Beyond Streets to Intersections & Districts: Hacking the Design of the Multi-modal Street in the Autonomous Future

3 CM / LU Pending

How can streets be better designed to support emerging and disruptive transportation and logistics? Can these designs be extended to intersections, corridors and districts that support livability and sustainability? During past years, academics and planners have worked to understand how automated vehicles can be integrated onto city streets, and to develop design and policy scenarios to propose aspirational streets of the future. Structured as an interactive workshop, this session will begin with a presentation on the design and policy landscape followed by a dialogue between academics, practicing planners and private sector innovators. Throughout the presentation, participants will be asked to answer questions via an interactive poll that will be used to highlight strengths and weaknesses of future visions as well as hopes and fears of participants. Following this, participants will work in groups to produce design and related policy concepts for intersections and districts. This will be done using a handful of interactive online tools and with the Urbanism Next Rethinking the Street vision as the primary street prototype. Upon extending this prototype, participant groups will list and develop potential designs, policies, financial strategies and near-term actions that can be implemented to achieve these visions. The workshop will conclude with a group discussion led by panelists responding to the ideas and workshop participants reacting to both the presented ideas and the panelists' responses.