WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 25: Driver John Scott transports commuters along the Georgia Avenue route ... [+]
“It used to be you got excited when you cut five minutes off the time for a bus route,” said one transit planner speaking yesterday at the small “Impact Mobility” conference in San Diego which brought city officials and new mobility companies together. Now, with scooter micromobility on one side, self-driving vehicles and on-demand services in vans and cars, their world is changing at what to them is a dizzying pace. It’s not so dizzying for the companies trying to build these technologies, who are in a dance with cities and regulators to carry out their plans as quickly as they can.
Transit and city officials see the world through a transit and infrastructure lens, as would be expected. It’s their job to do so, but the new 21st century transportation technologies are unlikely to be the first and last mile for the 19th and 20th century transit technologies in our cities today. Instead, they will rewrite those rules, with both good, bad, and bad eventually transforming into good results.
I was impressed, though, to see transit planners embracing “on demand” van and minibus transportation, though mostly through the last-mile lens. They are now sometimes calling this “microtransit” but you know it by names like UberPool and LyftLine. For transit planners, acceptance of on-demand (instead of scheduled, fixed route transportation) began with the mandate under the Americans with Disabilities Act to provide “paratransit” for the disabled. Though horribly expensive (an average of $30/trip) and inefficient, paratransit services are usually delivered with (sort of) on-demand accessible vans, often contracted out to private companies.
Now, some cities are using on-demand services from companies like Via and First Transit for ordinary commuters. At present, these remain like UberPool, though in a larger vehicle and subsidized by the transit agency. The vans drive to or near to customers who have requested a ride, like jitney services of old. Done well, vanpooling is the most efficient form of public transportation in the USA, though typically that involves longer distances and people working at the same company or nearby companies.
It was refreshing to see transit planners realize that buses are highly inefficient and start looking at more solutions.
Cities vs. Scooters
The battle continues between cities and micromobility scooter companies like Bird, Lime, Uber/Jump and others. More cities have recently pushed back, limiting the number of scooter companies or the number of scooters they can have, and instituting permitting processes. The scooter companies now all have government relations departments, and are trying to avoid getting too much regulation. As is usual in these situations, some of the incumbents actually welcome regulations which can make it harder for new entrants.
Companies like Bird and Lime are wary of fixed caps on the number of scooters, which many cities want to stop what they see as an oversupply of scooters leading to crowded sidewalk parking. The companies now accept this, but recommend the limits not be fixed, but be based on utilization – ie. a company can deploy only so many scooters as to assure an average of 2 rides/day/scooter.
The scooter rush has led to a call by cities to get data from scooter companies on how scooters are being used. Los Angeles has even defined a standard format for that data. Some cities are demanding the data in real time and in great detail, which brings up privacy concerns. (While the privacy concerns are real, one has to suspect the sudden belief in privacy by the scooter companies has more motives than simply protecting consumer privacy.) Real time data would disclose fairly proprietary secrets of the big players. I have to say that the cities can probably do fine for their planning purposes with aggregated, delayed data.
MobilEye shows stupid city success
MobilEye showed off a new product which was created as a byproduct of their robocar mapping system, known as REM. In order to build maps for self-driving, MobilEye is taking advantage of the fact their cameras are in millions of existing cars, and getting cars to report on changes to the road environment as they drive by. MobilEye is now offering that to cities, providing detailed and constantly updated maps of city infrastructure which many cities don’t have. Nexar, a dashcam company, is producing a similar offering.
MobilEye’s offering is tracking not just cars but pedestrian flow on streets, and also the frequency of “near misses” and other safety incidents which don’t go recorded because nothing serious happens. They are able to map streets according to their safety levels
MobilEye tool evaluates roads based on risk and event history for city planners.
These products are a great example of the principle I advocate of the “stupid city.” As the term “smart city” caught on, many people imagined that we want to make the cities and infrastructure “smart,” which is to say, we should add computing, sensing and connectivity everywhere we can in the infrastructure. This is actually the wrong plan. Infrastructure changes on a scale of decades, while vehicles change on a scale of years and phones on a scale of months. Many cities made huge an expensive plans to instrument their roads to measure traffic, then Waze did it in every city in the world for free. The smart vehicles driving the stupid roads not only can do most of the jobs better and at much lower cost, they also are constantly improving, with new generations at regular intervals. No matter how smart your infrastructure plan is, it’s going to be beaten by the fast-improving mobile technologies. This is yet another lesson.
The author is invested in a stealth scooter company
