E-Commerce

While Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers futuristic and automated passenger and cargo transport options, its impact on city goals remains uncertain due to limited scalability, high costs, and infrastructure challenges. A prioritization of proven solutions and the use of UAM as a supplementary tool may have the potential to address city objectives such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, relieving traffic congestion, ensuring equitable access, and improving mobility options.

The Knight Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Initiative is a multi-year collaborative effort between the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, Cityfi, the cities of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and San José, and Miami-Dade County (the “cohort”) to pilot and learn about automated mobility technologies today to shape the future of deployment tomorrow. This cohort partnered with Kiwibot to learn more about a new technology—sidewalk delivery robots. Through this partnership, Kiwibot tested different use cases and collaborated on community engagement opportunities in each locale. Given the proliferation of bills being passed by state legislatures legalizing deployment of personal delivery devices (PDDs) or sidewalk robots, and the increased delivery demand due to the pandemic, the pilots were well timed to able to meaningfully inform the cohort cities about the potential benefits and challenges of sidewalk delivery robots.