however, Bird had logged more than 100 million rides in 120 cities and become the first start-up to be valued at $2 billion in less than a year of existence. Just as Uber and Lyft had demonstrated how a combination of new technology and deep-pocketed investors could upend the taxi business and strong-arm regulators, Bird’s tactics hinted at how the next wave of mobility companies would seek to remake the urban fabric itself.
Whether or not Bird or any of its competitors endures in its current form, the emergence of dockless scooters, electric-assist bicycles, and other modes of “micromobility” represent the first significant new category of vehicles to appear on the streets of Los Angeles in more than a century. Unlike passenger-carrying drones or fully autonomous vehicles — technologies already a decade or more in the making, yet still mostly speculative — the rise of micromobility vehicles has been astonishingly brief and very real. Analysts for scooters and their like giddily point to adoption rates higher and faster than ride-hailing automobiles, while noting that two-fifths of all car trips cover less than four miles (a distance easily covered on two wheels rather than four). Or in other words, a world ripe for the picking.
Even if their promise to transform cities is never fully realized, electric scooters hint at a radically different model for urban mobility. Instead of piloting your own large vehicle from driveway to freeway to a parking space at an office or shopping mall you may never set foot in again, imagine riding an electric-assist bicycle to an all-day café-cum-courtyard work space a few minutes away — all booked seamlessly through an app and paid for with a tap. The scooter might even come to you; Spin, Segway-Ninebot, and others are developing semiautonomous versions capable of delivering themselves, making it possible to summon one to your door.
And that represents just one of the dozens of possible transportation scenarios being energetically pursued in Los Angeles at this moment. Their sheer variety — in their scale, in the technologies they employ, in the nature of their sponsors, even in their very domains of motion (not just the surface of the city, but above and below it) — is remarkable. But for all their differences (and as Bird’s rollout demonstrates), they present a common, profound challenge to the status quo of urban movement: entangling the public and private spheres in ways not seen in a century or more.
It used to be so simple. For much of the past century, the dividing line in America between private and public transportation was clear, stable, and all but immutable. It was in many ways a rivalry, to be sure — one in which, decade after decade, the private automobile seemed increasingly victorious. Most Americans owned a car — many suburban households owned two or three — which they used to travel almost everywhere. To enable the movement of those private vehicles, city and state governments built, maintained, and regulated the public thoroughfares on which those cars traveled, along with plenty of curbside and other parking spaces to store them when not in motion. States and municipalities also — and often reluctantly — provided public transportation: buses that used the same streets and roads as cars and, in larger urban centers, rail and metro lines to move people within and between cities. Until fairly recently, more accommodation was made each year for cars and less for public transit. New highways and freeways were constructed, and existing roads widened, to speed the flow of traffic, and more parking spaces were provided, on-street and off. Public transportation agencies, meanwhile, were ever more starved for funds and often forced to reduce service. Over time, fewer people tended to use transit, and those that did were increasingly marginalized. It was an obvious — and perhaps unfair — contest, but one whose boundaries were well-defined, well established, and essentially fixed.
No longer. In the past decade, the explosion of new kinds of mobility has begun to change everything about this long-standing arrangement — blurring and intertwining those once-firm lines of demarcation between public and private. The most obvious symbol of the change, of course, has been the unbundling of the large, lumbering, all-purpose automobile into a profusion of new modes of travel — often smaller, more agile, and tailored to different purposes or distances. Even more revolutionary, if less visible, are the startling innovations in digital technology — above all the emergence of smartphone-enabled apps — that allow for all kinds of vehicles, from the newfangled electric devices of Bird and Lime to the fleets of conventional sedans and SUVs operated by Uber and Lyft, to be seamlessly rented on demand, rather than owned or leased. It has been the widespread acceptance of the sharing of vehicles, even more than new kinds of vehicles themselves, that in many ways represents the most radical leap for the vast majority of Americans — Southern Californians above all — who have long regarded the ownership of a private automobile not only as an inalienable right but as an extension of one’s personal identity.
