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It was an idea that seemed to have all the right ingredients for the tech-saturated world of twenty-first-century urban mobility. In 2015, a Helsinki start-up unveiled a plan for something it called ‘mobility as a service,’ or MaaS, based on ideas that had been developed in a 2014 master’s thesis at a Finnish university. The company, MaaS Global, had built an app that provides city dwellers with a digital one-stop shop for all sorts of travel options – including transit, taxis, ride hailing, and bike sharing.
With Google’s online mapping function, commuters can plot the best way to get from A to B and then, through the app, procure or book the transportation modes that fit the route and the users’ preferences. Global MaaS sells monthly subscriptions, not unlike cellphone packages, that provide various combinations – up to a given number of transit trips, a certain number of ride-hailing journeys, and so on; the bookings are made through smart phones, and a single transaction covers all the legs of a journey. The ‘unified’ payment is meant to encourage multi-modal trips. The company’s mission is to provide a ‘true’ alternative to private vehicle ownership. ‘MaaS,’ according to the firm’s website, ‘could be the single most powerful tool to decarbonise transport for future generations.’
The idea rapidly caught the imagination of other mobility entrepreneurs, as well as venture capital firms and transportation giants like Siemens. ‘We need to make end-to-end trip planning easier,’ says deputy CEO Roland Busch.
As of late 2019, Global MaaS had raised almost €54 million ($84 million) from investors including BP and Mitsubishi. Its app, known as Whim, was available in Helsinki, Vienna, Antwerp, and a handful of other cities. Other versions of MaaS had appeared in Stockholm, and trials in North America, India, and Australia were underway. There’s even a MaaS industry association.
Yet for all the hype and seeming promise, the concept hasn’t taken off. Transportation experts know that individuals’ travel habits are difficult to change. Some analysts have enumerated the long list of stakeholders – private, public, and otherwise – that have to be on the same page to ensure that MaaS ventures deliver a benefit. Others have raised questions about what role municipalities should play in the oversight and regulation of these kinds of undertakings.
It also became apparent that in some jurisdictions, municipal transit agencies have not welcomed this innovation – most don’t want to relinquish the pricing and distribution of fares to third parties – and consumers have been slow to sign on. According to a recent report by Bloomberg CityLab, some MaaS firms are also facing financial difficulties because the business model isn’t especially profitable yet. ‘If you’re going to disrupt automobiles, one of the biggest industries in the world, it will take a bit of time,’ said Global MaaS founder Sampo Hietanen.
The uncertainty orbiting around the MaaS sector reveals much about the promise, risk, and perils of digital urban mobility, which is, arguably, the single most sought-after prize in the sprawling smart city industry. Smart mobility encompasses a wide range of digital technologies and applications, from those already in wide usage (car- and bike- sharing services, ride hailing, transit smart cards, parking apps, electric vehicles, and the steadily expanding array of micro-mobility products on the market) to those that are under development (autonomous cars, buses, and trucks; ‘smart’ traffic signals; curb mapping; drone delivery vehicles; and even streets where illuminated lane pavers adjust automatically based on traffic levels detected by sensors (an experimental technology dubbed ‘Pebble’ by Sidewalk Labs).
Many of these technologies will rely heavily on artificial intelligence algorithms and densely layered digital mapping applications, such as Google Maps, TomTom, and Waze, as well as proprietary systems being developed by car manufacturers. They mesh together GPS, satellite images, and cellphone signals along with a rapidly expanding collection of other data streams, from dynamic bike-sharing or transit maps to parking-spot addresses, and eventually, perhaps, the location of potholes. Some of the granular information that drives these services will come from the cellphones of people moving through cities, while other tranches will be harvested from municipal agencies’ open data portals.
In some fields, there are enormous opportunities presented by the technologies that fall under the broad heading of smart mobility: more responsive traffic and transit planning; improved accessibility for groups that face impediments in moving around cities (disabled residents, seniors, children); and better low-carbon alternatives to privately owned fossil fuel–burning vehicles.
Yet the disruptive arrival of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft – which, pre-pandemic, fuelled congestion and eroded transit usage – serves as a warning that future market-driven mobility innovations will require scrutiny, careful policy planning, and clear-eyed assessments of the costs and the benefits.
