Smart Mobility today—a conversation with five cities
Co-author: Philipp Willigmann, Vice President Corporate Strategy at a sustainable, smart infrastructure multinational and Former Co-Founder Global Deloitte Future of Mobility Practice
In April 2015, Mayor de Blasio announced the release of One New York: The Plan for a Strong and Just City, a comprehensive plan for a sustainable and resilient New York City, with smart transport and mobility as a core pillar. In December 2015, the US DOT launched the Smart City Challenge, asking mid-sized cities across America to develop ideas for emerging transportation technologies that address their most pressing problems. In 2016, Ford officially established its Ford Smart Mobility LLC to expand its business model to be both an auto and a mobility company. So, since half a decade ago, there has been a lot of energy, hype, and investment poured into “Smart Mobility” from the public and private sectors, with an overarching vision of helping people and goods move more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently through the use of new digital technologies. After years of development, where does Smart Mobility stand today? For those of us involved in the industry from a consulting or investing perspective, we often learn about developments of technologies and city programs on a high level, but what is actually happening in the field? Are cities achieving their objectives? What have been their core challenges and key lessons learned for the operators themselves?
For this blog post, Philipp Willigmann and I collaborated and chatted with six experts leading Smart Mobility initiatives across five cities to learn about their vision, boots-on-the-ground experience, and path forward. Big thanks to the experts for the conversations—
CHICAGO | David Leopold, Director of City Solutions at City Tech Collaborative
COLUMBUS | Mandy Bishop, Deputy Director of Public Service and Smart Columbus Program Manager
MIAMI | Carlos Cruz-Casas, Assistant Director, Department of Transportation and Public Works of Miami-Dade County
MIAMI | Michelle Abbs, Managing Director, Mana Tech
RENO | Carlos Cardillo, Director of Nevada Center for Applied Research
SAN DIEGO | Alyssa Muto, Director of Mobility and Sustainability Department at City of San Diego
Q1: What is your vision of Smart Mobility?
Miami & Miami-Dade County
Miami-Dade County comprises 34 municipalities. Other than snow and slopes, the County has all the ecosystems and its unique transportation use cases.
“Our vision for Smart Mobility is the ability to maximize our resources in a way that is aligned with our community goals. For example, there’s a lot of competing needs for the public right of way, and it is our responsibility to manage the lanes, the curb, the lights. The end goal is not just transportation for transportation's sake, but rather to achieve sustainability, maximize space, create impact to business and communities, and help people move faster.”
Assistant Director of Transportation and Public Service Carlos Cruz-Casas says that the County has good quantitative data on throughput and travel times, and is focusing now on gathering more qualitative data from the community to better understand community needs and goals. The County received a grant from the Knight Foundation to have community members from four cities convey what types of transportation needs they have and how they prefer that to be solved.
Separately, we spoke with Michelle Abbs, the Managing Director of Mana Tech, the technology-focused arm of Mana Common, a real estate platform that owns 50+ buildings in Miami’s Flagler District with a core focus on urban revitalization, sustainability, and community building. Mana Tech strategically recruits startups to work on key priorities at the city and county levels. In the last few years, there has been a thematic focus on Smart Cities, and Mana Tech has worked to recruit corporations to participate as partners and weave in startups from the Plug and Play community.
“Recently, Mayor Suarez met with Elon Musk, which began a conversation around thinking more futuristically and dreaming even bigger about the vision of Smart Mobility.
We are starting to talk about the influx of thousands of people moving to Miami from other cities, and starting to talk about what that means in terms of moving people and goods. I’m pleased to see that we are dreaming bigger and exploring conversations around aerial mobility, point-to-point solutions, kiosk integrations, street management, and better utilization of our greatest asset—the water.”
Chicago (City Tech Collaborative)
For Chicago, we connected with David Leopold at City Tech Collaborative, a member-driven consortium and 501(c)(3) organization that creates cross-sector teams from industry, academia, and government to develop solutions to urban challenges including mobility, health, and infrastructure. In 2019, the Collaborative launched its Advanced Mobility Initiative (AMI), and for the last two years has been in progress with 16 projects spanning 70 partners that address mobility challenges.
