Mobility revolution is ready for boarding
“Every time you expand a freeway, it just fills up with more traffic.” Robert Garcia, mayor of Long Beach, Calif.
AUSTIN — The promise of the transportation revolution is seductive: Computerized cars lead to fewer accidents, shared cars lower expenses, and better public transit lessens traffic.
To take full advantage of this potential, though, cities will need to buy smart traffic signals, install Bluetooth navigation beacons, upgrade buses and trains, and integrate transit systems with ride-hailing services. They’ll also need to worry about the downside of this new technology, because like any revolution, there will be losers.
First, though, let’s look at the problem.
Cities are rapidly expanding, collectively adding a new Manhattan every day. By 2025, 6 billion people will live in cities, and about 8 million of them will be in Houston. Population density is increasing, and there is not enough space for everyone to drive a car to work or around town.
If Houston does not want to end up like New Delhi, where I spent 90 minutes in a cab traveling 10 miles last year, city leaders need to give up on adding lanes and purchase technology that uses our roads more efficiently. In Wednesday’s column I wrote about how internet-connected cars and traffic signals can work more efficiently, but ultimately, cities can’t build enough roads. The best solution may be to reconsider our entire system.
“Every time you expand a freeway, it just fills up with more traffic,” Long Beach, Calif., Mayor Robert Garcia said during a presentation at the SXSW Conference & Festivals in Austin. “We’ve given all of this space to automobiles, so how do you move from that as we focus on multi-
modal transit and autonomous vehicles? How do we reclaim that public space and make it more usable and not just for car traffic?”
The answer mayors chose for the Los Angeles area is to double the rail network, add bike lanes and improve the bus system. In Raleigh-Durham, N.C., the transit system increased ridership 20 percent after it offered a smartphone app that allows people to track their buses in real time.
A tech startup called TransLoc is working with Raleigh-Durham to offer an app that calls a taxi to take you to a train or bus at exactly the right time and then arranges another taxi to take you the final mile to your destination. The app calculates and pays for the entire trip with one click on your phone.
“Most people think buses are unreliable,” Douglas Kaufman, general manager at TransLoc, said. “The more we connect these different modes, and the more transit agencies accept these new technologies that are rider-centric, the more they’ll increase rider trust.”
Computers can use existing roads more efficiently, which is why self-driving technology is critical. While automakers at the conference disagreed on whether self-driving cars will ultimately require tiny and inexpensive Bluetooth beacons to navigate cities, everyone agreed that cities that employ them will get self-driving cars, vans and buses sooner.
The most difficult truth for local politicians to admit, though, is that the only proven way to reduce traffic is to charge people to bring their cars into the city. London uses license plate readers to identify cars operating between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. on workdays and levies a $15 fee. Other European cities are following suit, with some planning to ban all private cars.
American cities will ultimately need to consider congestion charges because greater public transit usage and self-driving taxis will mean lower revenues from gasoline taxes, parking fees and traffic tickets.
“Cities make an enormous amount of money on parking tickets, so this whole paradigm about how these vehicles will change our cities is huge,” Garcia said.
There will also be massive job losses. About 4.5 million people in America work as professional drivers, and many of those jobs will go away. Fewer accidents also mean less work for body shops and insurance adjustors. Electric motors have a third fewer moving parts than internal combustion engines and require little maintenance, hurting the auto-repair business.
The Port of Long Beach already has autonomous cranes and railcars offloading container ships, and soon self-driving trucks will haul the containers out of the port, Garcia said. Job losses are already mounting.
“So much of our economy is ingrained in these middle-class jobs of truck drivers and dockworkers, and now these jobs are in danger,” he said.
President Donald Trump has proposed spending $1 trillion over the next 10 years on infrastructure, but with technology changing fast, city planners need to think more about technology than concrete. Employers will be paying close attention, because they don’t want their workers and goods sitting in traffic and will locate to the most convenient cities.
We also need to worry about our communities. This past election demonstrated the profound frustration felt by those who lost their jobs to technology and trade. How we will help them, and those who will soon lose their jobs to new technology, must be a top priority.
We’d better prepare for the coming changes, because there is no stopping them.