Arguably, the smartphone is the most fundamental transportation technology of the twenty-first century. It is our constant companion… [and] has changed the way we travel. It also connects travelers to new information, to nearby vehicles, and perhaps most importantly, to anyone going their way. — HENRY GRABAR, 2019
And yet even these striking shifts in the way we live now may not represent the most potent or transformative impact of the new mobility revolution being pioneered in Los Angeles. The story of Bird’s unexpected appearance in Santa Monica — from the visible change it brought to the city’s streets and sidewalks to the unseen but no less profound challenge it posed to the agencies whose mission it is to regulate those streets and sidewalks — foretells a remarkable renegotiation of the relationship of private companies and public officials that have long governed and given shape to the modern city.
Just as railroad lines, then streetcar networks, and then automobiles (and the great freeway network built for them) successively reshaped the physical and socioeconomic landscape of Los Angeles, a new generation of technologies — nearly all of them underpinned by the digital revolution that has transformed every aspect of contemporary life — now promises to remake the region once again, in ways that we can just now begin to glimpse.
2. The Kitchen
I want everyone to come here and try stuff. I want LA to be the kitchen where all this is cooked. — ERIC GARCETTI, MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, 2018
It was hardly a coincidence that Bird chose Santa Monica to launch its new service — nor that the start-up was located in Los Angeles in the first place. By the late 2010s, the sprawling West Coast metropolis had become the world’s cauldron of innovation in urban mobility.
In some ways this was surprising. No city, after all, has been more closely identified with the reigning mode of twentieth-century transportation — the private automobile — that all these newer innovations, one way or another, are bent on superseding. Los Angeles also presents a unique — and uniquely challenging — regulatory landscape for any would-be mobility entrepreneur. Unlike the relatively unified structure of most American cities, LA’s political map is a bewildering patchwork of eighty-eight different jurisdictions — not only the City of Los Angeles itself, where power is divided between the mayor and a fifteen-seat city council, but dozens of smaller independent cities like Culver City, Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, West Hollywood, Inglewood, and, yes, Santa Monica, each with its own strong-willed mayor and council. As if that were not complicated enough, there are also scores of “unincorporated” districts — many of them right in the middle of town — which are legally not part of any city and are instead operated by Los Angeles County (governed by still another five-member council). Even a short-distance vehicle might cross three or four municipal boundaries on a typical trip. Who’s in charge?
Yet these obvious drawbacks have been more than outweighed, in recent years, by the region’s outstanding assets. First, of course, is LA’s famously sun-washed, temperate climate, which makes open-air devices like dockless scooters and electric-assist bikes an attractive and realistic alternative to fully enclosed, climate-controlled vehicles. Then there is Southern California’s long heritage of leadership in aerospace technology and its large pool of engineering talent, whose expertise in lightweight structures and innovative materials has proved readily transferable to the design and fabrication of these new, highly efficient contrivances (as well as more ambitious proposals to move people above and below the city’s surface). Widespan, ground-level work spaces for start-ups are relatively easy to locate within the sprawling industrial reaches of the region, and multiple sources of venture capital are not far at hand, especially with Silicon Valley just a few hundred miles to the north.
Beyond these worldly advantages, furthermore, lies a larger energizing reality: the very scale and seeming intractability of its traffic crisis — for decades an aching fact of life for the city — makes Los Angeles exceptionally open to exploring alternative ways to move around. Even as they oversee the largest public-transit construction effort in America in eighty years, LA’s leaders have thrown out a welcome mat to all comers in private mobility. “My goal, and the goal of this city,” then-Mayor Eric Garcetti declared in no uncertain terms in 2018, “is to be transportation capital of the world.”
By then, he was well on his way to getting his wish. “For electric bus manufacturers, designers of flying machines, ride-sharing app-developers, tunneling companies — for mobility entrepreneurs of every stripe and color — LA present[s] an immense and ravenous market for miles,” write the urbanists John Rossant and Stephen Baker. “The coming transition is bound to transform the economy, the cityscape, and life itself in this sun-soaked expanse of California.” Responding to the city’s enormous market opportunities as well as its mayoral “invitation,” a head-spinning array of new transportation concepts, proposals, and inventions have begun development across Southern California. Some are tiny, some are huge. Some are already well in use, others still in prototype, and yet others reside only, for now, in the dreamlike realm of digital renderings.
