10 Things from LA’s Transportation Technology Strategy That Cities Can Do Now to Prepare for Autonomous Vehicles (and One That Isn’t)

[the first in a series]

The most salient feature of LA’s recently released Transportation Technology Strategy, titled Urban Mobility in a Digital Age, is how clear it makes it that there’s no reason cities need to wait for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to arrive to start realizing the benefits of transportation technology. Current technologies already provide a fantastic opportunity to prepare for the arrival of AVs (some of them don’t even require technology at all). LA’s newly released transportation technology report shows us how to get there, from here, if only we connect the dots. Replace “AV” with “Uber and Lyft” (or “ride-sharing / ride-sourcing” if you aren’t ready to crown these two the winners), and almost all of these tactics still hold on a smaller scale, giving cities the perfect opportunity to introduce each tactic gradually and scale them up with demand:

These tactics group into three categories: reducing the appeal of the owner-operated, single-occupancy vehicle mode of driving; increasing the appeal of public transit and shared mobility modes; and behind-the-scenes changes.

Reducing the Appeal of Single-Occupancy Driving (aka Getting People Out of Their Cars)

1. Code curb access for pickup and drop-off instead of parking. Not all of it, of course, not yet, but that’s the general direction of things. Under a ride-sharing/ride-hailing ownership model, autonomous vehicles won’t need to park in cities, but they will still need spaces to be able to pick up and drop off passengers without blocking other modes of travel. A lot of spaces, in fact, if we assume that a significant share of individuals who currently drive will shift to taking AVs, as well as a significant share of those who are currently using other modes. It’s impossible to predict the exact mix, as there are so many variables involved — and once people are out of their cars they will not likely use the same mode for every trip in their day — but in the busiest areas, where double-parking would block automobile and/or bike lanes, it’s probably a good idea to include at least one designated pickup/drop-off zone per block in order to garner popular support for regulation requiring pickups and dropoffs to use these zones. Asking people to walk one block is one thing; asking them to walk two is quite another. Long blocks like those between avenues in Manhattan might require multiple zones to break up the distance.
   In the interim between now and the wholesale transition to autonomous vehicles, the need for these is already rising in direct proportion to the rise of Uber and Lyft, as well as the rise in e-commerce deliveries (particularly on-demand services that arrive in their own vehicles rather than as part of already scheduled common carrier deliveries).
2. In fact, get rid of parking minimums altogether. Almost all cities in America have too much parking — 65% on average according one study — as a result of decades of parking minimums that were calculated without regard to local conditions. Yes, the price of parking in the urban cores will go up, it will become harder to find free curbside parking, and some people will have to give up their cars (and will no doubt complain about it), but that’s a good thing. Parking is not a human right. If you are trying to shift people away from the use of personal vehicles in the city center, the construction of mandated — ie not market-driven — parking is a market distortion that does the opposite. And if a city is planning to issue a 30-year bond to finance a new parking garage, under the assumption that the coupon payments will be met by the garage’s income over the same period, it better make sure the floor-to-floor heights are tall enough to convert that garage to an alternative, rent-producing land use when parking demand dries up.
3. Start acculturating people to the idea of usage-based pricing (what the strategy calls “infrastructure-as-a-service”). The public will cry bloody murder when they start to get billed directly for their usage of public streets. The strategy report puts this more delicately: “As this is a fundamental rethinking of how we pay for and access our public right-of-way, Infrastructure as a Service requires a phased approach.” Nonetheless it has to be done, for two reasons. From a financing perspective, gas taxes are not keeping up with the cost of maintaining and building our infrastructure, and electrification is going to decimate this source of funding. From a traffic perspective, with the cost of the driver removed from the vehicle, the cost of operating AVs is going to be so low — Robin Chase, the co-founder of ZipCar, calculated the cost of running her 2004 Prius to be $1.50/hour — that it might drop below the opportunity cost to Uber or Lyft of missing a customer. In that case the only way to prevent a fleet of empty AVs from roaming the city, searching for their next ride, will be by raising this cost with a usage tax until it is no longer economical to do so. With the right data it will be possible to tier the tax by the number of occupants in the vehicle, so that zero-occupant miles are much more expensive than single-occupant miles are much more expensive than “HOV” miles. You can even tax ride-hailing and personal-use vehicles differently, to promote the former (and in particular the pooled use versions of the former); I suggested one model for that here.
   Pairing the introduction of a mileage-based tax with the elimination (or reduction) of the gas tax would make it more palatable (and probably makes sense anyways, if you are going to take this concept to its logical conclusion).

