FRED PAYNE

In a world where visions of better urban transportation are scarce, South Carolina's Fred Payne beams out a steady stream of positive images and thoughts. He and the Envision SC Update he is leading for the Greenville County Council use a different vocabulary. They speak of mobility hubs and GreenVillages with high accessibility and connectivity. They argue that this will solve many first/last mile problems, reducing the need to own cars and thus reduces congestion and related problems.

Fred Payne's infectious Southern Smile

For years, Fred has urged civic officials, major stakeholders and the general public in this direction fully aware of podcar possibilities. He frequently speaks at civic and professional events. On September 16. he moderated a session of Smart Transportation Corridors and Smarter GreenVillages Development at the annual meeting of a county planning officials.

Due to the seeds Fred have planted, podcars are being considered in and around Greenville -- in a trial-oriented development corridor, at the airport, by several large medical and university campuses and at senior complexes.

SILICON STUPIDITY

Without the power to restrain individual freedoms, US city and regional planning institutions are weak. This is painfully true in northern California’s Silicon Valley -- a narrow north-south stretch along the southwest shore of San Francisco Bay. SV is hemmed in on the west by the Santa Cruz Mountains. West of them is the precious, lightly developed Pacific Coast.

Booming Silicon Valley stretches from San Franciso at the norther tip
of the western shore of the Bay south and San Jose.  - courtesy of Lawrence Livermore Labs

Most of Silicon Valley is a string of suburbs stretching south from SFO Airport in the north ending more or less in San Jose. To say that this is hot real estate is no exaggeration. It is home to a techno-corporate powerhouse that generates cutting-edge thinkware and generates thousands of jobs This makes for very pricey real estate with little room to grow except up.

Weak US Planning

America’s political culture is one of individual freedoms and minimal local governance. Physically, most of America is a spread of parking lots and highway-oriented development spilling out with residential neighborhoods of modest density that spill out into scattered housing. This is so unlike the tightly regulated cities and towns of Europe.

The Bay Area has a metropolitan planning organization (MPO) known as the MTC. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission oversees a highly structured planning process for the region’s transportation infrastructure -- essentially the highways and mass transit. In theory MTC works toward the future well-being of a vast area, Silicon Valley being one sub-region.

Like most states, California has no coherent statewide development policy. Silicon Valley’s economic success in the absence of proactive planning has blown the cost housing sky-high and choked up the highways with traffic.

Where is a Sense of Vision?

Despite attempts by INIST, San Jose State’s Mineta Center and pod  activist Rob Means, local and regional officials in Silicon Valley don’t think much beyond five years. MTC’s Federally mandated process is the exception, weak though it be. Where is the Master Planner who can boldly explore a full array of development scenarios with different housing types, such as high-rise along the Bay or along Santa Cruz Mountain ridges? Where is the transport strategist looking at non-road ways to move people around?

Existing Caltrain is shown in blue. The green network is a
Trans.21 fantasy that would attract most road traffic

Indeed new modes of transport are available to shape growth and reduce auto dependency. Trans.21 proposes extensive podcar networks inter-connecting scores of the many places where people want to go. The overall service is so satisfying that 25-50% of all travel will be attracted. That compares to transit’s share of 3-5% today. Think of how podways will alleviate street and highway congestion.

Savvy citizens will ditch car ownership and save lots of money. With the right public policies, these savings can be the base from which society can pay for pod infrastructure.

The accompanying map shows a hypothetical pod network in green. It includes several hundred miles of guideway (some could be on existing, protected streets) and several hundred stations. It would distribute from and feed into the several existing Caltrain stations shown in blue. Ridership on it has grown recently. Pod feeders would at least triple today’s ridership of 65,000 daily trips.

As for the political reality of such a future, the MTC is not even thinking of such a scenario. Its vision is more narrowing focuses on a recently announced $700 million project to electrify the 84km Caltrain line That’s just to replace signaling! The MPO process tells us that this is a good investment that also happens to enrich well-placed consultants and contractors.

Can MPOs -- MTC and the many others spread across the US -- open up to podcar futures? 

Smart Urban Remake

About ten years ago, Trans.21 offered a 21^st century vision that it is still valid today. 

       The world needs cities made up of people-friendly districts unthreatened by speeding traffic and not choked by parked cars.

 In these compact, walkable districts, neighbors know each other and nurture small public landscaped places. 

