New Mobilities

Smart Planning for Emerging Transportation Technologies

Todd Litman

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642831467
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Transportation & Navigation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

New transportation technologies can expand our world. During the last century, motorized modes increased our mobility by an order of magnitude, providing large benefits, but also imposing huge costs on individuals and communities. Faster and more expensive modes were favored over those that are more affordable, efficient, and healthy. As new transportation innovations become available, from e-scooters to autonomous cars, how do we make decisions that benefit our communities?In New Mobilities: Smart Planning for Emerging Transportation Technologies, transportation expert Todd Litman examines 12 emerging transportation modes and services that are likely to significantly affect our lives: bike- and carsharing, micro-mobilities, ridehailing and micro-transit, public transit innovations, telework, autonomous and electric vehicles, air taxis, mobility prioritization, and logistics management. These innovations allow people to scoot, ride, and fly like never before, but can also impose significant costs on users and communities. Planners need detailed information on their potential benefits and impacts to make informed choices.Litman critically evaluates these new technologies and services and provides practical guidance for optimizing them. He systematically examines how each New Mobility is likely to affect travel activity (how and how much people travel); consumer costs and affordability; roadway infrastructure design and costs; parking demand; land use development patterns; public safety and health; energy and pollution emissions; and economic opportunity and fairness.Public policies around New Mobilities can either help create heaven, a well-planned transportation system that uses new technologies intelligently, or hell, a poorly planned transportation system that is overwhelmed by conflicting and costly, unhealthy, and inequitable modes. His expert analysis will help planners, local policymakers, and concerned citizens to make informed choices about the New Mobility revolution.

Chapter 1

Introduction

If you are shopping for an automobile, you’ll find an abundance of useful information. Numerous websites, magazines, and reports provide practical guidance for evaluating and comparing makes and models. These sources offer detailed information, concerning costs, dimensions, performance, and features, plus ratings and reviews by experts and amateurs. This helps shoppers make informed decisions.

However, if you are trying to evaluate emerging transportation technologies and services, you’ll find much less useful information. Although many websites, magazines, and reports describe these new transportation options, their content is generally less helpful. Most sources consider just a few modes, provide limited information, and are biased. It can be difficult to find comprehensive and objective information on their impacts, or practical guidance for incorporating them into your community’s transportation future.

I wrote this book to help fill that gap. It provides the equivalent of product reviews for twelve New Mobilities, the emerging transportation modes and services listed in Table 1-1. These were selected because they are currently developing and likely to become more important in the future.

The New Mobilities have tantalizing potential. They allow people to scoot, ride, and fly like never before. They can provide large and diverse benefits. However, they can also impose significant costs on users and communities. Decision-makers need detailed information on their impacts.

Table 1-1 New Mobilities Considered in this Book. This book critically evaluates these twelve emerging transportation technologies and services.

Active Travel and Micromobilities. Walking, bicycling, and variations, including small, lower-speed motorized vehicles such as electric scooters, bikes, and cargo bikes.

Vehicle Sharing. Convenient and affordable bicycle, scooter, and automobile rental services.

Ridehailing and Microtransit. Mobility services that transport individuals and small groups.

Electric Vehicles. Battery-powered scooters, bikes, cars, trucks, and buses.

Autonomous Vehicles. Vehicles that can operate without a human driver. Also called self-driving vehicles.

Public Transport Innovations. Innovations that improve transit travel convenience, comfort, safety, and speed.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Navigation and transport payment apps that integrate multiple modes.

Telework. Telecommunications that substitute for physical travel.

Tunnel Roads and Pneumatic Tube Transport. Underground road and high-speed tube transport networks.

Aviation Innovation. Air taxis, drones, and supersonic jets.

Mobility Prioritization. Pricing systems and incentives that favor higher-value trips and more efficient modes.

Logistics Management. Integrated freight delivery services.

This book’s goal is to provide practical guidance for optimizing these emerging technologies and services. It critically evaluates their benefits and costs, examines how they can affect our lives and communities, and discusses how we should prepare in order to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs. It is intended to help you determine whether they should be mandated, encouraged, regulated, restricted, or forbidden in a particular situation. It considers a wider range of goals and perspectives, and applies more comprehensive and systematic analysis, than other comparable publications.

This is a timely issue. Transportation planning decisions affect virtually every aspect of our lives. In the future, households and communities will face countless decisions concerning how to respond to these emerging technologies and services. It is important to make informed decisions based on comprehensive analysis.

Better Planning for a Better World

Much of human progress results from transportation innovations—from walking to wagons, boats, stagecoaches, steamships, trains, automobiles, airplanes, and space travel. New transportation technologies and services expanded our world, extending where we can work, trade, and play, which increased our productivity and improved our lives in countless ways. This progress hasn’t stopped; more innovations are currently under development, from e-scooters to autonomous cars and from navigation apps to e-medicine. What comes next? Moving sidewalks? Jet packs? Flying buses? What problems might they create? How should we prepare?

