For this fifth episode of our “Meet our Scientific Committee” series, we interviewed Nigel Jacob.
Nigel Jacob is the co-founder of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a civic innovation incubator and research and development lab within Boston City Hall. He was also an Urban Technologist in Residence at Living Cities, a philanthropic collaboration of 22 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions, is currently a board member of organizations such as Code For America and coUrbanize, and is an executive in residence. at Boston University.
Could you present New Urban Mechanics?
The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is Boston’s civic innovation research and design team. Our job is to look for new ideas and to explore new concepts improving the quality of life for Boston residents.
In New Urban Mechanics the theory of change, the model, is that for local governments to be able to adapt to a changing world and invent ourselves into the future, we need to be able to explore through prototyping. We need to be able to explore possible futures for our city and we do that by trying different things, by doing experimental prototypes to test everything from new models of community governance to new approaches to public education, transportation, etc.
Do you have an example of a project that has been scaled up?
Just to give a specific example, a few years ago the Transportation Department came to us and said that they wanted to explore the role that autonomous vehicles would play in our city. It is not immediately obvious how things would change, and they wanted to understand how it would impact public transport and lots of different topics. We pretty quickly reached out to the start-up and research communities in the Boston area to understand different approaches and eventually we were able to prototype some technologies on the road. The challenges with this were and are that the Federal government at the time was not giving any regulatory oversight to cities and states and how they were giving oversight to the autonomous vehicle market. The state was in a position where they do not technically have the legislative right to be able to do that either but we control the roads in the City of Boston so we knew at the end of the day that we had the highest leverage to explore the unknown territory. Starting from that, because we get to issue the permits for new kinds of vehicles to be tested on the roadway, we worked with the state to essentially trade with temporary permits, which they would sign-off on, and we could issue. Again, the Federal government really did not have a lot to do with it and so we were then able to enter into a collaboration between the State Department of Transportation, several start-ups in the Boston area that at the time were MIT spin-offs, and our Transportation Department to explore the transportation future of Boston, with an eye towards how these new technologies would impact the lives of our residents.
A project related to this work is Go Boston 2030. Could you tell us more about this initiative?
It is like a foundational component to this work. When Mayor Walsh took office in 2014 one of the first things he wanted to do was come up with a strategic vision for Boston. He developed a two-layered model, one being an overall cross-city strategic plan, which is called Imagine Boston 2030, and then to have components of this within certain verticals, housing, infrastructure, and transportation. The transportation part of that was called Go Boston 2030, primarily led by the Department of Transportation for the City of Boston, but which we supported in some of the community outreach. Essentially, it was incredibly useful to have that as a starting point so that whenever one of these start-ups approaches us, we have a document that gives our starting place and frames our initial set of interests. When somebody comes to us with one of these new pitches we say, please take a look. Whatever it is we are sure it will be interesting but please take a look at our transportation goals and then try to find opportunities for an intersection. No one has resisted that and I think it is actually useful to have the sort of design constraints for these start-ups as they think about deploying in Boston or any city.
In this project, you had a lot of deliberations with multiple stakeholders. Could you explain how you created a kind of social contract around autonomous or augmented mobility?
Obviously, we knew that we wanted this to be the people’s plan. We did not want it to be the Mayor’s plan, it was intended to be the vision for the City of Boston by the City of Boston. We used every means at our disposal to have a dialogue with different communities, some of the more interesting parts of the discussion were a question campaign, where we were asking people to imagine the transportation future of the City in short vignettes. We would ask people what a perfect commute would look like and people would give us stories. I attended one of those forums with my son Alexander and he was maybe five or six and the facilitator asked him what he thought about the transportation future. He thought that we should ride cheetahs to work and I thought it was an awesome idea.
We got a lot of really interesting dialogue, we heard very clearly about what people want and what they do not want. They want the transportation future of the City to be equitable, safe, and effective. Those were the top three but then there were a whole set of maybe another 10 elements people wanted. Boston is historically an innovative city so people wanted to say that we should make more room for innovative modes of transport in our city, which suggested a more open-ended approach to technology, vehicles, and business models, etc. That gave us space and a context so then we do not just say, come on in autonomous vehicles and do whatever, we say we want to see how autonomous vehicle systems play into an equitable, safe, and effective transportation future.
We also knew from those dialogues we had with the community that a lot of people were skeptical about autonomous vehicles. They were imagining robots moving around the city and maybe running people over, people were catastrophizing. We knew that autonomous vehicles had a public image problem to some degree and so one of the first things we did as an actor in that process but as you begin the experimentation of autonomous vehicles, we held a robot petting zoo. It was a public forum where we invited a bunch of different manufacturers to public space and invited people to come and kick the tires, sit in them and take short trips of one or two meters and just ask a lot of questions. There were engineers surrounding it and they could respond to the questions, etc. I think that both groups of people, the engineers, and the technology folk, and the timid learned a lot from each other. A lot of people had questions about how these vehicles would be able to move alongside pedestrians, bicycles, etc. It was a good experience and the device manufacturers were very open about what they are good at and what they are not good at. I remember an interesting conversation about communication between pedestrians and vehicles. In Boston pedestrians, cyclists and drivers communicate through visual cues. People will look or they might get rude gestures too but there is a lot of communication happening so people wanted to know how that would work in this realm so we had a really rich dialogue about what is possible, what would and what would not work. It was a really great experience.