At one end of the spectrum are “micro” solutions, ranging from the diminutive Bird scooter to slightly larger electric-assist bicycles to a new breed of small but enclosed two-seat, electric hybrids such as the Arcimoto — intended to fill, in the words of its inventor, Mark Frohnmayer, the “enormous [market] space between the motorcycle and the car” and well-suited, its promoters claim, to the vast majority of short-range trips that city dwellers actually make in their full-sized autos. (So short they can be parked sideways, like a Vespa or a Harley, these lightweight, three-wheeled vehicles take up a third of the space, at most, of a conventional automobile — though few if any models have yet to catch on with the general public.)
At the scale of the full-sized automobile, of course, there are the countless prototypes under development — by tech companies, auto manufacturers, and other major players — for fully autonomous electric vehicles, which will not only drive their occupants around town, but, as a crucial corollary, make their own way to parking spaces and charging stations (likely located in remote, less-expensive quarters of the city) when not in use.
Not least of the questions about the future of self-driving cars is whether the familiar model of individual vehicle ownership, or an on-demand model using shared vehicles (essentially similar to Uber or Lyft, without the drivers), will ultimately make more economic and technological sense. “Right now most companies working on self-driving cars are working on them as the prelude to a self-driving-car service,” the journalist Alexis C. Madrigal writes. “So you wouldn’t own your car; you’d just get rides from a fleet of robo-cars maintained by Waymo or Uber or Lyft.” In both cases — but especially the service-oriented model — there will be almost nothing left of today’s pressing need for vehicles to be stored in proximity to the people they serve — that is, in centrally located parking lots and garages.
Of course, the question of whether the widespread public adoption of such fully autonomous vehicles will come five years from now, or fifteen, or twenty-five — or ever — is one that elicits widely differing responses, to put it politely. Many skeptics point to the still-abiding truth spoken by transportation expert Jameson Wetmore in 2003: “that automated driving has been “‘only twenty years away’ for sixty years.” After more than a decade of intense activity and over $100 billion in private and public investment, early optimism has given way in many quarters to sober realism. “Long term, I think we will have autonomous vehicles that you and I can buy,” the Gartner market researcher Mike Ramsey says. “But we’re going to be old.”
In the meanwhile, there are the handful of truly ambitious — if almost entirely speculative — “macro” solutions proposed for Los Angeles, which call on major engineering breakthroughs to move large numbers of people under the earth or in the sky. Uber Elevate, an aerial division of the rideshare giant since acquired by Joby Aviation, initially conceived — and commissioned design concepts for — a series of raised landing pads scattered around the city, from which hundreds of unmanned passenger-carrying drones (“electric Vertical Take Off and Landing” devices, or eVTOLs) would whisk thousands of well-to-do Angelenos from one end of the region to the other, following the air-space corridors above existing freeways. Whether Los Angeles should be following the lead of São Paulo — home to the world’s highest number of helicopters per capita, along with truly staggering inequality and traffic — is rarely discussed.
The mind-boggling technical, environmental, and regulatory obstacles to aerial flyways are rivaled only by its subterranean rival: the tunnel initiative promoted by the Boring Company, the dryly named start-up founded by the omnipresent tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. Dismissive of unmanned drones in the sky (sooner or later, he suggests, one of them will “drop a hubcap and guillotine someone”), Musk is certain the answer to LA’s traffic problem lies in the other direction: a network of underground tunnels laced beneath the region, in which individual vehicles are carried on high-speed electric “skates” to vertical access points all over town, where elevator-like lifts carry each auto to and from street level.
