Planning — May/June 2013

Livability 2.0

How social trends, transportation technology, and a new planning paradigm can create more livable cities.

By Peter Carter and Jerry Walters

One of the most popular attractions at the 1939 World's Fair in New York was an exhibit called Futurama. It was sponsored by General Motors and consisted of an airplane flight (simulated by a conveyor belt) from which spectators looked down on scale models of futuristic cities. With construction of the Interstate Highway System still nearly 20 years away, Futurama offered the public a glimpse of something new: a future in which everyone drove and could travel for miles on roads of seemingly endless capacity made only for cars. Of course, as cities adapted to this dream of freeways and autocentric design, urban life would be transformed.

Today's vision of what lies ahead in the coming decades looks beyond a single defining innovation to a sea change in social trends, mobility services, innovative transit, smart vehicles, and large-scale planning movements. In myriad ways — including parking requirements, trip generation rates, safety accommodations, and aesthetic factors such as traffic signing, building setbacks, and urban design amenities — these phenomena are altering the genetic code of our cities. If we anticipate this future and plan accordingly, we can play an active role in shaping it.

Driven by transportation

After a period of dramatic shifts in the second half of the 20th century, it is likely that auto travel in the 21st century will be moderated by several factors. Baby boomers are aging beyond their peak driving years, and rates for average household size, female labor force participation, and drivers per household are stabilizing. Increasing fuel costs act as a deterrent to driving, and according to research by the U.S. Department of Transportation and others, walking, bicycling, and transit ridership per capita are starting to grow after decades of decline.

Suburban migration trends have also shown signs of reversal, and urban living will likely be the dominant trend in postrecession home ownership. A recent report produced for the Conference of Mayors projects that urban populations will increase by 30 percent over the next 30 years.

Another study, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, found that between 1990 and 2008, central cities in 15 metropolitan regions more than doubled their share of regional building permits.

Planning for transportation infrastructure is primarily influenced by a few primarily autocentric factors: how much people drive (vehicle miles travelled), how much space cars take up when parked, how much space cars need on the road, and how much accommodation is needed for safe interactions among travel modes.

But despite the amount of space devoted to car travel in today's cities, the inefficient use of that space is well chronicled. Most roadway capacity is unused during off-peak hours, and most car trips are made by drivers traveling solo. There are multiple parking spaces for every car, and given typical schedules for residential and commercial uses, each of these spaces is vacant at least half the time. In addition to taking up space, moving vehicles create collision risks for pedestrians, bicyclists, and one another.

But that's changing. Urbanization devised in a way that's complementary with socio demographic trends, generational preferences, and social sharing networks can produce less driving, less parking, more efficient infrastructure, and safer streets. As shown in the 17 Future-Shaping Phenomena matrix, we project that these and other social and technology trends will allow us to fashion safer, more efficient, and more compact transportation infrastructure and more livable urban space in the next two decades.

Research by Fehr & Peers and others has demonstrated that trip generation is directly influenced by development scale, site density, land-use mix, urban design, transit availability, and the location of accessible travel destinations. A forthcoming APA PAS Memo by Jerry Walters, Brian Bochner, and Reid Ewing finds that standard traffic engineering practices that do not account for these factors typically overestimate trip generation by about 35 percent.

So, if we know how to reduce vehicle trips using the existing toolkit of urban planning, can we compound these benefits by integrating planning and technology?

Mobility to go

As technological evolution accelerates and web-based social interactions become more universal and spontaneous, our means of travel will become more networked and responsive to demand. This includes the emergence of integrated mobility services with apps for car sharing and taxis, bike sharing, door-to-door trip planning, least-congested-route guidance, parking occupancy, and peer-to-peer ride sharing.

Car sharing has emerged as a separate phenomenon from traditional car rental for a variety of reasons, including faster transactions (resulting from the preapproval of users), self-service rentals, and smaller sales increments. People who use car sharing instead of owning a car travel more frequently by other modes. Shared cars also reduce space devoted to parking because storage is similarly shared and vehicles are more frequently being driven than left parked.

One of the biggest obstacles to car sharing has been existing vehicle ownership, but car ownership among newly eligible drivers is decreasing. (See "My Car, Your Car" in Planning's May/June 2012 issue.) Teens and 20-somethings are forgoing driver's licenses in greater proportions than the prior two generations, and they're using social networks to share rides, cars, bikes, and scooters.

Chauffeur services have also been affected by the sharing economy. Apps like Lyft and SideCar allow members of the general public to become taxi drivers and offer rides on demand, although the legal status of these services is still evolving. (See "Not Your Daddy's Taxi" elsewhere in this issue.)

