Urban transportation is a domain where problems abound, experimentation is rife, success is mixed, and interested parties are legion. Congestion and pollution persist, pedestrian fatalities are rising, and public finances are shaky. Local decision makers puzzle about how to fund mass transit, regulate micromobility, and speed up deliveries. State and federal actors deliver needed funds only with many strings attached. Tech entrepreneurs treat the urban landscape as a playground for disruptive, platform-based innovations that may or may not deliver net public benefits. Residents want it all to work reliably, safely, and cheaply. How do we make the needed changes when many of the available solutions impose unwanted tradeoffs? The key is to admit that we are experimenting on ourselves, so we’d better learn from those experiments.
From a system perspective, it is tempting to want to optimize the city. Ubiquitous smart city initiatives pursue efficiencies in traffic operations and integrated controls of demand-side messaging and supply-side resource scheduling. Interconnected systems provide greater situational awareness, operational flexibility, and smoother user experiences. Yet, adding more “cyber” to our cyber-physical infrastructure systems increases their brittleness and vulnerability to cyber-attacks. Operators have to deal with cybersecurity issues such as hacker override to ensure everything works properly, 24/7. Transportation agencies’ security challenges are increasing.
From a user perspective, the increasing connectivity adds convenience in navigating urban transportation systems, scheduling trips, and paying for them. Yet the journey toward mobility-as-a-service lacks a clear destination. Some cities encourage residents to use platform apps that allow access to carshare services, driverless autonomous vehicles, e-scooters, e-bikes, and more from within one app. Other cities create universal tap-to-pay systems that let a credit card take care of all transactions across transportation providers and modes. Both approaches under-appreciate the increasing importance and fragility of the pedestrian experience in urban settings. Collaborations among cities could create a more uniform experience whereas the separate evolution of technologies can create disjointed experiences. The view that transportation needs to be a separate user domain is waning.
The above examples illustrate the general dilemma of how to plan for and manage a technology-intensive future transportation system.
- Functionally, both general-purpose and specialized technologies exist now and will be part of our future. For example, cellphones have evolved to serve also as cameras, health trackers, and internet portals. Analysts in every industry use familiar spreadsheets for simple calculations and AI tools to detect patterns in data and generate text or images, and such tools are as relevant to transportation planning as specialized system simulation models.
- Financially, infrastructure providers, building owners, and manufacturers all recognize that the “cyber”-portion of their cyber-physical system becomes obsolete at a different rate than the physical system, complicating asset management. The growing ubiquity of IoT-based sensors also brings with it a need to maintain them.
- Ethically, the data flows that are essential to making the transportation system function well also reveal much about personal circumstances that people might prefer to keep private.
These illustrations just scratch the surface of the topic.
The personnel who bring tech to transportation need cross-training in technology, planning, and management. Local governments often struggle to keep employees who are good technology assessors and know which questions to ask about urban transportation innovations. Those with the appropriate technical knowledge often head for the private sector rather than government. Existing employees may be good engineers, managers, or planners, but they may not be familiar with novel information and communications technologies. Few people in transportation are fluent in the rigorous experimental design principles that ensure learning from pilot projects. Plus, they often work for politicians who fear public backlash from needed trial-and-error learning. Our universities need to prepare the future transportation workforce to master technology assessment and innovation adoption skills.
Cities are great transportation innovation testbeds for the nation because only one jurisdiction at a time is put at risk by the novel technology. But the local risks are only justified if national learning takes place. Successful innovations emerge from an environment that encourages novel solutions, actors who develop ideas iteratively in specific contexts, and objective assessment using rigorous testing regimens. The federal government ought to encourage more urban technology experiments, sponsor more systematic evaluations of those experiments, and support development of a workforce adept at handling urban transportation innovations.
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