Since the dawn of the rail era, transportation technologies have done more to physically shape and reshape cities than any other innovation, except perhaps digital networks. From trains to trams, streetcars, cars, trucks, planes, hulking container ships, elevators, and high-speed rail, the narrative of urbanization tracks the powerful trajectory of transportation technology and its capacity to collapse distance, accelerate trade, and alter the global environment.
The digitization, automation, and electrification of transportation heralds the next chapter in this story, and there’s good reason to assume these braided forms of innovation will have far-reaching consequences.
Electrification – not just cars, but also everything from planes to e-bikes – holds out the potential for weaning twenty-first-century society from its addiction to gasoline, but the environmental benefits only click in if the electrical grids that support all those new EVS can be both scaled up and decarbonized.
Automation promises to remove driver error from the operation of trucks and cars, and give rise to new forms of urban transportation. But AVS will only come into widespread use once navigation technologies have been thoroughly debugged and cities develop rules and norms governing the operation of such vehicles in spaces they share with pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-automated traffic.
The digitization of urban transportation, which is linked closely to both automation and electrification, encompasses an ever- expanding collection of technologies that are transforming vehicles into wifi-enabled moving computers. Thus equipped, they are linked into intricate networks of mapping software, GPS navigation systems, sharing apps, and digitally enhanced infrastructure platforms that govern the operations of streets, roads, and highways based on continuous readings of traffic flow. Many of these applications already exist, but they tend not to be integrated in ways that allow cities to take full advantage of digital network technology to address congestion. Even more problematically, the prospect of fully digitized mobility also raises critical questions about privacy, surveillance, and security.
In recent years, so-called ‘black hats’ (i.e., programmers hired to look for bugs) have figured out how to remotely hack into Teslas and commandeer infotainment systems, operate doors, and alter steering and accelerating modes, but not take over control of the vehicle, Security Week magazine reported in May 2021 (Kovacs 2021). Stories about hacks on AVS and other electric vehicles have also circulated, raising fears about the potential for weaponizing self-driving cars. Some scholars, in turn, have documented potential security breaches and cyber-attacks against intelligent transportation systems, the highly integrated digital/sensor networks that monitor and control traffic (Paiva et al. 2020).
All these scenarios serve as a reminder that the unfurling future of digital mobility will be radically different than the familiar, congested world of big-city traffic.
Since the late 2010s, new car buyers have been able to choose vehicles with safety features that hint at the dawn of a new era. Automated anti-collision systems developed by manufacturers like Toyota process information from dash cams, GPS devices, tiny radars, on-board sensors with recognition capabilities, and systems that track and adjust the vehicle’s position in a lane. The automotive industry, as well as tech giants like Google, have invested billions in these kinds of innovations, and they can be seen as some of the earliest advances in what may lead to fully autonomous vehicles (AVS) – so-called ‘level five,’ for their ability to guide themselves without a driver.
During much of the decade prior to the pandemic, the investment hype around AVS reflected a feverishness informed by futuristic visions of vast fleets of driverless cars operated by ride-hailing companies. Instead of private vehicle ownership, city dwellers could travel around urban regions simply by summoning shared AVS, which would cost far less to use because there are no drivers to pay.
Some critics, however, find this projected image of urban mobility to be troubling and rife with questions: Where would AVS go when they don’t have passengers? Would these services accelerate sprawl or further erode transit ridership, which has already seen drops due to the popularity of ride hailing? What about safety: Despite all the talk about AVS being immune to distracted driving, who is responsible if a cyclist or a pedestrian is hit, as has happened in numerous trials? And finally, are such vehicles, with their wireless connectivity, vulnerable to hacking, satellite signal disruptions, or even power outages?
Other experts point out that the pandemic fundamentally altered the presumed uses for fleets of AVS operated by companies like Uber or Lyft. ‘There are huge challenges right now with sharing anything,’ says University of Toronto geographer Shauna Brail, who studies the ride-hailing sector. Some of the big players, she notes, have slowed or closed their AV R&D operations.
