2017

For 50 years, American geography and land use has been centered on the personal car. The three revolutions in vehicle sharing, automation and electrification present new challenges and also great opportunities for land use and transportation planners. Absent policy reform, the three revolutions may contribute to more sprawl, but a sustainable planning approach that supports both higher-density development and lower single-occupant (or zero-occupant) driving can once again put people first rather than their cars.

"The aim of this paper is to show how TNCs could replace public transportation in the United States if subsidized at the same level of transit agencies."

EPA webpage briefly outlining the US emissions facts in the transportation field.

Using data from the 2010 to 2014 merged American Community Survey released by the U.S. Census Bureau, this paper estimates the labor market impact of jobs likely to be lost with a rapid transition to autonomous vehicles. The report finds that certain population groups and areas of the country would be disproportionately affected. Finally, we call for policymakers to take immediate steps to offset the potential for harmful labor disruptions.

With so much transportation funding going toward highways, it’s tempting to support any transit investment as a step in the right direction. But not all transit investments will produce service that helps people get where they need to go. To make transit a useful travel option that people want to ride, says TransitCenter, there are three basic goals that officials and advocates should strive for: speed, frequency and reliability, walkability and accessibility.

At 92 million strong, millennials are an economic and demographic powerhouse. They’re also different from every preceding generation since they’ve grown up with personal computers and smartphones. They’re used to a connected world in which information, goods and services are readily available at the click of a button. This millennial mindset is shaping how the tenants of tomorrow are looking for space to live, work and shop and what they expect. In this whitepaper we break down the three most important millennial trends and what they mean for commercial real estate.

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.

“Zombie malls,” as they are known, are increasingly dotting the suburban landscape. The lights are on, the escalators keep moving, but their purpose in life has gone. Burlington Center has less than 20 tenants — including a Sears and a Foot Locker — but once had more than 100.

In this article, we set out to collect the facts and compile CEO quotes to determine the self-driving timelines of the world’s 11 largest automakers. Many businesses and industries will be impacted by the impending transitions in autonomous vehicle tech, and our aim is to put the most relevant facts together for business leaders and auto enthusiasts alike.

A very brief introduction to the impacts that may come with autonomous cars in the future.

Ever since Amazon began selling books online in 1995, retailers — and plenty of other commentators — have been asking what role, if any, physical stores might play in the retail arena. Some have gone so far as to predict the ultimate demise of stores, and others expound the virtues of various hybrid omnichannel solutions. This report explores where things stand in retail in 2017.

This article explores the different ways retailers might engage with their customers in the future as we shift into an evermore digital-physical hybrid world.

We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history. By 2030, within 10 years of regulatory approval of autonomous vehicles (AVs), 95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals, in a new business model we call “transportas-a-service” (TaaS). The TaaS disruption will have enormous implications across the transportation and oil industries, decimating entire portions of their value chains, causing oil demand and prices to plummet, and destroying trillions of dollars in investor value — but also creating trillions of dollars in new business opportunities, consumer surplus and GDP growth.

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?

The purpose of this report is to provide information on TNC activity in San Francisco, in order to help the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (Transportation Authority) fulfill its role as the Congestion Management Agency for San Francisco County. The report is also intended to inform the Transportation Authority board which is comprised of the members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, as well as state and local policy-makers in other arenas, and the general public, on the size, location and time-of-day characteristics of the TNC market in San Francisco.

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.

This briefing document concisely conveys the key findings of NCHRP Research Report 845: Advancing Automated and Connected Vehicles: Policy and Planning Strategies for State and Local Transportation Agencies. NCHRP Research Report 845 assesses policy and planning strategies at the state, regional, and local levels that could influence private-sector automated vehicle (AV) and connected vehicle (CV) choices to positively affect societal goals. The researchers identified and described mismatches between potential societal impacts and factors that influence private-sector decisions on CV and AV technologies. Policy and planning actions that might better align these interests were then identified. Researchers and the project oversight panel identified the promising actions and then conducted in-depth evaluations of the feasibility, applicability, and impacts of 18 strategies.

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

This article is about the development of microtransit. It suggests that microtransit can be the answer to underused, oversized public buses. And the technology such as routing software can improve the services as well.

"The Future of Equity in Cities seeks to take these core issues and forecast the opportunities and challenges to come in cities not just today, but in the decades to come through an analysis of long-range planning, an examination of on-the-ground programming of inclusive economic growth, and by seeking to better understand the public safety challenges that cities will face far into the future."

This report by KPMG discusses how the new market will look like for autonomous future. It talks about transportation market, new customer demand, change of economic models, trip mission, and other market changes.

This report looks to the past to anticipate an uncertain future. It adopts the view of neither the techno-optimist nor the techno-pessimist about the scope and pace of change, instead taking a middle-of-the-road approach to evaluate the impacts of automation on the future of work in Oregon. Regardless of the scenario, Oregon policymakers — and their federal partners — should be preparing an expansive, flexible and focused policy response that can keep pace with rapidly changing conditions.

This article highlights the disaster that could be the continuation of everyone thinking they need their own car for each trip they take and how we need to get serious about expanding the sharing economy.

How safe should highly automated vehicles (HAVs) be before they are allowed on the roads for consumer use? This question underpins much of the debate around how and when to introduce and use the technology so that the potential risks from HAVs are minimized and the benefits maximized. In this report, we use the RAND Model of Automated Vehicle Safety to compare road fatalities over time under (1) a policy that allows HAVs to be deployed for consumer use when their safety performance is just 10 percent better than that of the average human driver and (2) a policy that waits to deploy HAVs only once their safety performance is 75 or 90 percent better than that of average human drivers — what some might consider nearly perfect. We find that, in the long term, under none of the conditions we explored does waiting for significant safety gains result in fewer fatalities. At best, fatalities are comparable, but, at worst, waiting has high human costs — in some cases, more than half a million lives. Moreover, the conditions that might lead to comparable fatalities — rapid improvement in HAV safety performance that can occur without widespread deployment — seem implausible. This suggests that the opportunity cost, in terms of lives saved, for waiting for better HAV performance may indeed be large. This evidence can help decisionmakers better understand the human cost of different policy choices governing HAV safety and set policies that save more lives.

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority will test self-driving shuttles on Treasure Island, as well as introduce a toll system from the Bay Bridge to the island.

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.

This report shows tables of ridership dates and how they compare to the previous year in major US cities and Canada.

This report analyzes traffic impacts from the 2015 implementation of a pilot “road diet” on Lincoln Avenue, in the City of San Jose, California, comparing data on traffic volumes and speeds from before and after the road diet was implemented. The analysis looks at impacts on both the road diet location itself and on surrounding streets likely to have been impacted by traffic diverted off the road diet segment. The results within the road diet zone were as expected, with falling volumes and numbers of speeders. The all-day data aggregated by street type (e.g., neighborhood streets, major streets) showed limited overall negative impacts outside the road diet segment. These summary results do not tell the entire story, however. Individual locations, particularly among the neighborhood streets, saw more noticeable negative impacts. The report ends with recommendations for best practices in designing and conducting road diet evaluation studies.

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.