Kicking off today in Portland, Ore., is the first-ever National Urbanism Next Conference 2018.
Mobility Lab, a media sponsor for the conference, interviewed Nico Larco, who is co-director of the University of Oregon’s Sustainable Cities Initiative, which created the event.
Mobility Lab: What was the niche that you all discovered in which you found there to be a need for this conference?
Nico Larco: About two year ago, a number of us here at the University of Oregon got interested in what we call the secondary impacts of autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, and the sharing economy on cities – an area we call “Urbanism Next.”
What we found is that while there were numerous conferences and much research around the technologies themselves and there were starting to be great conferences and research around the impacts on transportation (such as Three Revolutions, Shared Use Mobility, and TRB), there seemed to be nothing that focused on how these emerging technologies where going to be impacting things like land use, land valuation, urban design, municipal and state finance, and pressures on sprawl – to name only a few key issues.
The more we looked into these issues, the more we started to understand the cascading impacts these emerging technologies were going to have on communities throughout the country and, frankly, started to become tremendously concerned about the lack of general understanding about these issues.
This created a high level of motivation to gather, create and organize research and bring together the people who were doing research in these areas. In that gathering, we reached out to people in the American Planning Association, the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Urban Land Institute and found that as they became aware of these secondary impacts, they were equally concerned and shared our desire to gather thought leaders from around the country to help push the thinking around these topics.
What are the first real-world changes we’ll see as early as this year?
We are already seeing the impacts of changes to our transportation system. The largest one is from transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber, Lyft, Chariot, and Via. The growth of these models has skyrocketed. To give you an idea, in just over a year-long period, the number of TNC rides in the New York Metro region tripled (yes, tripled) to half a million trips per day. And that was back in January of 2017. According to great research coming out of California, these TNC trips are replacing bike, pedestrian, and transit trips, and are increasing congestion and increasing vehicle miles travelled.
And this is only a weak outline of what we will experience with autonomous vehicles. We often say TNCs are exactly like AVs. It is just that they happen to have drivers in them for now. What we mean by that is that the models of how we use TNCs – a car comes when we call it, picks us up, and then goes and does something else – is exactly the model for AVs. As AV technology becomes available on our streets (and GM and Waymo have said they are pointing towards ridesharing fleets without any drivers at all – level 4 automation – available by next year!), the impacts we are already seeing from TNCs will just skyrocket.
One of the truly paradigm-shifting issues with this is that these trips reduce the need for parking. That is clear from parking use reported by airports and is now starting to be seen in cities. Some reports show that, as we continue down this path with growing use of TNCs and the advent of AVs, parking needs will reduce to 10 to 15 percent of what they are today. Those changes will completely change the face of our cities, as urban areas can become densified or filled with parks, development projects pencil out easier (because they don’t need to carry the cost of parking), on-street parking can be turned to other uses, and suburban strip malls invite new development into the 40 to 50 percent of land currently used for parking.
Unfortunately, this will also lead to potentially negative consequences. What happens when parking, the largest single land use in most U.S. cities (in terms of surface area) is all of a sudden available for development. That is a tremendous increase in land supply at the same time that the added ease of transportation expands suburban development and sprawl further into the periphery – adding more land supply to cities. Property values are sure to drop, and along with it the property taxes cities rely on. This could be disastrous to municipal budgets.
Will the responsibility of public spaces (particularly streets, sidewalks, and transit areas) begin to fall under private control (since Uber, bikeshare, and other systems continue to expand) more than under the traditional scenario of public, government control? I ask this mainly because we seem to be seeing a shift in the formula for infrastructure funding under the Trump Administration’s just-announced plan.
This would be disastrous. Privatizing roads and sidewalks will create perverse incentives and behaviors that my guess is would not be equitable and would not end well. Cities – in the face of the challenges that are about to arrive – need to do just the opposite of privatizing roads and instead, as Jeff Tumlin of Nelson\Nygaard always states, cities need to start understanding that they own the operating environments for these new transportation technologies – the streets. Because this precious resource is controlled by cities, those cities have tremendous leverage to make sure any new technologies serve community goals as they serve any private interests. This will be critical in shaping the future of cities.
You’ve done some work on retail and warehousing shifts occurring because of the changing transportation landscape. With this research, what do you think has been under-reported so far by the mainstream press and could become a big issue?
With e-commerce I would say two things – the first is the holes that vanishing brick-and-mortar stores are going to be leaving in our communities. Last year there were nearly 7,000 store closings in the U.S. – more than ever in our history – and that happened during a thriving economy. With the continued growth of e-commerce, these closings will only continue to grow. What happens when our cities lose 20, 30, 40 percent of our retail spaces? What happens with the blight that brings on? What happens to the loss of jobs and the loss of property and sales taxes associated with that? That will be a large issue to deal with.
The second potential trend I think we should be paying attention to is a possibility of a whole new model of mobile retail. Concepts like Toyota’s e-Pallet offer the opportunity not only for e-commerce to lead to automated delivery, but that we start to see mobile stores coming around our neighborhoods. I could have one show up to my door with 50 pairs of shoes in my size. Or shelves full of fruit I would like to pick through. Or any other commodity that is not working as efficient with e-commerce because we want to touch, see and feel that item. Transportation and land use might become even more linked than we already think of as the land uses themselves become mobile.
Mobility Lab focuses on transportation demand management. Along those lines, do you think there’s much hope that people in the U.S. will truly be able to break their drive-alone habit, and what content or ideas in this conference do you think could be most promising in having a chance in contributing to that?
I do think this is possible for three reasons – first, as we look at future AV-infused scenarios of our cities and communities, the outcomes we will have if we maintain our drive-alone habits are not desirable. More congestion, more energy use, more impacts on our environment, less of the places we all want to spend time. Impacts of AVs will make our current levels of congestion and transportation headaches seem light and dreamy. This will hopefully be enough to get us to rethink how we want to move – and critically – the incentives we use to shape that behavior.
Second, we do not need to change your mind, or mine, or the minds of most of the people who will be reading this article. We are dinosaurs. The question will be what my seven-year-old will want. If he grows up with “mobility as a service” and a range of more affordable, pleasurable options, it is hard to believe we will stick to our current model of travel. Look at who is using Uber and Lyft today – look at who is using uberPool and Lyft Line. The younger generation is much more flexible and open to options than we might be.
Finally, there is a strong economic incentive away from this. We are somehow okay with putting a tremendous amount of capital into something that we use only 5 percent of the time and only at 20 percent of its full capacity only because of the convenience it provides. As models develop that give us similar, not same, but similar levels of convenience at a fraction of the price, it is hard to believe we won’t react to that. It is just starting to happen with shared-ride models and I think we are early in the development and adoption of these, but the economic incentive for Uber and Lyft to shift to shared rides is too strong to write off.
Anything else you would like to add?
We always say – AVs are not a transportation issue – they are an everything issue. They will be affecting all parts of our lives and our cities and will be as game-changing and impactful as cars were when they were first introduced.
It is important that we understand and share this thought because, first of all, it is true and we need to understand the range of impacts. But secondly, we will need a broad coalition of support and political will to build the necessary knowledge and make good decisions for our communities.
Change is coming and we need to be ready.
Photo by Roland O’Daniel/Flickr.