Increasing the Appeal of Public Transit and Shared Mobility Modes (aka Improving Customer Experience)

Transit agencies and DOTs need to make transit and shared mobility attractive, and they need to make it attractive now, before AVs arrive. Otherwise, if people are not already acclimated to using transit when AVs arrive, it may be too late to convince them of its merits. They may skip using public transit altogether and decide that the mental overhead of figuring out transit just isn’t worth it for the relatively smaller difference in cost of simply taking an AV all the way. If you don’t get people taking public transit now, you might miss the window to ever do so.

1. Train people to use ride-hailing — or other shared mobility modes — for first and last mile (hint: mobility hubs are great). Outside of NYC the number of people who identify as transit riders as such is statistically insignificant. Two major barriers that are keeping those who are within the public transportation networks’ coverage area from utilizing it are 1) an intimidation at having to navigate the system, when driving seems so much easier, and 2) the perceived difficulty of getting to and from the transit stations. The first is addressed via wayfinding, as discussed in more detail in the next step. The proposed mobility hubs are brilliant for addressing the second. By making them so high visibility — “beacons”, as the report calls them — and demonstrating all of the mobility modes in one place, it sends a clear message to residents and commuters that not even guaranteed ride home programs can: we are here for you. Mobility hubs also form a single place where analog methods of wayfinding — aka signs and maps — can be concentrated in one place, for all modes, creating a de facto standard and allowing users of one mode to visualize what it would be like to utilize others.
2. Invest in wayfinding, including making sure that data for as many transportation modes as possible in your city are integrated into the most popular wayfinding mobile apps. A significant portion of would-be transit riders are deterred from taking transit because they are intimidated by the idea of having to navigate an unfamiliar system with all of its exchanges and mode transfers. Mobile, GPS-driven wayfinding — aka apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps that tell you how to get where you are going by car, transit, biking, walking, etc. — has quietly, almost accidentally, had one of the largest impacts on public transit ridership of any technology. So much so that Sam Schwartz, in his book Street Smart, dedicates half of his chapter on smart cities to the impact these technologies have had on overcoming this intimidation factor as well as other obstacles to transit ridership.
   Los Angeles has invested in building its own wayfinding apps; this is one of those ideas that is good in theory but bad in practice, because it puts them in direct competition for users with exponentially more popular wayfinding apps, led by Google Maps and Apple Maps. Unfortunately, this is not a battle that any individual city’s app can win. Rather, cities should work to ensure that as many modes as possible gets integrated into existing wayfinding apps. Yes, Google Maps and Apple Maps are not truly multimodal; for example Google can only handle fixed schedules and routes and only works with transit agencies, which rules out car sharing and bike sharing. On the other hand, giving citizens access to public transit information at the tip of their fingers is a pretty good start, and it is so easy for transit agencies to add their data to Google Maps that if you haven’t added yours yet, there is no excuse.
   If truly multimode wayfinding is important to your city, there are other apps that do offer this, such as CityMapper, TransitApp, and Moovit. While not as popular as Google or Apple Maps, they are still far more popular than Go LA.
   This will require proactively approaching these companies and working with them to integrate all of your respective transportation modes into their apps.
3. Create a multimodal payment system. This complements the previous two bullets in terms of lowering the friction of using transit and shared mobility modes. Having credit cards on file also increases your leverage for whether you will own the customer relationship when you are negotiating with the ridesharing services, who at this point are already huge, multi-billion dollar companies, or whether you will merely be a pass through to their app.
4. Leverage dynamically-routed, on-demand microtransit. There are currently four operators of this sort of service, Bridj, Via, Chariot, and Split. All feature the same on-demand, smartphone app-based ride-hailing and payment features of Uber or Lyft, but use larger vehicles with capacities of approximately 6–8 passengers. They provide a trade-off between the savings over taking a taxi or private Uber — fares on all range from $3–6 — and the delays of picking up and dropping off other passengers along the route. Or as Via puts it, “Cheaper than a taxi, better than a bus.” Unlike traditional fixed-route buses, however, every rider e-hailing a dynamically-routed vehicle must enter not only their pick up location but also their destination. This allows a bunch of sophisticated algorithms behind the scenes to takes these routes and constantly optimize matching of riders whose travel paths overlap. In theory, if the system can get to enough riders and vehicles, and the algorithms work well enough, the delays created by additional pickups and drop-offs will be minimized and the result will be something approaching the ideal surface transportation system: one that picks you up where you’re at, drops you off where you’re going, and takes the shortest route from one to the other with no unnecessary detours (maybe just some stops on the way). Reality of course is not quite there yet, and as a passenger microtransit is not the best option when you are under a time constraint, but all four services are popular and growing, and Chariot was just acquired by Ford. Microtransit, by providing a highly flexible, demand-driven service, can work well in areas where traditional bus service economics don’t work, dynamically adapting to shifts in demand throughout the day, week, and month, as well as to fill in a gap in transit tiers between buses and taxis that was not known to exist before but whose existence has been proven by their popularity.