Despite the science-fiction-like aura of the concept, Musk’s company has succeeded, by all accounts, in achieving significant advances in the traditional boring process — substantially bringing down the cost-per-mile of underground construction — and has built a full-scale, 1.14-mile-long test tunnel under Hawthorne, in southwestern Los Angeles. But given Musk’s assessment of transit — “It sucks….It’s a pain in the ass…. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer” — it’s again unclear why ordinary Angelenos should root for private tunnels explicitly designed to separate the rich from everyone else. “The degree of contempt autonomists hold for public transit,” the author Anthony Townsend notes, “is shocking.” The technology writer Paris Marx goes even further, arguing in 2022 that “these technologies are likely to reinforce the trends of growing tech billionaire wealth and these billionaires’ desires to close themselves off from the rest of society”:
Recall that the first of Musk’s proposed tunnels was designed to make it easier for him to get to and from work without getting stuck in traffic with everyone else. Rather than a network of tunnels for the masses, such a system could be redeployed as one designed by and for the wealthy, inaccessible to the public and connecting only the places that the rich frequent: their gated communities, private airport terminals, and other exclusive areas of the city.
In some ways resembling a reimagined subway system, in others a modern iteration of the postwar car-and-freeway model, Musk’s ambitious concept, like nearly every other urban mobility proposal now being floated — above, below, or on the surface — represents a further blurring of the lines between private and public movement and space and, in order to be commercially implemented, will require entire new structures of regulation and oversight. It is striking, however, that nearly all of these proposals and schemes share the Los Angeles region as their incubator and testing ground.
Thanks to its intrinsic advantages of climate, market, and scale, as well its local government’s enthusiasm, Los Angeles has found itself, for better or worse, on the front line of a worldwide struggle over the shape of the future city, one pitting private, self-proclaimed “disrupters” — tech entrepreneurs and start-ups with their eye set firmly on profitability and market share — against public agencies and administrators who must briskly evolve their tactics and vision in order to protect the interests of the larger public, and who, in the end, retain enormous power over how and by whom the public space of the city is used. The outcome of this conflict will not only determine how Angelenos move through the Southland but also help to define the face of the region itself.
The ramifications of this struggle have only been magnified by the Covid-19 pandemic, which as of this writing has killed well over a million Americans, including more than thirty-two thousand in Los Angeles County alone. In the first months of lockdown in 2020, sharing took a back seat to isolation as Angelenos swiftly went back to their own cars. Within months, driving in the city returned to pre-pandemic levels while the number of Uber trips globally fell by half. To compensate, Uber pivoted to the delivery side of its operations, which is now bigger than its ride-hailing business. It is poised to grow bigger still after a series of acquisitions including Cornershop (groceries), Postmates (meals), and Drizly (liquor), surging ahead of competitors DoorDash and Grubhub in terms of market capitalization now that investors demand profits instead of growth.
As thousands of small businesses shuttered amidst the early pandemic fallout, storefronts were rapidly replaced by “micro-fulfillment,” “ghost kitchens,” and “dark stores” accessible only by app and hidden from view. Parking spaces may well disappear in a city filled with Ubers, self-driving scooters, autonomous shuttles, and delivery robots, but will they take much of the streetscape with it?
3. Walled Gardens
The larger story of this unfolding struggle over the city’s future begins with a blunt reality: with more than 6.4 million vehicles on the streets and freeways of today’s Southern California, the private car is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon. The average vehicle life in the region is eleven years, so even if Angelenos were somehow never to replace any automobile they currently own (an unlikely scenario, to say the least), there would still be plenty of cars on the road a decade from now.
But the goal of the mobility revolution now underway in Los Angeles is not to eliminate the private automobile entirely. It is to offer a host of alternatives that better suit the variety of trips people make, to better accommodate different populations in the city, to help to usher in a more environmentally responsible and energy-efficient way of life, and, if all goes well, to put a dent in the traffic congestion that in recent decades has slowed movement around the region, at many times and in many places, to an agonizing crawl. It is not the car, but the city’s overwhelming reliance on the car, its strangling monoculture, that the leaders of the mobility revolution — public and private alike — hope to see overturned.