With fully automated AVS still at least a decade – and more likely two decades – away, it’s by no means clear how local and regional governments should proceed. Clearly, there will be implications to the advent of AVS, but no one really knows what a proactive policy response looks like.
The messy, and mostly unregulated, arrival of ride hailing offers important insights. During the early to mid-2010s, tech upstarts like Uber wielded the triumphant rhetoric of disruption: innovators could topple lumbering incumbents that had grown complacent, but such was the way of capitalism. After all, does anyone today fret that a very young Microsoft kneecapped IBM in the 1980s, or that Steve Jobs ruthlessly dethroned Blackberry with the iPhone in 2006?
Yet mobility, and specifically urban mobility, isn’t just another consumer good or service; cities are defined, in fundamental ways, by their transportation networks, which create urban spaces, enable commerce, support labour markets, and activate street life, but also require extensive planning and public investment. The notion that mobility is a ‘market’ isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t tell the whole tale.
Some cities welcomed Uber et al. and ignored the complaints of taxi companies, which had become complacent over many decades. Others imposed regulations, banned Uber outright, or sought to give homegrown ride-hailing firms a leg up. Over time, however, the policy environment in many places has shifted, including in Toronto. According to a 2018 study conducted by researchers with the University of Waterloo’s School of Public Health and Health Systems, safety concerns relating to driver training, background checks, and insurance drove regulatory action in many jurisdictions.
What’s missing from that study’s list, however, is the non-negligible impact that ride hailing has had on transit, transportation, and land-use planning. For example, a 2018 analysis published by three University of Kentucky civil engineers found that in U.S. cities, each year after the arrival of ride-hailing companies saw rail ridership fall by 1.3 per cent and bus ridership drop by 1.8 per cent. ‘The effect builds with each passing year and may be an important driver of recent ridership declines,’ the authors conclude. Those losses translate into increased traffic and emissions, as well as accelerating operating shortfalls for transit agencies. Put another way, the profits earned by ride-hailing firms come directly at the expense of the public purse.
The Town of Innisfil, north of Greater Toronto, sought to square this circle by offering subsidized or flat-fee Uber rides as a substitute for bus service – an experiment that garnered international media attention. The problem, as it turns out, was that residents enthusiastically embraced the offer, so much so that the town has ended up spending far more than it would have on a conventional bus service and had to impose a cap on the number of subsidized trips an individual could take. What’s more, Innisfil, which plans to develop a walkable urban core over the next few decades, has seen an increase in vehicular traffic as a result of the popularity of the partnership, according to some reports.
More recently, e-scooter firms like Lime and Bird also borrowed from Uber’s playbook, rapidly launching their services, in some cases without seeking municipal approval. Like ride hailing, e-scooters can be booked and paid for via a smart phone app. Because e-scooters can move so rapidly, cities that have allowed these devices have also seen a spike in collision-related injuries, in some cases even exceeding those involving pedestrians and cyclists.
Then there’s the data aspect. University of Ottawa professor Teresa Scassa, Canada Research Chair on information law and policy, notes that Los Angeles County planners wanted to understand whether dockless scooters made a dent in the so-called ‘last mile’ problem, i.e., the final stretch between home, shopping, and work where there are few transportation options besides private vehicles. As a quid pro quo, she says, county officials offered to allow the e-scooter companies to operate on city streets, on the proviso that they provide anonymized usage data for planning purposes. But the firms balked and appealed to state legislators for protection.
Cities’ experiences with both ride hailing and e-scooters should sound a warning shot for municipal officials. ‘The disruption from AVS is likely to be much more substantial,’ Kirsten Rulf, a researcher with the Harvard Kennedy School Autonomous Vehicles Policy Initiative, cautioned on Medium in 2018.
‘Cities and states need to move into the driver’s seat now to set the right course for their constituents,’ she said. ‘That is why learning from both the scooter wars and the rapid and irrevocable [ride-hailing] implementation is essential for city and state policymakers. They can avoid being on the defensive once again by acting now on AVS.’
