2019 Will Be The Year of the City
In July 2018, the new and improved “dockless” bikesharing that had been rapidly expanding across the country seemed destined to fail. Mobike and ofo exited the U.S. market leaving large mounds of bikes stacked in junkyards in their wake — a depressing image for urban planners everywhere.
But as the bikes retreated, scooters sprang to life. Bird, Lime, Spin, and Lyft’s scooters became a common sight on boardwalks and bike lanes from coast to coast. Cities across the country reported unprecedented adoption as well as intriguing early results. Scooter trips replace many trips otherwise taken in a car. They help connect underserved communities and improve access for low-income riders. Most importantly, scooters are helping many cities deliver on local transportation priorities.
This caused city officials to think deeply about how the right-of-way is prioritized as a whole, and how local policy levers can act in harmony with private providers — in the holy grail of public-private partnerships.
You could easily call 2018 the Year of the Scooter. Our prediction is 2019 will be the Year of the City. With new access to data and advanced software to use it, cities will take charge and make bold moves to re-prioritize the street, reduce congestion, and make zero-carbon personal transit safer and more accessible. Cities will be at the center of mobility management in 2019.
The Remix policy team recently sat down to predict news headlines we will see in the year to come. The results are below.
2019 NEWS HEADLINES:
1. Cities Begin to Rival the Private Sector in Technology, Taking a Proactive Role in Managing and Planning for New Mobility
- New mobility calls for a breaking down of old silos built to deliver transit or bikes or pedestrian improvements. Cities across the country are meeting the growing array of multimodal transportation planning needs by creating ‘Mobility’ Departments to tackle permitting, planning, policy and compliance with new modes, starting with “harmonization” efforts to ensure that all modes are regulated to achieve shared goals, and processes are fair and transparent.
- Several agencies now have mobility principles to guide interactions with new vendors and services, ensuring that both sides have a clear idea of what success looks like for operation. 2019 will be the year these efforts start bearing fruit, delivering improved equity, safety and accessibility outcomes to citizens and easing the regulatory process for vendors.
- Many cities are realizing it doesn’t always make sense to build their own tools in such a dynamic environment, and are working with partners like Remix for the ability to track and manage new mobility in real time. Remix already partners with several leading new mobility companies, giving cities power to create geofences and enforce regulation. They can use the data to drive designs for infrastructure improvements (see below).
2. Scooter, TNC and Bikeshare Companies Help Fund Infrastructure Changes Needed to Make Them Sustainable, Including the Construction of “SLOW LANES”
- The Remix policy team’s review of micromobility policies shows an increasing number of cities instituting a nominal fee on micromobility companies, some of which is intended to be spent on infrastructure.
- Bird, a scooter company out of Santa Monica, pledged to fund protected bike lanes. It remains to be seen if we will still call them “bike lanes” when they are implemented.
- Cities have already begun adjusting lane markings to signify that scooter riders belong in the bike lane. Scooters, being neither car nor bike, open an important debate about how we currently prioritize and classify street lanes. These discussions will only increase as we see broad diversification of modes. After all, you can only fit so many markings in a 6ft lane.
3. Cities Get Ahead of Driverless Cars
- Nothing is scarier to a transportation official than the idea of an empty car driving around a city searching for a passenger. This is a very possible issue that could arrive driverless vehicles and increase congestion and emissions. Policymakers see this possible future and are responding by writing rules that will discourage this outcome. New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission’s recent decision to pass a wage floor may seem very much connected to a physical driver, but central to that calculation is a “utilization rate.” This factor works against empty vehicle miles and lays the groundwork for encouraging fleet operators to consider this in their operations. San Francisco’s ridehailing tax is 1.5% for shared rides and 3.25% for solo travel, encouraging riders to opt-in for sharing their ride. In 2019 we will see more forward-thinking policy.
- In June 2018, LADOT announced their Mobility Data Specification which created rules for how mobility data will be shared. We have watched dozens of cities across the United States adopt this as a standard in the last six months alone, making this the likely national format for sharing autonomous vehicle mobility data.
- City Data Officers (CDOs) banded together to convey their preparedness and expectations for access to dockless mobility data in a [beautifully written] open letter. Today’s dockless systems are tomorrow’s autonomous robots, and we believe we’ll see continued leadership from CDOs in 2019.
4. First Congestion Pricing Plan Goes into Effect in the U.S.
- City officials are becoming increasingly vocal in their support for congestion pricing as a means to address the conditions in traffic-choked downtown cores and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
- San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, and New York have all begun revisiting congestion pricing with new vigor. The New York State legislature is set to vote on their plan in 2019, which would begin by creating a surcharge for-hire vehicles and taxis in the CBD, with plans to tax cars and trucks to follow.
- Uber recently announced a $10m congestion pricing campaign. This will likely be spent to encourage congestion pricing plans to encompass all modes, not just for-hire vehicles.
The car-centric paradigm of the last 60 years is finally starting to change, as new mobility options force cities to think differently about how to design and make policy around the public right-of-way. 2019 will be the year this starts to become a reality, and as the balance of power shifts from vendors back to cities, there will be a more productive conversation about how to achieve a more livable city for all.
Special thanks to Rachel Zack and Andrew Glass Hastings on this post.