“For AMI, our vision is a more seamless, connected, accessible, and far-reaching transportation system for all people and goods that move about the city. We’ve seen that there has not been an appetite for a single private or public sector actor to manage and control an integrated transportation system, resulting in gaps that can be detrimental to the user experience. Where a lot of our work has focused is on smoothing out the transitions between modes through solutions that enable better collaboration between partners and making their data more shareable, systems more interoperable, and business models more open.”
Columbus
In 2016, Columbus won the hotly contested Smart Cities competition among U.S. cities for a $50 million award from the U.S. DOT and the Paul Allen Family Foundation. As part of the Smart Columbus program, the City deployed a broad portfolio of emerging mobility technologies including connected vehicles, two autonomous shuttles, mobility hubs, bike share, and a number of applications tailored to specific needs such as non-emergency transport. We connected with Mandy Bishop, the Deputy Director of Public Service and Smart Columbus Program Manager.
“As for what Smart Mobility vision looks like, we have succeeded in deploying smart mobility when everyone has equitable transportation options.
Have we reached it? No.
It’s an ongoing process, and the way that we are measuring improvement is to look at what our transportation enables: how many jobs, education opportunities, and healthcare services do we put in reach.”
San Diego
San Diego has been a hot market for new mobility technology, with deployments of shared bikes and scooters, neighborhood shared electric vehicles, ADA accessibility, and circulators that supplement the transit system. They are even keeping an eye on the developing technologies associated with autonomous vehicles and aerial mobility with their regional partners. Looking forward, San Diego is moving forward with a competitive RFP to get a mixed fleet of shared mobility devices—scooters, e-bikes, cargo bikes, adaptive scooters—that can increase mobility options with the newest technology for operator partners and their users to get around the city, says City of San Diego Director of Mobility and Sustainability Department Alyssa Muto.
“For Smart Mobility—from a functional perspective, there need to be available and accessible transportation options that are real alternatives to single-occupancy vehicles for different lengths and trip types, with a key focus on underserved communities.
From a technology perspective, it’s about having data and performance indicators that can help us innovate in the right direction. For example, Smart Mobility data can help us understand if a certain corridor is a lead corridor for getting from one neighborhood to another via a scooter or bike and requires attention to improve on safety or the user experience.”
Reno (Nevada Center for Applied Research)
For Reno, we chatted with Carlos Cardillo, Director of Nevada Center for Applied Research (NCAR), a University of Nevada, Reno research and development center sponsored by the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development that creates technologies and innovation through partnerships between industry, startups, and university students and professors. Three years ago, NCAR established Intelligent Mobility intending to develop projects using the triple helix model of innovation: a collaboration between government, industry, and university.
“A few years ago, we had an excellent meeting in Las Vegas with stakeholders regarding the grand vision of the Intelligent Mobility initiative. While keeping an eye on the grand vision, we decided we needed to start small and create a tangible project. The project we decided on was mass-transit automation, where we took a Proterra electric bus operated by the Washoe County Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) and instrumented it with a suite of sensors, lidar, camera, GPS, and computing platform (all of the technology that goes into autonomous vehicles). The objective is to collect data and better understand how the fusion of technology behaves under various environmental conditions, for example, if sensors lose accuracy in 100-degree weather, can camera/lidar/radar take over as backup? In parallel with the electric bus instrumentation, we are also piloting connected traffic signals and exploring the legal/regulatory and socioeconomic impact of this program.”
Q2: What are the key pain points in piloting and scaling your vision of smart mobility?
Miami & Miami-Dade County
Michelle Abbs and Carlos Cruz-Casas provided several insights on key challenges that the City and the County face in implementing Smart Mobility solutions.
In Miami, it is hot. Taking public transit requires riders to wait outside. Or, perhaps the AC doesn’t work on the bus. There is a heavy reliance on cars and parking solutions because that’s the most comfortable way to get around. This makes the mind shift to shared and sustainable modes a big challenge.
The layout of the county is such that there is a lot of wealth centered on the waters, and as a result, there are a variety of transportation solutions like bikes and scooters along the beach. However, the majority of the population lives west and south, even into Homestead. The County is incredibly spread out, and there are no good solutions for those that reside South and West.