While AVS will likely be several orders of magnitude more disruptive than either e-scooters or ride hailing, the prospect of developing AV policy proactively serves up a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. With the technology still under development, many governments are reluctant to act, beyond enabling AV test projects, such as pilots of automated minibuses. At the same time, AVS, once commercially viable, shouldn’t be allowed to use public rights of way in the absence of standards and regulations that govern traditional vehicles.
Which is not to suggest policy makers aren’t thinking about AVS: many are. For example, Transport Canada in 2020 released a detailed ‘guidance’ on cyber-security for ‘connected and autonomous vehicles’ – an acknowledgement that hackers or terrorists could corrupt these computer systems on wheels, either during the manufacturing process or while they’re on the road and operating. The guidance points out that Canada is heavily involved in international standards-setting working groups focused on harmonizing AV regulations.
At the local level, however, it’s a different story. A detailed study published in the Journal of the American Planning Association concluded that most cities haven’t attempted to get out ahead of the eventual arrival of AVS on local streets and highways.
MIT mobility-planning scholars Yonah Freemark, Anne Hudson, and Jinhua Zhao reviewed the transportation plans for 25 large U.S. cities and surveyed another 120. Few, they concluded, had begun planning for AVS. Nevertheless, many transportation officials had formed opinions about the potential consequences. ‘Although local officials are optimistic about the technology and its potential to increase safety while reducing congestion, costs and pollution,’ the authors found, ‘more than a third of respondents worried about AVS increasing vehicle miles traveled and sprawl while reducing transit ridership and local revenues.’
The City of Toronto, interestingly, is an exception – it is one of the few large municipalities to have leaned into the problem of creating a local policy framework for a global technology that has yet to ripen. Approved in the fall of 2019 by city council, the 162-page Automated Vehicles Tactical Plan aims to bridge the gap between the emerging technology and the city’s other priorities. The document is nothing if not encyclopedic in scope. It scans the state of the technology, the commercial ecosystem in which AVS are being developed, the weave of federal, provincial, and municipal regulations that apply to vehicles, potential use cases, and even the findings of surveys detailing residents’ expectations about AVS.
‘We’re very proactive in thinking about [AV policy],’ says Shauna Brail, the U of T geographer. ‘But it’s unclear how to regulate something that’s changing so rapidly.’
The plan’s main focus, explains its author Ryan Lanyon, was to force a conversation about how AVS should advance, as opposed to undermine, Toronto’s other civic priorities. These include equity and health, sustainability, privacy, integrated mobility, and prosperity. ‘We need the technology to move us to those objectives,’ says Lanyon, a senior transportation manager with the city. ‘The bigger question is, how does the technology get us there? … The vision,’ he continues, ‘has to accommodate what we want the technology to do.’
The tactical plan lays out a highly detailed menu of small preliminary steps as a means of embarking on a much longer journey. These include measures from ensuring wheelchair accessibility on an automated shuttle-bus pilot project to establishing a testing ‘sandbox’ for AV prototypes. Much of the work calls for continuing research on the development of AVS, from their impact on surface transit to the way they might circulate when unoccupied. Unstated but evident is the city’s intention not to get sandbagged again by a technology that it didn’t see coming.
Lanyon’s report was informed by a close reading of how early car adoption influenced urban histories. In cities like Los Angeles, critical decision points – e.g., the postwar move to tear up its extensive streetcar network – played a determinative role in the city’s fraught relationship with the automobile and the related problems with sprawl and air quality.
His analysis also drew heavily on an influential 2005 essay about the evolution of urban transportation technology between 1860 and 1930, written by University of Manchester innovation scholar Frank Geels. Geels set out to explore the technical and societal ‘transition pathway’ between the horse-drawn carriage and the automobile. Lanyon says the most important lesson from Geels’s work is that there was ‘no critical path’ that led to the dominance of the automobile; it was never some kind of foregone conclusion. Lanyon also takes the view that we’re in a similar period of transition right now. ‘As a society, we won’t just jump forward’ to the adoption of AVS as they are currently imagined (Geels 2005).