Behind the Scenes Changes (aka Improving Internal Operations)

1. Expand role to include mobility manager in addition to service provider and infrastructure builder. Transit agencies must recognize that they can no longer take for granted that their services are the only — or the best — alternative to driving. They are being forced by the market and by riders to up their game on their own service offerings, as well as to recognize that they need to add a new arrow to their quiver, that of being a “mobility manager,” as the report calls it. Every city will have different definitions, but some of the responsibilities of a mobility manager in the urban transportation ecosystem include overseeing the overall portfolio of mobility services, negotiating agreements with 3rd-party mobility and infrastructure providers on behalf of the city as well as ensuring that each provider is making good on their commitments; managing access to the public right-of-way and mediating any conflicts; looking out for the public welfare with appropriate regulation and as a measure of last resort, enforcement in the case of unsafe or criminal activity; and solving any collective action problems through the power and long-term commitment of government. Maintaining the DOT’s traditional monopoly on public mobility services, however, is not an option. Look at how miserably cities failed at keeping Uber out when it was still a tiny startup; now that the cat is out of the bag on the benefits of private transport startups, trying to hang on to the status quo is both technocratic and political suicide. As the report puts it, “Riders are going to choose the mode that best meets their needs and priorities” — whether that is the bus, the train, or the Uber.
2. Gain experience negotiating agreements with private transit operators. Given the developments in the transportation marketplace both in terms of ride-hailing and autonomous vehicles, it seems likely that cities will not be able to provide a full range of competitive autonomous vehicle services. In other words, they will have to negotiate and work with private transit operators. Starting to do so now will allow cities to develop experience in an area they currently find way outside of what they are prepared for. Even if the first time around the results are less than optimal, the learnings from this trial experience will help cities figure out what is important to them, what else or who else needs to be taken into consideration, and where they need to adapt their negotiating and relationship strategies in the future.
3. Keep tweaking the data streams so you can maintain the health of your mass transit lines. AVs are not going to replace mass transit for moving massive amounts of people in and out of urban cores during peak hours; it will be important to maintain these even after AVs arrive. However, the greater the role that 3rd-party mobility providers begin to play in a city’s transportation network, the more important getting the appropriate data from them will become — and the more important it will become to make sure this data is fed into the right systems and processes within the city and its planning. If the data that you are getting at the beginning of a public-private partnership is not giving you what you need, push to get it. Certain mobility providers are very zealous of protecting their data, but they are generally more concerned about having access to operate where and how they want, so you can trade with them on items of unequal value.

I promised one thing that cities can do right now to get ready for the coming of AVs that was not in LA’s Transportation Technology Strategy, and here it is: spend time in your local tech community, aka your startup community. Get to know these people, how they think, how they build things. Develop relationships on which you can call when you have some questions about transportation tech. Learn about their best practices, particularly Lean Startup and Customer Development, and consider how you might apply them to any innovation work you do, digital or not. This will obviously be much easier if you live in San Francisco or New York, but almost anywhere you go these days you can find a tech startup community with a regular calendar of events.

You might think that you will be totally out of place, but the startup community is incredibly social, warm, and welcoming to anyone who comes with genuine interest and curiosity, rather than trying to make a quick buck. An ethos of helping each other out, of paying it forward, of expanding the pie rather than fighting over how to divide it prevails(we are lucky that growth has enabled that). Plus, transportation technology is hot right now, so you might even find yourself in demand. But, if you’re still unsure, you can always drop me a line!