The County oversees 34 municipalities. Implementing a Miami-Dade County-wide plan requires enrolling each of the City’s Mayors and commissioners. The leaders of some municipalities can be wary of County-wide solutions because sometimes these solutions do not benefit everyone, and can even be detrimental to some. As an example, 80 years ago, there was an area in Miami that was a thriving black and brown residential and business community. Once I95 was built over it, all of the industry and economic development in this booming business area was disrupted. Now, the town is called Overtown, because it’s just a town that the highway passes over.
Chicago (City Tech Collaborative)
As David mentioned in the last response, one of City Tech’s key goals around Smart Mobility is equitable access. However, the risk to achieving that is that the private sector will naturally lean towards providing transportation services in the areas of highest demand and highest revenue potential. This does not always yield equitable access to mobility options for certain communities and neighborhoods. The role of policy-makers and organizations like City Tech then is to ensure that there is balance, for example by applying performance-based contracting or other structures that would reinforce more equitable access and deployment of mobility solutions in cities.
Columbus
For Columbus, Mandy Bishop says that some of the City’s biggest challenges in the last few years have been unforeseen circumstances. The pandemic is the big and obvious one, but another example is that the Federal Communication Commission published a rule in 2019 that changed the amount of the 5.9 GHz band that was dedicated for safety (which includes bandwidth dedicated to connected vehicles), essentially allocating more bandwidth to Wifi, broadband, and other unlicensed uses. Given the City was using radio communication for connected vehicle equipment, this new rule changed how the City was approaching its first connected vehicle environment project. The City was the first to comply with new channel designations dedicated to safety.
San Diego
In San Diego, one of the top pain points for the evolution towards Smart Mobility is the City’s own regulatory codes and policies, says Alyssa Muto. These policies were created with the car in mind and prioritize less so the active, shared, and new types of mobility. The City continues to evolve these codes, for example reducing parking space requirements and retiming traffic signals to reduce start-stops and therefore reduce fuel consumption. But, a key challenge for the municipality has been writing new policies and codes without deeply understanding new technologies or the integration of that mobility mode in the public right of way to maintain accessibility for all persons of all ages and abilities.
Furthermore, there’s the age-old challenge of data acquisition, data ownership, and data privacy. The City wants to acquire and analyze data that can help determine whether a project is providing a good return on investment, serving the right populations, or helping to achieve Vision Zero. However, the City needs to be very mindful of the individual privacy that goes along with acquiring and analyzing this data.
Reno (Nevada Center for Applied Research)
Carlos Cardillo addressed three key challenges he experienced in taking the mass transit automation project from a research lab setting to scale.
The first challenge is the financial sustainability and longevity of the Intelligent Mobility project—who will pay for the system to operate at scale, and who will pay for the continuous technology improvements? There was the idea for NCAR to monetize the data collected from the project, and while this would be a decent revenue stream, it’s not enough to fund the bread and butter of the operations.
A second challenge is the lack of technology standards. There are no rules from the Federal DOT (only guidelines) around data standards or connectivity protocols, and there’s a risk of different players in the ecosystem evolving to a point where the technologies are not compatible with each other.
Lastly, it’s getting all the stakeholders’ buy-in and keeping them all on the same page, maintaining the same level of interest and investment. For example, the mass transit automation and connected infrastructure project required partnerships from the City Works group, the RTC, the National Judicial College, the Nevada DOT, and more. Bringing these different groups together is a big challenge.
Q3: How do you prefer to work with the private sector— corporations or startups?
Miami & Miami-Dade County
“Miami-Dade County is big, and we’ve been visited by companies around the world who have innovative solutions. I look at them and fall in love. Then, the worst thing that can happen happens—I don’t need it right now,”
Carlos says that the process should start from the City/County being very vocal about their needs upfront, ideally through a Challenge-based procurement. This is because an RFP-based procurement requires the public sector to know the desired solution and the exact specifications, but for these types of problems, the public sector does not necessarily know all the details. Instead, in a Challenge-based procurement model, the public sector shares the problem statement and the desired outcomes and gets the right private sector partners involved in co-creating a program and solution. To de-risk the investment on the private sector side, the solution itself needs to be valuable to other cities, and that it can be standardized (or made open source) to be easily deployed elsewhere.
