Public Attitudes

This article details a study done in the neighborhood of Rosslyn in Arlington, Virginia to understand the relationship between e-scooter riders and non-riders in terms of e-scooter parking and pedestrian safety.

This report explores how smart mobility technologies can address the current and future needs of transportation disadvantaged communities. It looks at the barriers different communities experience regarding access to smart mobility technologies, and potential solutions to overcoming these barriers.

Food delivery service Postmates is building delivery robots to reduce reliance on vehicles. This endeavor faces many of the same challenges as autonomous vehicles, such as safety and public perception.

This report outlines the factors contributing to Millennial homeownership, explaining why their preferences differ from previous generations'.

A survey of adults in the U.S. found that there are generational differences in travel preferences.

This resource studies whether mobility as a service (MaaS) can be used to promote shared modes. Initial results from surveys showed that MaaS bundles can be used as a tool to introduce more travelers to shared modes.

This article examines bicyclists’ travel behavior for transportation and for recreational purposes based on preferences, physical and social environmental factors, and perceived safety.

The owners of a parking garage in downtown Boston have proposed constructing a 20-story tower on top of the existing parking structure.

San Francisco’s “parklet” trend of transforming parking spots into small public spaces has mixed reviews among residents. Some people think that they are provide spaces for neighborhoods to come together, while some believe they exacerbate gentrification.

This article discusses an experiment conducted to investigate the factors contributing to travel mode choice. The experiment found that subjects were more inclined to chose cars over other forms of transportation, even when another form of transportation might have been more ideal based on cost or travel time. This demonstrates the concept of car stickiness, where travelers are heavily biased towards traveling in cars over other forms of transportation.

This is a survey of 3,000 adults in the top 50 metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. about the quality of life in their communities.

This report summarizes the major assumptions, predictions and forecasts that have been made for autonomous vehicles. It emphasizes their impact and takes focus on the effects it will have on previously immobile people and what it will take to integrate them legislatively.

A shortened version of the Scenario Game that allows you to experience future mobility changes from a variety of perspectives. Free to download and make your own version.

The Future of Mobility Scenario Game is a role-playing game that allows practitioners, communities, and anyone who wants to play it to experience the future of mobility in a city from different perspectives.

Fluicity is a citizen engagement solution that allows collective decision making around topics of general interest.

Card game to engage citizen in the participatory budgeting process.

This report contains findings from all of the community engagement the City of San Antonio conducted during its six-month Dockless Vehicle Pilot Program which began on October 19, 2018.

"Seven companies operating electric scooters in Chicago have been fined by the city for not living up to the terms of their pilot program contract."

Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs.

This article describes the changing driving landscape in New York City. The city is making efforts to return the streets to the people and also optimize public transportation options. The pushback is steep again the community where the traffic is being pushed as well as with the business owners.

In working with Waterfront Toronto, the public entity that owns the land, to develop Quayside, Sidewalk Labs would reimagine urban life in five dimensions—housing, energy, mobility, social services, and shared public spaces—with an aim to “serve as a model for sustainable neighborhoods” around the world.

"To gauge the opinions of everyday Americans on this complex and far-reaching topic, the survey presented respondents with four different scenarios relating to automation technologies. Collectively, these scenarios speak to many of the hopes and concerns embedded in the broader debate over automation and its impact on society. The scenarios included: the development of autonomous vehicles that can operate without the aid of a human driver; a future in which robots and computers can perform many of the jobs currently done by human workers; the possibility of fully autonomous robot caregivers for older adults; and the possibility that a computer program could evaluate and select job candidates with no human involvement."

Nashville faces one of the biggest votes to date, a plan to approve or deny a $5.4 billion plan to overhaul the current transit system.

This is an overview of how the Portland Climate Action Plan was revised to include the equitable disparities that existed in the first one. It lays out the process strategies, budget considerations, and people that were involved and brought along for the process.

This article briefly outline the success of upgrades made to a bus line in the Twin Cities. So far ridership has increased 30%.

