Public Space

How much shared scooter parking is needed to meet demand and reduce noncompliant parking? Drawing on Lime data from a dozen cities in the US and Europe, this report provides three key planning and policy recommendations for cities to consider as they work to integrate scooters into the overall transportation system:

Many studies have noted that denser and more accessible environments with higher level-of-service (LOS) tend to encourage higher levels of walking and bicycling activity. As streets are increasingly designed to facilitate safe cycling through built environment interventions, little has been done to evaluate perceptions of safety on different typologies, particularly one vs. two-way corridors. Theory would suggest that many individuals frame their commutes based in-part on the perceived safety of the environment, yet little research looks at varying street design and this perception. This study uses a moving camera approach to evaluate the perceived cycling comfort for drivers and cyclists on different roadway designs (multi-lane, one way; two-way, bidirectional street; single-lane, one-way).

This study aims to quantitatively estimate the environmental benefits of bike sharing. Using big data techniques, we estimate the impacts of bike sharing on energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOX) emissions in Shanghai from a spatiotemporal perspective.

Zipline, the drone-delivery startup that sends medical supplies to hospitals in Rwanda, has expanded into Ghana and has plans to continue into India and North Carolina.

Cities around the world are beginning to prioritize people over vehicles by closing major streets to traffic and opening them up to pedestrians, cyclists, public transit.

Since John Bela and his collaborators installed the first temporary park on a parking space in San Francisco in 2005, Park(ing) Day has become a global event.

The city of Tainan, Taiwan has plans to demolish an abandoned mall and transform it into a public park.

Columbus Commons is a six-acre public park in downtown Columbus, Ohio that replaced a former shopping mall, and has transformed the downtown into a walkable community.

San Francisco’s emerging trend of transforming parking spots into “parklets” has sparked residents, businesses and nonprofits from around the city to come up with creative ways to turn parking into public space.

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.

GM's Cruise is working towards making an efficient, safe, and affordable new transportation mode. Self-described as "what you'd build if there were no cars," Cruise creates an experience geared towards the rider.

The goal of this white paper is to consider the impact of AVs on municipal budgets. AVs create a “potential rat’s nest of a budgeting challenge.” This paper seeks to begin the process of untangling that rat’s nest, and provide the foundation for future phases of the project that will consider potential additional revenue sources to fund the infrastructure changes that may come from the integration of AVs as well as land use planning implications.

Resources designed for people who will be conducting community engagement activities in the context of enhancing mobility and public space to co-create more vibrant, healthy, and equitable communities.

This policy paper focuses on the primary concept of the street as space that can be repurposed – real estate that can be allocated in similar or different ways than done currently. Cities generally refer to this publicly owned and regulated space from one side of the street to the other as the right of way (ROW). Our focus is on the centrality of the ROW in dictating many other community functions and values – transportation and otherwise. And our particular bias is to focus on the opportunities that AV technology is likely to create to rethink how the ROW is allocated, so that our communities can meet their substantial and unique environmental, social, and economic challenges.

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.

A new era of shopping centers is upon us. They’re beginning to look and function less like traditional malls and more like lifestyle centers with a strong community vibe.

"Mobility Plan 2035 (Plan) provides the policy foundation for achieving a transportation system that balances the needs of all road users. As an update to the City’s General Plan Transportation Element (last adopted in 1999), Mobility Plan 2035 incorporates “complete streets” principles and lays the policy foundation for how future generations of Angelenos interact with their streets."

"This paper provides a review of scenarios on these issues to date. Although some scenario studies provide useful insights about urban growth and change, very few consider detailed impacts of AVs on urban form, such as the density and mix of functions, the layout of urban development and the accessibility of locations, including the distance to transit."

With this paper, RMI hopes to (1) offer cities and other mobility and built environment stakeholders an experimentation toolkit that puts them in a position to more quickly unlock the full potential of new mobility in cities designed to shape and enable it, and (2) engage stakeholders in further codeveloping and exploring a concept for living, flexible, and collaborative experimentation sites we’re calling MOD Cities.

On May 10, 2017, Mayor William Peduto charged 120 National Summit on Design & Urban Mobility delegates with the following challenge: “we must develop and carry-out a new social compact for mobility in cities. Now is the time to address mobility to ensure that we serve and support core community values of equity, inclusiveness, sustainability, and collective advancement. A social compact with shared and autonomous mobility providers ensures that these services do good for communities while these businesses do well in cities.

In 2012 UN-Habitat presented to the world the notion of city prosperity, which implies success, wealth, thriving conditions, and wellbeing, as well as opportunity for all. Cities that foster infrastructure development, environmental sustainability, high productivity, quality of life, and equity and social inclusions are considered prosperous cities, Building on the notion of prosperity, UN-Habitat emphasizes that for a city to be prosperous, it must have a generous and well-designed street pattern. In this report, UN-Habitat advocates for a holistic approach to streets as public spaces that embraces the concept of livability and completeness. A good street pattern boosts infrastructure development, enhances environmental sustainability, supports higher productivity, enriches quality of life, and promotes equity and social inclusion.

Everyone—from ride-hailing cars to delivery trucks to bikes and scooters—wants a piece of the curb. How can smart cities map and manage this precious resource?

With Mayo Clinic defining its landscape, Rochester has always been a place where health is front-and-center. But a primary goal for the Destination Medical Center is to transform Rochester into America’s City for Health where residents and visitors will, literally, walk the walk when it comes to wellness. The Design Guidelines that the Design Center at the University of Minnesota has developed with the staff of the City of Rochester and the Destination Medical Center show, in very specific and concrete terms, how to achieve that goal.

This paper provides examples of how cities have successfully changed curb use to support transit. It is focused on the types of busy, store-lined streets where high-ridership transit lines often struggle with reliability. These key curbside management strategies support reliable transit and safer streets in one of two ways: either by directly making room for transit, or supporting transit projects by better managing the many demands on the urban curb.

First came e-bikes, then scooters. Now the District is adding mopeds to the mix of micromobility services available in the nation’s capital. Looking forward, they are focused on luring electric tricycles (trikes) and e-cargo bikes to the city. D.C. transportation officials say they’re open to testing whatever happens to be the next big thing in transportation technology.

In the 1960s, countercultural icon Timothy Leary popularized the phrase, "turn on, tune in, drop out," to describe the idea of using LSD and other psychedelic drugs to detach from society and achieve a higher level of thinking. Later in his life, he argued that the personal computer was the "LSD of the 1990s"—at that time having no inkling how much automation and augmented reality would play in our society, or how autonomous vehicles might change the way we connect with others. Might automated vehicles (AVs) be one of the ways that humans "tune in, turn on" and disconnect for the next few decades?

As more people make the shift to sustainable mobility options like e-scooters, cities are evolving their transportation infrastructure to combat car dominance and to allow human-scaled modes to thrive. In addition to creating dedicated spaces for people to ride shared micro-mobility devices, this transition also includes creating space for them to park when not in use. To explore how cities should think about parking and micro-mobility, Bird sat down for a conversation with parking expert Donald Shoup.

Segway-Ninebot Group, a Beijing-based electric scooter maker, "unveiled a scooter that can return itself to charging stations without a driver, a potential boon for the burgeoning scooter-sharing industry.