Parents are free of constant fears that their children might be injured -- or worse -- by traffic.

Integration of PRT into urban life has not yet happened.
- courtesy of Bob Woods/Chuck Harris

In this 21^st century re-embrace of town life with modern mobility, the air is clean. The atmosphere is free of the roar of highway traffic and the screeching and horn-blowing on your typical city street.

Talk Like a Mobility Czar

The policy menu of the mobility czar of cities today is growing and engaging. He or she is conversant in many modal niches. Most are aware of PRT or can quickly grasp both the benefits and the costs.

Uber, Lyft, Google and many others are forcing new debates and policy questions. The czar also talks and cares about parking issues, pedestrian safety, senior citizen shuttles and ride-sharing programs.

How symbolic is it that Washington DC has ditched its old Taxi Commission in favor a 21^st century Department of For-Hire Vehicles? These vehicles are getting smarter, many driverless, many with the comfy feel of a pod. Where does PRT fit in that world?

PCC-X Mark Your Calendar!

The 10^th Podcar City conference will take place Sept 19-21 in cooperation with the city of Antwerp, Belgium, and their transport consultant, in a large event that will examine a wide range of urban mobility options.

What is podcar orientation?

ATRA’s Ingmar Andreasson, professor emeritus of Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology, will head up the PODCARS and ADVANCED TRANSIT Program Committee, assuring highs level of professional and intellectual quality.

Many urban planning and management professional organizations will be involved, especially from densely urban Benelux (Belgium-Netherlands-Luxembourg) and from Euro-neighbors -- Britain, France, Germany and the Nordic countries and beyond.

  

            *        *        *        *        *        *         *        *         *        

           Sept 19 is less than four months away! It is not too early to commit

           to attending and more. If interested in PCC-X sponsorship, exhibiting,

           or other forms of cooperation, contact lfabian21@gmail.com.

CITY BUILDING WITH MODERN TRANSIT

Las Vegas is a city built on gambling. That includes the developers, especially the casino folks who have created a world-famous  array of mega-resorts up and down the Strip. Several have APM shuttles built in the 1990s.

As the 21^st century opened, MGM Mirage gambled when it unveiled a $7 billion project in 2005 for a large site between the old downtown (vintage casinos) and the newer, bolder and bigger Strip.  With name architects and huge ambitions, the project included a $11 million cable-powered APM by Austria’s Doppelmayr and Siemens. This huge real estate gamble was named CityCenter.  Midtown may be a more appropriate label.

Light and open, the APM station has a playful design.

This Vegas city-building gamble dove right into the 2008/9 mini-depression that rocked the world, especially speculative con-struction such as abounds in Arizona, Florida and Las Vegas. The good news is that the project continued and is alive today. The ARIA Express Tram opened in 2009.

Urban Perspectives

Early APMs within resort properties and at the airport were mostly back-and-forth shuttles.  Circus-Circus had two -- one has been dismantled and the other mothballed.  Others still operate at Treasure Island, Excalibur and the Mirage. The ugly elevated, automated monorail stands apart a long way back from the Strip, largely irrelevant except to conventioneers, waiting in vain for extension to the airport.

Ezra Larsen managed the ARIA Tram

Today, Las Vegas’s visitor-based economy is almost back up to where it was in 2007. The 3-station CityCenter APM hums 24/7 carrying about 9000 passengers a day.  Current owner Aria is reluctant to give out sales and occupancy data. In early April, the shops were bright. Visitors wondered about impressed. It looks like this APM gamble is paying off.

In the 1990s Raytheon tried to advance podcar concepts in Las Vegas but got nowhere.  Who will light the PRT torch in 2016?

ROBOCAR DOMAINS

Urban policy makers face a new set of questions these days. Frequent requests for drones and robocars are coming at them. This is terra incognito. They have no experience with driverless street delivery of pizza, fuel oil or people.

An official classification of levels of vehicle automation was published by NHTSA in 2013. “Level X automation” is now commonly heard in professional and commercial discussions and publications.

Do we need guideways to serve  auto-oriented districts?

Yet we lack classification of the complexity in which vehicle automation is to take place. This confuses discussions as ITS engineers deal with not just of vehicle-to-vehicle communications, but more importantly with vehicle-to-infrastructure exchanges and infrastructure-to-vehicles.