Bike sharing has been around for decades, but recent advances in technology have enabled a renaissance of large-scale systems. There are bike-sharing programs in Washington, D.C., New York, Minneapolis, Boston, Salem, Miami Beach, Kansas City, Denver, and Boulder, among others, with plans for many more, including those in Santa Monica, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In dense urban environments where bike ownership rates are low and personal bicycle storage is scarce or cumbersome, bike sharing offers a convenient alternative.

Making it new

Interest in transit as a tool for urban retrofits is evident in the rise of more personalized transit options. In addition to investments in buses, light rail, bus rapid transit, and heavy rail, more than 80 North American cities have built, planned, or considered streetcars as catalysts for downtown development in urban centers. Automated transit networks, which first appeared as podcars in the 1950s, have reemerged as low-energy solutions for medium-distance, medium-capacity trips. Advocates hope that automated vehicle technology will make it possible to deploy on-street ATN service without the cost of guideway construction.

With smartphone apps that allow users to time their arrivals at transit stops, technology has helped people to minimize one of the most irritating aspects of traveling by transit: wait times. Travel apps for drivers that add data layers to the street network are also becoming more prevalent. Data providers are now able to inform travelers not only of current conditions but of expected changes based on recurring events.

For cities, the availability of data means the ability to monitor traffic volumes, speeds, queues, accidents, and evasive maneuvers. Similarly, tracing traveler destinations and route decisions will allow planners and engineers to forecast future traffic patterns, bus system delays, pedestrian concentrations, and bike routing preferences.

New data from these sources will inform simulation models that will help the public and elected officials to visualize their options before making decisions. User-generated content will also be part of the conversation — from the community-based navigation of the app developer Waze to the voluntary geographers of OpenStreetMap (a free worldwide map) to specific projects. One example of the latter is a recent six-month smartphone tracking study of cyclists in Austin, Texas, that recorded data on more than 3,600 bicycle routes. (A similar effort in Charlottesville, Virginia, is described in "Ride, Then Decide" in Planning's December 2012 issue.)

Robots

Vehicle automation is inevitable, although we may barely notice when the fully autonomous vehicle arrives. In the interim, drivers will have become accustomed to the suite of detection and computational capabilities in their cars, from adaptive cruise control and blind spot elimination to collision avoidance and driver attentiveness assurance (including detection of drowsiness and inebriation).

Although adoption of automated parking facilities in the U.S. has been slow, they provide substantial reductions in real estate costs, time spent parking, and damage to vehicles from other drivers. On the street, cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco are installing smart parking meters that flexibly adjust the price of parking to maintain optimal levels of use and reduce cruising by those in search of an available space.

Self-parking capabilities will continue to evolve, from the ability to parallel park (found in some luxury cars today) to cars that will valet-park themselves and return to fetch drivers on demand. Visionaries foresee a future where instead of buying a car and having it sit parked most of the day, people will use their phones to buy rides on demand.

Self-driving, autonomous cars are capturing the imaginations of traffic safety engineers, social welfare advocates, and lawmakers. Some states are weighing the liabilities associated with granting permission for driverless vehicles, while others — Florida, Nevada, and California — have already given the green light.

With full market penetration of vehicles outfitted with cooperative adaptive cruise control and half-second gaps between cars, Steven Shladover and his colleagues at UC Berkeley's PATH research center expect vehicle capacity on freeways to double, reaching about 4,000 vehicles per lane per hour. Instead of simply reacting to external conditions, connected cars will sense changes in acceleration or deceleration several cars ahead in fractions of a second and alter their travel in unison. Shorter following distances will optimize the use of transportation infrastructure, reducing congestion, collisions, energy consumption, and emissions.

From a quality-of-life perspective, the technologies foreseeable in connected cars will facilitate management of traffic speeds; safer interactions among vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists; and more efficient use of available space. It is a traffic engineering truism that roads have a greater capacity to carry traffic at uniform, moderate speeds than at mixed speeds.

Another truism holds that as the design speed of a road decreases, its physical dimensions can be dramatically reduced, resulting in narrower lanes, tighter curves, grades that match the natural topography, and a smaller roadway footprint. Autonomously regulated traffic could also be kept from crossing the speed threshold at which freeways descend into progressively lower throughput.

A new paradigm

We have described 17 phenomena, some emergent and some envisioned, that have the potential to reshape our urban environments. Coupled with a new planning paradigm, these social and technology trends could result in less driving, less parking, more efficient capacity use, and safer streets, creating more livable cities. (See page 14.)

Planners and engineers will want to redraft guidelines for parking codes, multimodal facilities, setback and landscape standards, signing ordinances, level of service criteria, trip generation rates, traffic models, and simulation parameters. We will want to change the criteria we use to design streets and set speed limits to achieve more context-sensitive outcomes. We will want to move quickly, keeping pace with advancing technologies to update the crafting of urban land use and transportation environments with resource efficiency and quality-of-life goals in mind.