Transit bus automation could deliver many potential benefits, but transit agencies need additional research and policy guidance to make informed deployment decisions. Although funding and policy constraints may play a role, there is also a reasonable unwillingness to risk public funding or to undertake new operational models without a full understanding of the approach or without federal leadership and guidance. The purpose of this report is to define a five-year Strategic Transit Automation Research Plan that will establish a research and demonstration framework to move the transit industry forward. Key components of the Plan include conducting enabling research, identifying and resolving barriers to deployment, leveraging technologies from other sectors, demonstrating market-ready technologies, and transferring knowledge to the transit stakeholder community.

This article discuss the reasons for Seattle's success in transit ridership increase in terms of transit service, mode prioritization, and traffic management.

CityLab is launching Bus to the Future that puts public coaches at the center of the transportation future. It also plan to look at how technology can improve bus fundamentals. Automation (combined TNCs) could also transform surface transit.

Warren Logan, a Bay Area transportation planner, has new ideas about how to truly engage diverse communities in city planning. Hint: It starts with listening.

Lawyers of a luxury condo in New York City have been brought into the debate surrounding the construction of a new bike lane that over took city parking in front of the condos.

"With this white paper, we hope to explore the rapidly changing and disruptive nature of micromobility, and provide city officials useful information to deploy micromobility options in a safe, profitable and equitable way. We begin by defining micromobility and exploring the recent history of docked and dockless bikes and e-scooters. We then explore the challenges and opportunities facing cities, and illustrate a few examples of cities that are addressing these issues head-on. We conclude with a set of recommendations cities can consider as they work to regulate these new mobility technologies."

This article discusses the changes that will be necessary once AVs hit our streets. The changes in insurance policies, jobs, land use, etc. will change our societal norms.

The aim of this paper is to make an overview of the business models of the companies developing AVs for Last-Mile Delivery (LMD) of goods and to find out what is the attitudes of the online customers towards using AVs for delivery of their goods.

This article mentions the visible downfall of malls and large stores like Sears and Toys R Us, but it highlights how these stores have impacted individuals and their stories from growing up visiting them.

This whitepaper helps to stimulate debate over the proper way to introduce autonomous vehicles into society, with a hope that it leads to greater collaboration among all stakeholders about how to tackle the issue of congestion in autonomous future.

In theory, e-commerce can be greener than a bunch of shoppers making personal trips in their own cars: Consolidating products and delivering them on one route to a bunch of homes requires fewer miles on the road. However, that calculus changes significantly if items are coming from further away and have to be sent immediately, which creates fewer opportunities for lumping deliveries together.

A plan to develop a data standard for technology that could monitor and manage various mobility services has raised privacy fears.

In 2013, advocates, planners, and policymakers were abuzz with the 10.7 billion rides taken on transit, an all-time U.S. record. Yet the discussion focused too much on the sheer number of rides, without a deep look at the riders themselves, and particularly the changing attitudes that are propelling recent ridership increases. TransitCenter commissioned a survey to take that deeper look. We now have a snapshot into perceptions of transit and neighborhoods in 2014. As Millennials take center stage in American life and the Baby Boom generation confronts retirement, both the transit and real estate industries will have to adjust.

Public transit accounts for only 1% of U.S. passenger miles traveled but nevertheless attracts strong public support. Using a simple choice model, we predict that transit riders are likely to be individuals who commute along routes with the most severe roadway delays. These individuals’ choices thus have very high marginal impacts on congestion. We test this prediction with data from a sudden strike in 2003 by Los Angeles transit workers. Estimating a regression discontinuity design, we find that average highway delay increases 47% when transit service ceases. This effect is consistent with our model’s predictions and many times larger than earlier estimates, which have generally concluded that public transit provides minimal congestion relief. We find that the net benefits of transit systems appear to be much larger than previously believed.

