Urban parley to focus on commuter trends

BuroHappold Engineers around the theme of “Connected and Autonomous Vehicles.” At the exercises, participants were asked to come up with ways to solve problems such as neighborhood changes as a result of increased dependence on self-driving vehicles.

“At the core of all this is how the places are going to work for people,” said Ray Gastil, city planning director. “This summit should show how we develop policy to lead to the type of urban core we want.”

Two areas the summit won’t consider are how cities should react to the decline in revenue from parking fees and traffic tickets and what will need to be done to retain workers who lose jobs as drivers and parking attendants as a result of the shift to shared and selfdriving vehicles. Those issues are better left for groups such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Mr. Gastil said.

One change Mr. Bogle expects with a growing reliance on self-driving vehicles is a move away from suburbs and back into urban areas as a nod to the need for sustainability. A question the summit will try to address is whether public policy should go out of its way to push a return to urbanization or “let the marketplace come to its own solution,” he said.

“Density and sustainability are pretty compatible. Sprawl and sustainability aren’t compatible,” he said.

For the summit, experts will be divided into three groups to deal with public policy, use of public space and the effect on people and where they will live. The groups will report back on Friday for open discussion on their recommendations, and the architectural foundation is expected to issue a report with a national framework in early June.