But how? An obvious if traditional answer is the development of a major rapid-transit system, crisscrossing the region with a mesh of rail lines, like those found in most of the world’s great cities. To a degree that would have evinced astonishment in anyone who knew the car-based Los Angeles of 1990, Angelenos have pushed ahead in the years since with the construction of an ambitious rail network — then doubled down on Election Day 2016 by voting with their wallets for Measure M, a Los Angeles County sales tax increase passed by an overwhelming 72 percent of voters, designed to generate an estimated $120 billion for massively expanded rail, rapid bus, and bicycle lanes over the next four decades. A shorter-term milestone is 2028, when the city will be hosting the Summer Olympics for the third time in its history. By then, Los Angeles expects to have completed twenty-eight major transit projects, including literally doubling the size of the Metro system. No American city has seen anything like it since the eve of World War II, when the completion of the Independent (IND) line in 1940 capped four decades of furious subway construction in New York.
It remains a stubborn fact, however, that to date many of those same voters have shown considerably less interest in taking public transit themselves. A 2019 poll conducted by UCLA’s Michael Manville suggests the old Onion parody headline might be on to something: “98 Percent of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others.” The actual numbers were less lopsided, of course, but it is still the case that in a non-pandemic year only about 7 percent of the population of Southern California uses public transportation. (The pandemic cut that figure in half, though ridership began rising again swiftly as the viral threat receded.) Supporters of Measure M effectively wanted their neighbors to ride the train or bus so they could drive to work unimpeded. A half-cent sales tax increase was a small price to pay for less congested freeways.
Even as new lines continued to open, ridership on LA Metro’s new rail lines grew only slightly over the past five years. The far larger ridership on the LA County’s buses, meanwhile, fell 19 percent in that same period, as the economic boom — and historically low-interest loans for first-time auto buyers — siphoned tens of thousands of working people from buses to newly affordable new or used cars. Metro officials vowed to go back to basics, with redesigned and updated bus routes and more frequent service.
Others suggested taking a longer view, especially in light of the immense amount of apartment, office, and retail construction now underway adjacent to Metro stations (a real estate formula suddenly challenged in 2020–21 by “Covid flight” to more spacious housing, permanent work-from-anywhere policies, and same-day e-commerce, but which, like transit ridership, seems to be reasserting itself in the pandemic crisis’ aftermath). At some point, it is safe to assume, a significant number of Angelenos, like their counterparts in New York or Chicago, may well find it easier and more appealing to walk a block or two from their high-rise apartment to a Metro station than crawl for hours through heavy traffic.
Still others have argued that “there’s an app for that” — or at least there should be — and that buses and trains should act more like Uber. Or be run by Uber itself. In truth, the dramatic rise and pervasive adoption of Uber, Lyft, and their ride-hailing rivals in the mid-2010s shocked and awed veteran transportation planners. “No one had an inkling, including me, that people would change their travel habits so quickly and dramatically,” the noted traffic engineer “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz recently confessed. In the space of a few years, Uber and Lyft overturned the traditional status markers of California car culture, with driving one’s own vehicle taking a back seat, for many, to being driven by someone else.
Despite their hardball tactics in establishing and expanding their services, both companies assiduously asserted themselves as allies to cities in “the war on cars.” Seizing on the observation by UCLA’s Donald Shoup that the average automobile is parked 95 percent of the time, they insisted the unparalleled convenience of their roaming fleets would eventually supplant private ownership and redound to the city’s benefit.
But as has become clear through the research of academics, transportation officials, and even the companies themselves, ride-hailing succeeded in reducing the need for parking by injecting hundreds of millions of new vehicle miles traveled (VMT) into American city streets. Just as venture capital subsidized their artificially low fares, so many residents paid the price for their constant motion. Uber and Lyft drivers, according to the companies’ own data, comprised 2.6 percent of pre-pandemic traffic in Los Angeles County, a formidable number indeed. Congestion has risen accordingly. And not coincidentally, bus speeds have fallen in tandem, sometimes to a crawl, producing a vicious circle in which transit’s supposed allies contribute to the wave of frustrated riders abandoning transit.