Levels of Vehicle Automation

Smart infrastructure will determine the future of roadway safety and security oversight. It will communicate with algorithms that reside in a remote center (maybe the cloud). It is helpful to create a comparable categorization of the two-dimensional, geographic areas or domains over which robocars will operate.

NHTSA’s scheme for robocars ranges from Level-0 for the millions of vehicles driven over today’s freeways, highways, arterials, local streets, alleys, parking areas, driveways and sometimes places they shouldn’t go. Level-1 brings in some driving functions, such as cruise control and park assist.  L-2 is fancier. L-3 lets the system takes control, but depends on drivers to intervene when necessary. L-4 takes it all the way up to full driverless mode.

For owners and operators of L-3 and L-4 vehicles, the domains over which they run becomes critical.

Levels of Geographic Extent: Domain

Managers of private campuses (university, medical, corporate, etc.) of not more than a few square miles don’t have to worry about state-to-state differences. In fact, they probably have pretty full control over their own property. A fleet of robocars that goes no faster than 20 mph will do just fine. There is no need to put them out on the busy highways or public streets. They remain on campus roads, paths and parking lots. This is Level-0 of robocar domains.

How large a service area for robocars?

A municipal service may stay within its corporate boundaries overseen by one police unit and served by one DPW department. That is Level-3. Level-1 is over a small domain such as metro-feeding service limited to, say, a mile out. Level-2 is with a well-defined district. A transit authority would likely require metropolitan-scaled services: Level 4. Larger regions stretching across states are Level 5.

Clearly robocar safety and control requirements are tied to the size and complexity of the domain. Asking good questions about the service domain may be a key to finding the right answers of how to deploy and oversee them.

A Domain Classification

To repeat and further define, the categories off Robocar Context to can help advance conversations are:

                0   Secured, managed private or semi-private campuses

                1   Supervised activity centers, probably mixed land uses that rely in part on public streets

                2   Urban districts with firm boundaries (physical or by policy) with residential and/or employment populations of, say, 5000 to 50,000

                3   An entire city - central or suburban - but within the jurisdiction of a single legal entity or municipality, aka City Hall

                4   A metropolitan area with populations of, say, 0.1-10 million

                5   A very large metropolitan or inter-regional with significant long-distance trips (over ~10 miles).

In a few decades, policy makers may want to think about a sea-to-sea domain as the 6^th and international as the 7^th levels.

To restate visually, the array of robocars in different domains is:

	Context Scale	0	1	2	3	4	5
Veh Smarts
	0
	1
	2
	3
	4

MILLENIAL OUTLOOK

Young adults look at the world they are inheriting, frustrated by congestion and the high costs of keeping a car. Many try to get along without one. They value having the right device with cool apps to summon a ride without owning a car. They scope out Uber, Lyft, Vulog and others leading a global transformation of urban mobility.

Marcus Sharpe (right) learning about podcars in 2014.

Transit and other public officials seem -- if not oblivious -- bewildered by the new economics of mobility. “Why are we holding on to the old technologies of the 20^th century?” questions Marcus Sharpe in freeway-jammed Atlanta. To him, transit officials seem wedded to the past, unable to even think about modern modes to link up urban nodes better. He sees how sleek, high-service transit networks can be envisioned, not just lines.  

The Old Guard

Unfortunately Baruch Feigenbaum of Reason Foundation did not in 2013 when he proudly presented a plan to eliminate chronic congestion that costs Metro Atlanta drivers $1100 a year.  A 2010 plan by consultants HNTB has meant that highway and transit systems have failed to keep pace with north Georgia growth.

Does MARTA not care enough to see
the logic of enhanced TOD?

Reason’s plan tries to update and move on, mostly by  recommending new self-financing “dynamic lanes” and shifting transit funding from Georgia DOT to the Department of Community Affairs. Claiming to look out 30 years, the plan doesn’t even mention shared use, “smart TOD” or PRT -- the “untried” mode that excites Marcus and many of his cohorts.

Freed from 20^th century baggage, Millennials look at urban living with fresh eyes. One calculates that putting a dollar more tax on gas would be an easy, revenue-generating measure that would very quickly reduce traffic. “Dude, is it the same people blocking the metric system?”

Millennials bubble with new ideas for tackling the problems of the world. It’s time for aging Boomers to shake loose of the 20^th Century!