Geels’s narrative illustrates just how complex that transportation revolution was. The push to rely less on horses was informed by public health concerns – too much manure on city streets – and gave way to the advent of horse-drawn taxis and then trolleys. The inventors of early private cars experimented with batteries and steam as fuel sources, and combustion engines initially didn’t catch on because they required a crank. The late nineteenth-century bicycle craze gave rise to specialized precision manufacturing techniques while stoking public interest in individual mobility and the use of bikes for touring. Meanwhile, cities were beginning to pave streets and replace cobblestones with asphalt as the expansion of electricity whet the public’s appetite for electric trams.
A Dearborn, Michigan, inventor named Henry Ford borrowed from new bike-manufacturing techniques as he developed what would become the first mass-produced car. But, Geels argues, the ‘application’ that really fuelled the popularity of private cars was that city dwellers could take them into the countryside to explore. It was a recreational, as opposed to practical, use that produced the demand that allowed the gas-powered private vehicle to eventually dominate. ‘The success of the automobile,’ Geels concludes, ‘was enabled by the previous transformations.’
The learning, Lanyon reflects, is that AVS have to compete with other transportation technologies and uses; the winner is not predetermined just because the auto sector, and tech giants like Amazon and Google, are investing so much money into self-driving electric vehicles. In fact, the pandemic underscored the serendipitous nature of technology adoption in this part of the mobility sector. According to a World Economic Forum analysis published in late 2021, investment in AVS slowed during the pandemic, and the market shifted to the commercialization of self-driving delivery and freight vehicles, as well as more specialized industrial applications such as autonomous forklifts and pallet movers developed for cavernous distribution centres (Laviv et al. 2021).
Smart city watcher Anthony Townsend adds that the car industry’s much-hyped investments in AVS have also diverted attention from what he feels will become more impactful applications, such as smaller, nimble autonomous transit vehicles or a range of specialized mobility devices that rely on AV navigation systems, such as bikes capable of rebalancing themselves and next-gen motorized wheelchairs. ‘There are so many scenarios for other kinds of vehicles,’ he says. ‘But that’s not part of the main narrative because that’s not part of the auto industry’s messaging.’
COVID-19 further revealed the ways in which politics and abrupt swings in public opinion can affect the evolution of emerging mobility technologies as much as advances in engineering. Because the pandemic coincided with a spate of severe weather crises and served up bracing lessons about the experience of global catastrophes, many governments stepped up their carbon-reduction plans and established dates for the phase-out of combustion-engine-powered vehicles – something that had never happened before 2020. Those moves, in turn, stoked demand for battery electric vehicles, whose performance and range have steadily improved, and prompted governments to step up investments in charging infrastructure and grid capacity.11 A growing number of major automakers, in turn, have pledged to move to all electric in coming years – a development that could happen sooner than many expect. According to BloombergNEF, in fact, global EV sales jumped 80 per cent in 2021 and accounted for 7.2 per cent of all vehicle sales in the first half of 2021 (Walton 2021).
Similarly, the market for micro-mobility devices, many of which are battery-powered, saw its own pandemic bounce. With the drop in car traffic and transit use, many cities significantly expanded their networks of bike lanes to accommodate the growing use of conventional bicycles, e-scooters, and e-bikes, including app-based e-scooters and municipal bike-sharing services.
Market research studies have forecast rapid growth in this segment, and some assessments have found that people who rely on micro-mobility devices are travelling longer distances. ‘According to a U.S. micro-mobility company that rents e-scooters,’ noted a 2020 McKinsey Partners study, ‘average trip distances have grown 26 percent since the start of the pandemic, with rides in some cities, such as Detroit, increasing by up to 60 percent’ (Heineke et al. 2020).
However, these emerging modes of low-carbon transportation are not free of controversy. In some places, tensions between the users of traditional bikes and faster-moving or heavier e-bikes have flared. Some cities, in turn, have faced a backlash against so-called ‘dockless’ e-scooters, which can be left anywhere and have tended to clutter up streets and public spaces in early adopter cities, like Edmonton.
A 2020 study in the Journal of Urban Affairs by two University of Texas at Austin scholars noted that the experiences of Chinese cities with essentially unregulated dockless bike-share services forewarned of the problems with e-scooters operated by firms like Bird and Lime. Between 2015 and 2019, the study pointed out, the use of upstart Chinese bike-share services exploded, creating widespread problems with illegal parking and abandoned, broken bikes strewn around public spaces. ‘Nevertheless,’ wrote Shunhua Bai, a PhD candidate, and Junfeng Jiao, an associate professor in the U of T Austin school of architecture, ‘the success of shared micro-mobility at an early stage has generated a transportation revolution in short travels.’
