E-Commerce

UAM is promoted as a service that could address a wide-range of city goals from reducing traffic congestion and emissions to improving access to destinations. At the forecast scale, however, trips will remain both too few and too expensive to meet broad city goals. While UAM may offer an exciting and futuristic technological vision, it can also distract attention and resources from proven policies and investments that could realize concrete improvements. For cities planning to pursue scaled UAM services, they should consider scenario planning and implement flexible regulations and plans that can be adapted and updated as understanding of UAM services’ costs, risks, and benefits evolve.

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.