Project Feasibility

This report looks at the potential impacts autonomous vehicle deployment could have on parking demand and how that might impact urban development. The study focused on three distinct areas of San Francisco. The research found that, contrary to headlines about AV impacts on parking, achieving large reductions in parking demand based on AV deployment will not be easy. To achieve significant parking reductions, AVs would need to be shared (not privately owned), pooled (riders willing to pick up other passengers along the way), have widespread geographic deployment (across entire metropolitan areas), and would need to complement high-capacity transit. Without all or most of these factors, parking demand may only by marginally impacted by AV deployment. The study also found that if parking demand could be reduced, different areas of the city would see quite different results. While many areas in San Francisco would see minimal development impacts as parking is not currently a significant driver or limiter of development, more auto-dominated areas could see substantial impacts if parking demand could be reduced by more than 40%. This raises interesting questions of how these levels of parking demand reduction might impact more auto-dominated and suburban areas throughout the country. This research was funded by Waymo.

Open source simulation platform for supporting planning and analysis of urban development, incorporating the interactions between land use, transportation, the economy, and the environment.

Urban Footprint provides a cloud-based urban planning software built by urban planners and designers who truly understand planning needs. Service includes actionable data, scenario building, and multi-metric analysis.

Decision-makers guidebook for strategy development, process in planning, procuring and operating policy decisions in transportation.

La Fabrique aims to maximize the chances of success of mobility innovations without providing direct financial support to projects. La Fabrique provides organized resources and partnership opportunities to entrepreneurs.

Free, open source tool that can support presenting budget flows in transport in a particular city through a sankey visualization.

Amazon can now be used for housing - a build-you-own tiny house kit is available online for $7,250.

This article explores the possible motives for online retailers to open up physical stores.

In 2013, eyewear e-commerce pioneer Warby Parker opened its first retail store in SoHo with fairly low expectations. In 2015, that store still occasionally had a line out the door on weekends, and Warby Parker had 12 retail locations across the country, with plans to open seven more before the end of the year. This article explores why the online-native eyewear retailer chose to open so many stores in such a short period of time.

Meal-delivery companies are the ultimate symbol of the most powerful force in business today: convenience maximalism. But it comes with ethical, ecological, and economic costs.

Most of today’s retailers and their supply chain advisors understand the shift in retail sales to the online channel but, for many years, the inclusion of gasoline, groceries, and automobile sales in U.S. retail sales numbers masked the true extent of eCommerce penetration. This is a blog summary of a longer report.

With its 1950s aesthetic intact, Knightley’s Garage is more than a kitschy throwback to the past. Wichita’s repurposed parking facility may actually be an indication of things to come. As personal auto ownership declines in urban downtowns, car-related urban infrastructure is increasingly underused. Some garages, like Knightley’s, are ripe for adaptive reuse. Others are being constructed from scratch in ways that will allow them to be repurposed down the road.

Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to take space in a first-of-its-kind three-story warehouse, a new type of distribution center that could reduce delivery times in congested cities to hours rather than days. While common in densely-populated Asian and European cities, modern warehouses with multiple floors have been absent until recently in the U.S., where higher land and construction costs deterred developers. But now that more retailers are racing to deliver more same-day packages, developers are starting to build the multistory fulfillment centers needed to speed delivery in congested cities.

Robotic parking will be an amenity starting in high-end buildings and becoming standard, like radios in cars, predicts local landlord Brian Veit.