When Bai and Jiao looked at Austin, they observed similar dilemmas with the city’s dockless e-scooter services, especially in the downtown and around the university campus. The sight of e-scooters that had been left lying on paths or along sidewalks prompted many angry calls and texts to the city’s 311 service, made worse by a lack of follow-through on the part of city crews.
Considering the prospects for these services, Bai and Jiao waxed poetic: ‘In a Shakespearian tragedy, we always see a tragic hero born with a fatal flaw, struggling between good and evil,’ they wrote. ‘“To be or not to be dockless” is a Shakespearian question for shared micro-mobility. The dockless system is the tragic hero currently struggling between the virtue of flexible, car-free travel experience and the disvalue of overcrowded vehicles engulfing the public space in our cities. The overgrowth of dockless transportation systems in many Chinese cases has alerted us of a tragic ending if we do not strive to control the damage to our society promptly.’
While Bai and Jiao opined that there was potential to make better use of data analytics to confront the discarded scooter problem – for example, using algorithms to track and hopefully minimize response time by city crews to complaints – they also recognized the limits of the technology.
Another option, they argued, was a so-called ‘shared responsibility’ model that would allow both the city and the e-scooter companies to have access to crowdsourced 311 complaints data as a means of better managing the fleets. ‘City staff could identify predominant issues and adjust license regulations to alleviate the impacts on society,’ the authors suggested. ‘[T]he licensees could change their user instructions to address misbehaviors and enact restrictions or penalties on improper use according to the regulations from the city.’ In other words, regulation.
The missing element in this particular story is the element that has allowed e-scooter businesses to proliferate: docking stations. Without these anchors in public space, e-scooter companies obviously can reduce their capital costs and therefore their rental charges while minimizing interactions with the municipal authorities that regulate what can and can’t be installed on public spaces like sidewalks. (E-mobility firms like Bird recruit ‘fleet managers’ to look after and recharge the bikes or e-scooters.)
The physical tether between smart mobility devices and urban space, however, is a critical element, as important as the government’s duty to regulate transportation. We might not think of the quotidian bike-docking stations that have proliferated in many cities as transportation infrastructure per se, to be added to a list that might include transit stations, buses, or traffic signals. Yet with rapidly growing public use of bike-sharing services, bike-docking stations can certainly be categorized as urban infrastructure. When complemented by an array of digital features, such as smart phone apps that map the locations of available bikes and offer online payment options, these bikeshare services can be properly described as sustainable smart city technologies that improve urban life instead of merely cluttering up public spaces with more gadgets.
There is one more layer to the story about the use of bike-share systems to augment existing transportation networks. In many cities, municipalities or their technology partners operators have deployed bike-share infrastructure in neighbourhoods that tend to be more economically affluent and less diverse, thus exacerbating social ‘stratification,’ according to a 2021 study co-authored by smart city expert Rob Kitchin and National University of Ireland, Maynooth geographer Robert Bradshaw. The pair, however, cite the rollout of Hamilton’s SoBi bike-share platform as an example of how planners went out of their way to consult local communities in order to situate docking stations in lower-income areas that aren’t well-served by transit. They concluded that when residents were actively involved in co-creating bike-share systems, the result was a more equitable service. Kitchin and Bradshaw point out that Hamilton’s approach has been taken up in places like Boston and Washington, which have sought to reconfigure their own legacy bike-share programs to be more inclusive in their coverage (Bradshaw & Kitchin 2021).
Besides relative newcomers like Lime and Bird or specialized e-bike manufacturers, global tech giants are also hustling to exploit the commercial potential in ordinary and even unsexy forms of civic infrastructure, including parking spots and sidewalks.
Since the late 2010s, a Google subsidiary called Coord has been busy mapping the curbs of big cities. ‘Curb analytics,’ as the company describes this venture, involves building digital maps packed with geographical data on the locations and dimensions of ‘assets’ like parking spaces, loading zones, use regulations, taxi stops, wheel-chairaccessible curb ramps, fire hydrants, and so on.