"To better understand the emerging area of low-speed automated shuttles, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office (ITS JPO) partnered with the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe) to review the current state of the practice of low-speed automated shuttles. These vehicles share many characteristics with other forms of automated vehicles but include unique considerations in terms of design, operations, and service type, including: fully automated driving (intended for use without a driver); operational design domain (ODD) (restricted to protected and less-complicated environments); low speeds (cruising speeds around 10-15 mph); shared service (typically designed to carry multiple passengers, including unrestrained passengers and standees); and shared right-of-way with other road users, either at designated crossing locations or along the right-of-way itself. This report defines design and service characteristics; discusses the deployers, their motivations, and their partners; and provides information on demonstrations and deployments, both international and domestic. The document also provides context on common challenges and suggested mitigations. Building on all of this information, the document identifies several research questions on topics ranging from safety and accessibility to user acceptance and societal impacts."

Ten years into the race to build self-driving cars, many developers, analysts and even venture capital firms say robot cars won't go mainstream for another decade or more.

As retail went digital, the idea was, physical space would become redundant. But while pivoting to a new digital paradigm hasn’t been easy, the retail industry’s ability to adapt has been notable and impressive. In fact, as cities grow and new hordes of consumers flock to establish themselves in urban communities, opportunities for innovation are emerging that suggest brick-and-mortar may be the pillar of a new retail era." This article primarily talks about the urbanization and the consumer, and the rebirth of brick-and-mortar.

Low wages, lack of career paths and an overwhelming belief among the working public that fast-food jobs should only ever be temporary all contribute to the worsening turnover issues faced by quick-service restaurants. Automation is being explored as an answer.

Meow Wolf started as a loose group of penniless punks coming together as an art collective. Now it’s a multimillion-dollar dream factory thriving in creating installations for the experience economy.

CurbFlow is a new startup that is working to map who uses the curb and when. It is using this data to create a system where delivery companies can pay to reserve a parking space.

Seniors need transportation alternatives more than ever, but many are intimidated by ride-hailing apps." This article explores how transportation network companies are providing transportation options for seniors.

Autonomous vehicles use sensing and communication technologies to navigate safely and efficiently with little or no input from the driver. These driverless technologies will create an unprecedented revolution in how people move, and policymakers will need appropriate tools to plan for and analyze the large impacts of novel navigation systems. In this paper we derive semi-parametric estimates of the willingness to pay for automation. We use data from a nationwide online panel of 1,260 individuals who answered a vehicle-purchase discrete choice experiment focused on energy efficiency and autonomous features. Several models were estimated with the choice micro-data, including a conditional logit with deterministic consumer heterogeneity, a parametric random parameter logit, and a semi-parametric random parameter logit.

As ride hailing and ride sharing grow more common, a new survey offers insights into shifting attitudes and behavior.

For decades, many of the nation’s biggest companies staked their futures far from the fraying downtowns of aging East Coast and Midwestern cities. One after another, they decamped for sprawling campuses in the suburbs and exurbs. Now, corporate America is moving in the other direction.

Alphabet’s self-driving car company Waymo has built the world’s smartest vehicles with access to the world’s best artificial intelligence, but there’s one barrier that it might have underestimated: people.

The next big political fight over data privacy may center on an unlikely piece of technology: The scooters currently flying around streets and scattered on sidewalks in cities across the country.

Autonomous trucking is coming faster than expected—perhaps within five years, according to panelists at the Transportation Research Board’s 96th annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

"Cruise, the startup General Motors acquired to develop its self-driving car, will launch an autonomous taxi service on the gnarly, crowded streets of San Francisco," CEO Dan Ammann said Wednesday. It will not, however, do so by the end of this year, the deadline it set for itself in 2017. Instead, Cruise will spend the rest of 2019 expanding its tests across the city and working on the less technical aspects of running such a service, from charging its electric cars to working with regulators to soothing a public that may be wary of robots roaming the roads.

The introduction of fully autonomous vehicles will constitute perhaps the largest change to everyday transportation in living memory and is predicted to deliver a wide range of environmental, social and economic benefits. However, the route to full automation is also likely to involve significant challenges, with public attitudes playing an important role in determining the level of success with which the technology is introduced. This report outlines the results of a survey of 233 people measuring current attitudes to autonomous vehicles.