Given this disheartening situation, one might be tempted to fight fire with fire. Responding to ride-hailing’s instant gratification, transit advocates have countered with “mobility-as-a-service” (MaaS). In this vision, a single smartphone app combining route-finding, booking, and payment across multiple modes of travel would extend both public and private services, while retaining a large measure of public control over the movement of people. Fares would be replaced by monthly all-you-can-travel subscriptions (similar to smartphones’ data plans), in hopes of convincing customers to get on the train, or back onto the bus. In this vision, old-school transit operators will be recast as “mobility integrators,” Anthony Townsend writes, “expanding into the business of MaaS while continuing to operate trains and buses. This would gradually expand the role of government from simply building and running trains and buses to orchestrating the flow of mobility data and mobility-service transactions.”
Linking fixed transit lines to the go-anywhere flexibility of the new mobility modes would seem to solve the long-standing “last mile” dilemma that has bedeviled the region’s transportation planners for years: unlike denser Eastern cities where a high percentage of people live in walking distance of metro stations, people in low-density Los Angeles often live too far from a station to conveniently walk. How should they traverse that last mile? A cheap, readily available electric scooter, electric-assist bike, or Uber ride might be just the answer. Indeed, Phillip Washington, the former head of LA Metro, has proposed an organic analogy for this hybrid, with the Metro’s rail and bus lines as the system’s sturdy trunks and branches, and scooters, bikes, and hailed vehicles as fine-grained tendrils, spreading just about everywhere.
Although MaaS platforms have launched in a handful of overseas cities — including Berlin, Helsinki, and Singapore — perhaps the biggest proponents of the idea in the United States, ironically enough, are Uber and Lyft. The former began to pivot with the arrival in 2017 of a new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. “I want to run the bus systems for a city,” he declared in his first public remarks. I want you to be able to take an Uber and get into the subway…[then] get out and have an Uber waiting for you.” Setting aside the fact that its pilot projects connecting commuters to transit have not shown much success, there’s a lot to unpack in that statement. Uber, of course, has no intention of running buses on behalf of cities, but is already happy to sell bus tickets through its app in Denver and London, with more cities on the way. Khosrowshahi has since expanded his aim for Uber to become nothing less than “the operating system for your everyday life.”
When scooters and e-bikes arrived on the scene, meanwhile, early data suggested they would cannibalize short ride-hailing trips. Uber promptly acquired Jump bike — an on-demand electric-assist smart bicycle service — while Lyft, not to be caught short, bought Motivate, which operates public bikeshare systems in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. The latter deal included exclusive rights to host docking stations on public property and the public right of way — potentially invaluable real estate for future mobility offerings. In short order, Lyft added bicycle stations and bus stops to its own app, and the company’s cofounder, John Zimmer, began talking up “transportation-as-a-service.”
Their dueling efforts to vertically integrate ride-hailing, micro-mobility, and public transport did not go unnoticed. Transit advocates warned of the two companies retreating behind privately controlled “walled gardens,” precluding open competition in favor of a local monopoly — at least a duopoly.
All through the rapid rise of ridesharing, back in the mid-2010s, public officials had begged, threatened, or cajoled start-ups to share the data necessary for understanding the scope and scale of their operations — to no avail. But although they were essentially flying blind and stripped of regulatory powers by state lawmakers, the officials at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) had vowed to be better prepared when the “Next Big Thing” appeared. It was just then that Bird arrived.
4. Code Is the New Concrete
While the Internet engendered its own virtual worlds on screens, mobility takes place in the physical realm we inhabit, much of it in our shared space. It involves roads and bike lanes, and machines that can hurtle down sidewalks and bang into us. It has to be managed. So from the get-go there’s a clear role for government. — JOHN ROSSANT AND STEPHEN BAKER, 2019
When Bird e-scooters began flocking to the sidewalks of Santa Monica, the region’s transportation officials worried they were about to be overwhelmed yet again, as they had been when ride-hailing came out of nowhere. This time, however, LADOT was ready. For months, its staff had worked with software engineers and counterparts from around the country to create the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), an open standard for receiving data on the status of a vehicle — where it is, what it’s doing, and when a trip begins and ends. Originally designed for the perpetually imminent arrival of self-driving cars, it was immediately re-tasked to deal with the clear and present danger.