Multimodal planning, urban systems data, and freight logistics are three large-scale movements that hint at the magnitude of these future-shaping phenomena. The complete streets movement is evidence that planners and engineers have already begun to reprioritize the use of transportation space. Traffic engineers are considering layered networks that provide community-wide accessibility for all travel modes and multimodal level-of-service criteria that balance comfort and efficiency for pedestrians, cyclists, transit, cars, and trucks.

With "big data" — giant data sets — streaming from mobile devices, transit vehicles, and citywide sensors, planners have access to more information and better tools to simulate their proposals and make better informed decisions.

Freight ton-miles per capita have increased dramatically in recent decades, but nascent trends toward local sourcing and fabrication, shortening supply chains, just-in-time delivery, and 3-D printing are beginning to reduce transporter size and mileage, making it possible to more compatibly integrate goods movement into communities.

The future is now

A year after producing the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair, industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes wrote a book about it called Magic Motorways. Bel Geddes felt that the transportation systems of the time were plagued by insufficient space. He imagined high-capacity roadways as the solution, but he overlooked how much travel behavior and the built environment would change as a result.

He seems to have been unaware of the potential for induced demand to consume newly built freeway lanes, for high design speeds to encourage even faster driving, for a cultural shift away from transit that would lead to a state of functional inadequacy and plummeting ridership, and for pedestrians and cyclists to be intimidated out of many urban environments. Today's traffic and parking inefficiencies come in the form of crushing congestion interlaced with overbuilt emptiness.

Google is at the leading edge of the intersection between data and technology, and it is telling that it is also a transportation innovator. Google's robo-Priuses have traveled (without drivers and without accidents) more than 300,000 miles on city streets, highways, and winding mountain roads. The fast-learning cars know the lay of the land through continually self-updating maps, artificial intelligence-based observation (or emulation) of situational responses by experienced human drivers, and 360-degree vision of road conditions.

Now that the news is out, developers are making a point to calm public interest until the technology is fully tested and ready for widespread use (no sooner than 2017, according to Google's cofounder, Sergey Brin).

We've worked with several major Silicon Valley firms that provide a full suite of transportation services for their employees. One company includes more than 100 Wi-Fi-equipped, door-to-door coach buses serving more than 4,000 long-distance commuters daily, several hundred solar electric vehicle charging stations, and almost 2,000 shared bicycles.

As a result, the company's employees drive to work at less than two-thirds the rate of employees at neighboring businesses. There are also plans to offer a commuter car-share fleet of compact electric vehicles, shared electric bicycles, a ride-sharing app, and (eventually) vehicles that will valet park themselves.

Social trends and technology have considerable potential to reduce auto travel, decrease the space devoted to parking and driving, and improve safety, but realizing this potential will remain a challenge. With urban populations expected to increase by 30 percent over the next 30 years, effectively planning for an efficiently mobile future will require a planning paradigm that operates in harmony with the social and technology trends of the current millennium. n

Peter Carter is a senior transportation planner in the Los Angeles office of Fehr & Peers. Jerry Walters is a Fehr & Peers principal based in Walnut Creek, California.

Resources

Image: Photo by Yana Paskova/New York Times.

Joan Hudson and Jen Duthie, "Using Smartphones to Collect Bicycle Travel Data in Texas," and Denis Eirikis, "Driverless Cars and Long-Range Transportation Planning," both published in the Fall 2012 edition of TPD News (The newsletter of APA's Transportation Planning Division); Walters, Bochner, Ewing, PAS Memo, "Getting Trip Generation Right: Estimating the Bias Against Development" (May/June 2013).

S. Polzin, The Case for Moderate Growth in Vehicle Miles of Travel: A Critical Juncture in U.S. Travel Behavior Trends, U.S. Department of Transportation and Center for Urban Transportation Research, University of South Florida, April 2006; "Residential Construction Trends in America's Metropolitan Regions," 2010 ed., U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, January 2010: www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/pdf/metro_res_const_trends_10.pdf.

U.S. Conference of Mayors, "U.S. Metro Economies Outlook — Gross Metropolitan Product, and Critical Role of Transportation Infrastructure," The Council on Metro Economies and the New American City, prepared by IHS Global Insight, July 2012: http://usmayors.org/metroeconomies/0712/FullReport.pdf; PricewaterhouseCoopers, Emerging Trends in Real Estate, for the Urban Land Institute, 2010; Institute of Transportation Engineers, Planning Urban Roadway Systems, 2011:www.ite.org. Learn more about web-based traffic simulation systems at www.mak.com/labs-about-us.html.