Chicago (City Tech Collaborative)
As an organization that brings sector partners together, City Tech’s process is to first understand the problem fully from all angles, then what’s the desired outcome, then what are the possible technologies available, and finally how to bring organizations together. Among private sector players, City Tech works with startups as much as larger corporations. But one of the challenges of working with startups is the timeline. The problems City Tech solves are complicated and usually require a longer timeline since the work is done at the pace of public sectors or corporations. Working directly with residents also requires time to establish a trustful and lasting relationship. On the other hand, startups usually require a faster cycler as they have pressure from investors to prove the value proposition and show results in a certain timeframe. City Tech’s recommendation to startups is to partner with larger organizations on these types of projects to get support on funding, risk management, business strategy, legal, and more.
Columbus
Mandy’s guidance to vendors is: “I hire you to be my expert. Help me translate what I need into technology.”
The process starts with municipalities being very clear about the problems they are trying to solve, developing specific use cases, and then letting the vendors respond. The City prefers to work in partnership with the experts and leaders in the private sector, as opposed to having a vendor-customer relationship. The City does make an effort to work with local and minority-owned businesses as fit, for example, the local office of engineering consulting company HNTB and Etch GIS, a local woman-owned business developing an open-source trip planning tool.
San Diego
Along similar lines, Alyssa provides the feedback that for a more mature solution like scooters (where the City knows the desired specs and conditions), an RFP makes sense. But for a newer solution, for example, EV charging in the city, a Request for Information (RFI) or Request of Expression of Interest (RFEOI) may be more appropriate, because the City know what the need and challenges are, and can present the constraints for EV charging on public properties, but the City may not know the exact path to get to reach the goal. This is where the private sector can shape the solution design and business model.
In implementing new mobility solutions, one thing that the private sector has to be very mindful of is the City’s workforce, and explore how the workforce in the City can be staffed as operators of mobility solutions from the private sector side.
Reno (Nevada Center for Applied Research)
At NCAR, the key intention of working with the private sector is to collaborate on experiments, learn together, and co-develop new solutions.
Interactions with several AV shuttle companies and scooter companies were not successful because, Carlos indicated that, “I was looking for collaboration, but the companies were looking for sales revenue. As a research and development organization, it is not feasible to justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a solution that will undergo no further development.”
Nonetheless, there have been companies that have been collaborative, for example, Important (instruments AVs) and Velodyne (provides lidars that are instrumented at the street intersections). The relationship between these companies and NCAR has been successful because these companies provide the technologies at a reduced cost, while NCAR provides the physical space and resources from the university, and the organizations collectively share the data, know-how, and learnings.
Key Takeaways
Different cities and organizations define Smart Mobility in different ways, but overall, mobility equity and access are becoming a key lens in which cities define the success of mobility initiatives.
Pilots from public-private partnerships are key to galvanize U.S. cities to electrify transportation systems and develop smarter and greener infrastructure. The public sector, after all, does not have all the answers to what the solution should be or contain. Rather, it’s looking for a partner to solve a known challenge and co-develop solutions. In addition to the organizations that we chatted with for this post, other example partnerships include Metrolab Network, with 30+ cities and 30+ universities partnering on projects related to smart mobility, as well as Miami’s CoMotion Lab.
The public sector is relying on the Challenges model or RFEOIs for less-defined use cases before issuing RFPs. Therefore, growth from innovation will likely require a fair amount of time in exploring, designing, and piloting. “Legacy” experts base holds a lot of power in “shaping the future”.
There has not been an appetite for a single actor to manage and control an integrated transportation system. Additionally, cities are not usually looking for “all-in-one” Smart Mobility solutions. Therefore, providers of niche solutions and specific optimizations continue to hold relevancy.
Funding continues to be a challenge. COVID-19 impacted the budgets for most cities. However, Biden’s infrastructure plan can close the gap on funding for mobility projects—not just the standard roads and bridges repairs, but innovation and clean transportation technologies.