MDS also allowed regulators to send instructions as well. Is a bike lane closed? Have your app route around it. Did someone throw your scooter into the canals of Venice Beach? Please retrieve it. Did you promise to serve low-income neighborhoods as part of your operating permit? Then redeploy more of your vehicles there. And so on.
A public agency writing its own software standards was unprecedented — but very likely necessary, in the twenty-first century, to retain any semblance of control over the public realm. “We plan the streets, and we design them — but we also regulate and operate them,” noted Seleta Reynolds, then general manager of LADOT (and an energetic advocate of a transit-driven future for Southern California) who commissioned MDS. “Code is the new concrete.”
Santa Monica became the first city to make MDS a prerequisite for Bird and other scooter companies when the code went live in the spring of 2018. (Within months, Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, Austin, and seventy other cities had followed suit.) These cities were not afraid to use their newly expanded power. In July 2019, Santa Monica rebuked Bird for exceeding the number of vehicles allowed by its permit, citing “data anomalies” registered by the MDS. Consequences were swift, with Bird being instructed to downsize its fleet, while Jump and Lyft received a bump in theirs.
As one might expect, cities wielding MDS did not endear themselves to all operators. Uber and others cried foul, citing privacy concerns. Raw data could be de-anonymized, they argued, allowing LADOT to trace individuals’ movements and share that information with law enforcement, among others. Supporters bridled at the apparent hypocrisy. The debate moved first to the California legislature, then to the courts. At heart, the issue is: who owns the data emanating from private vehicles on public streets — the company, the customer, or the city?
If MDS was the first tool to make all of Los Angeles machine-readable, it surely won’t be the last. A company named Coord — a spin-off of the Google-subsidiary Sidewalk Labs — is on a mission to inventory every stretch of curb in fifteen cities, starting with Los Angeles. Its ambition: to create “a world in which every square foot is priced,” in the words of CEO Stephen Smyth. This “asphalt marketplace” would use the concept of dynamic pricing to allocate and reallocate curb space and lane space in real time, according to cities’ wishes.
Other start-ups, with names like Humn.ai and ClearRoad, envision similar approaches to freeway tolling. Even the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has begun exploring the mechanics of implementing congestion pricing in Southern California. What began as a struggle over data is quickly becoming a battle to control the profits of an increasingly contested public realm. “This isn’t just going to become a fee,” says Townsend. “It’s going to become a market for access, because you can turn city streets into a giant ATM.”
One way or another, agencies like LADOT are determined to stay ahead of the situation. If they fail to assert their presence in this brave new world, they realize, the urban mobility of the twenty-first-century city will be defined by tech entrepreneurs — driven almost entirely by their own financial goals and mandates — rather than the needs of the thirteen million inhabitants of greater Los Angeles. “We could repeat the mistake we made a century ago,” Reynolds says. “We adjusted the city around the technology, instead of the other way around.”
5. Crossing the Lines
Several of the tantalizing opportunities outlined in Renewing the Dream — especially those to reimagine new uses for the endless miles of parking and gas stations scattered across Southern California — arise from the overarching reality of the twentieth-century city: the widespread appropriation of the city’s public space for use by the private automobile. Indeed, the size of the city’s existing parking inventory and the number of service stations can be considered a clear sign of victory in the private car’s triumph over every other kind of urban mobility across the second half of the twentieth century. But the clear lines of that epic battle are now starting to fade, as the generation of advanced, digitally enabled devices and systems now arriving inevitably complicates and confuses that once-simple landscape. Together, they point to a future for urban mobility, which, among other features, will almost certainly include an intricate and meshed interweaving of public and private interests, in ways that continue to evolve year by year — if not month by month.
The possibility of liberating miles of excess surface parking and obsolete gas stations will be just two parts of this new and complex landscape — one whose larger consequences, as they unfold in the coming years, may well be as profound as the earlier revolutions that brought forth the city we know today. For now, we can merely glimpse the lineaments of the ways in which this newest transportation paradigm will remake, once again, the great capital of mobility that is modern Los Angeles.