The twentieth century was the period of automobile ascendency, during which private motor vehicle travel grew, to the detriment of other modes, to dominate our transportation systems and our communities. During the twenty-first century we are likely to see more transportation system diversity. Integrated information technologies will allow travelers to easily navigate myriad connected mobility options. If we are smart, the results will be far more convenient, affordable, inclusive, efficient, healthy, and fun than what we have now.

Of course, predicting the future is fraught with uncertainty. According to forecasts made a few decades ago, current travel should involve moving sidewalks, jet packs, and flying cars, with space travel a common occurrence.¹ General Motors’ 1939 World’s Fair Futurama display predicted that by the 1960s, uncongested, 100-mile-per-hour superhighways would provide seamless travel between suburban homes and towering cities in luxurious, streamlined cars. A 1961 Weekend Magazine article predicted that by 2000, “Rocket belts will increase a man’s stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 mph monorail trains operating in all large cities. The family car will be soundless, vibrationless and self-propelled thermostatically. The engine will be smaller than a typewriter. Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion.”²

The 1969 Plan for New York City stated, “It is assumed that new technology will be enlisted in this improved transportation system, including transit powered by gravity and vacuum and mechanical aids to pedestrian movement, such as moving belts or quick-access shuttle vehicles. These devices almost surely will become available by the end of the century.”

How accurate were these predictions? Where’s your rocket belt? Did you travel today on a moving-belt sidewalk, vacuum-powered transit, or hoppicopter? Most predictions failed, not because the technology is infeasible, but because our priorities changed. Past predictions assumed that our goal is to travel faster, farther, and with less physical effort. In reality, travelers are equally concerned with convenience, comfort, affordability, and health. We often choose slower modes that offer these attributes—for example, walking to local shops rather than driving to regional shopping centers for cost savings, exercise, and enjoyment.

We could travel faster if we were willing to spend more money. In the 1960s motorists paid about four times current inflation-adjusted fuel taxes to finance highway building. Had citizens supported large tax increases or road tolls, we could have even more high-speed highways than we do now. However, there is little public support for new highway investments. Similarly, in the 1960s, governments spent billions of dollars to develop supersonic commercial jets. Concorde supersonic service operated on a few routes between 1997 and 2003, but too few travelers were willing to pay significantly higher fares to save a few hours on intercontinental trips, resulting in the project’s demise.

A new planning paradigm is changing the way we define transportation problems and evaluate potential solutions, in order to better respond to consumer preferences. The old paradigm assumed that our primary goal is to increase mobility. This view favored faster but expensive modes, such as automobiles and air travel, over slower, more affordable and resource-efficient modes such as walking, bicycling, and public transit. A new paradigm recognizes other community goals, such as affordability, social equity, and public health, as well as other perspectives, including the travel demands of people who cannot, should not, or prefer not to drive. The new transportation planning paradigm requires comprehensive and multimodal planning.

New technologies expand the scope of what we can do, but communities must determine what we should do. The New Mobilities can help create a better future, but their benefits are contingent; they depend on how we incorporate them into our communities. Mobility is both precious and dangerous, not to be wasted or abused. If we are smart, these new modes and services can help make the world more efficient and fair. If we are foolish, they can increase waste and inequity. Heaven or hell: it’s up to us.

Table 1-2 Impacts and Perspectives. Conventional transportation planning considers a limited set of impacts and perspectives. This analysis considers additional factors.

Conventional Analysis	Additional Factors Considered in this Book
Government infrastructure expenditures	Downstream and indirect traffic impacts
Traffic speed and congestion delays	User experience (convenience and comfort)
Vehicle operating costs (fuel, tolls, tire wear)	Total user costs and affordability (costs to lower-income users)
Per-mile crash rates	Parking congestion and facility costs
Pollution emissions rates	Mobility for non-drivers Social equity impacts (impacts on disadvantaged groups) Barrier effect (delay to pedestrians and cyclists) Per capita crash risk Per capita resource consumption and pollution emissions Public fitness and health Contagion risk Additional environmental impacts (e.g., embodied energy and impervious surface coverage) Impacts on strategic planning goals

Some optimists predict that New Mobilities will solve our transportation problems, but there are reasons to be skeptical. For example, proponents claim that shared, autonomous, electric vehicles can virtually eliminate traffic congestion, crash risk, and pollution and will be so cheap that they can be financed by advertising.³ However, such optimistic predictions overlook many costs and risks. These vehicles will be appropriate for some trips but not others. To be efficient and equitable, our future transportation system must be diverse and provide transportation demand management (TDM) incentives to encourage travelers to choose the most appropriate mode for each trip: walking and bicycling for local travel, large-capacity public transit on major urban corridors, and automobiles when they ar...