‘A new way to see your city’s curbs,’ announced a Coord blog post, which itemizes commercial applications for this kind of data – visualizations for municipal planners to assist in figuring out the allocation of curb space, for loading, bike lanes, or pick-up/drop-off zones and parking spaces. In a related venture that Sidewalk Labs had planned to test in Toronto, the company would install sensors along the edges of streets to detect if a parking spot is vacant at any given moment. Such devices come with a cost, which suggests a business model and a strategy for generating revenue from them.
The company also envisioned the development of its own traffic management system, Flow, that used Google Maps, Street View, and other data sources to generate predictions about ‘where people are coming or going,’ according to Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff. One potential product dovetails with Coord’s mapping: services like ‘dynamic parking’ and ‘a shared mobility marketplace.’ As she wrote, ‘Sidewalk’s data flows combine public and private assets for sale in dynamic, real-time virtual markets that extract maximum fees from citizens and leave municipal governments dependent upon Sidewalk’s proprietary information’ (Zuboff 2019, 229).
Meanwhile, up on the sidewalk, Amazon is testing delivery ‘robots’ – they resemble tall, enclosed children’s wagons and are decked out with the company’s smile logo. These vehicles are designed to make use of sidewalk space as they drop off parcels in neighbourhoods. The trials, reports Mashable, are taking place in Georgia and Tennessee. No doubt the trials of these compact autonomous vehicles are being closely watched, given the dramatic surge in e-commerce that occurred after the beginning of the pandemic.
Veteran Toronto mobility consultant Bern Grush has been working on developing international standards, to be adopted by the International Organization for Standardization, that would lay out rules for how such robots must function on these strips of concrete that have long been the exclusive preserve of pedestrians.
This fast-growing family of smart mobility technologies is transforming the unhurried world of curbs and sidewalks into contested, and possibly financially valuable, spaces that are of intense interest to e-commerce, delivery, and tech giants, and, perhaps eventually, fleets of shared AVS, which will have wireless access to curb maps that identify parking spots where they can stop until the next ride. ‘We’ve never managed the sidewalk before with that complexity,’ Grush says. ‘They all compete for space.’
This standards development exercise, Grush observes, has raised some complex philosophical questions. ‘The rules apply to the machines,’ he says. ‘I’m not contemplating anything in the standard to regulate human behaviour.’ The prospect of AVS navigating sidewalks means they will interact with humans, dogs, people pushing strollers, and motorized wheelchairs, not to mention recycling bins, sidewalk detritus, snow, even dog poop. ‘What I am saying is that if we’re going to allow a robot on the sidewalk,’ says Grush, ‘that robot has to grant the right-of-way, it has to stick to one side. But will the robots change our sidewalk behaviour?’
It’s a provocative question. Of course, private enterprises use – and make money from – public spaces in cities all the time, from restaurant sidewalk patios to street vendors, billboards, and food trucks. Their presence alters the way city dwellers use public space – where we go, what we do, whom we meet, and so on.
Yet the combination of powerful digital mapping tools and emerging types of autonomous vehicles raises the prospect of the financialization of public spaces in order to serve the interests of large corporations. After all, if Uber or Lyft someday operates a fleet of AVS that will need places to park between rides, access to real-time data about the location and availability of nearby parking spaces suddenly becomes a desirable commodity. Likewise, if parcel delivery companies become reliant on the use of sidewalks, it’s not difficult to imagine that they’ll eventually demand that municipalities provide more and better access, perhaps even citing data collected from those routes where they encounter obstacles, like a group of preteens ambling home from school and blocking the sidewalk, as kids do.
In a world where urban mobility becomes ever more digitally determined and eventually autonomous, the role of local and regional governments as regulators of public space seems destined to become increasingly complicated – an exercise in weighing interests that could easily rank the desires of residents well below the demands of big tech.
11. In carbon-conscious cities like Vancouver, planning rules now specify that the developers of new multi-unit residential buildings must provide EV charging connections for every apartment’s parking space.