I always say it's like you have the
ability either to shape your future or you
can sit back and let the future happen
to you. And I think the plan like
the Denver Mobility Project is the first step
in trying to shape the future in into
a way that that you want.
I'm John Torrick. And I'm Danny Sullivan. And
you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you
the stories of the engineers and architects
who are transforming the world one project at
a time. Growing population and rapidly changing transportation
technologies
are affecting our everyday lives. Today, we'll learn
how public transportation
agencies
are partnering with private sector technology companies
to tackle that change head on in Denver,
Colorado. That community's mobility blueprint may suggest a
new approach for other metropolitan cities wrestling with
the same issues in their communities.
I don't own a car, so I either
ride my bike or take the bus. About
a half hour bike ride,
goes around the lake through a couple neighborhoods,
along the river, and through downtown. It's a
pretty nice ride, pretty easy. Or I can
take the bus. There are a couple different
buses I can take and that's about forty
minutes or something. That's Kiernan Miletsky, a transportation
planner in his early thirties.
He and his wife, Sarah, and their one
year old daughter, Evangeline,
live just a few miles west of Denver.
In Lakewood, close to a famous wacky Mexican
restaurant named Casa Bonita that you may have
heard of. Denver's a sprawling city. And even
though rail options have expanded,
it's still largely a city built around the
automobile.
Certainly,
Denver is not a city where very many
people choose to not own a car. It's
not that easy to get around.
It works pretty well if you work in
downtown, and the transit system here is pretty
effective for that, but it can be kind
of challenging to get around.
Like many young professionals in the region, Kiernan
loves what Denver has to offer in terms
of recreation,
hiking, camping,
skiing, backpacking.
And he also represents the changing point of
view that many in his generation have when
it comes to the concept of car ownership
and mobility.
Jason McGlashan, a transportation
planner and colleague of Kiernan's,
said a lot of the perks attracting an
influx of residents to Denver have led to
one inescapable
drawback. Just in the last decade, there's just
been an exponential
change in traffic and traffic congestion. Some of
that is owed to a a really strong
job market here, and I think it appeals
to a lot of people from just the
life style and access to a lot of
the opportunities in the Denver area. So a
lot of that has driven
population growth,
at a really accelerated pace, one where transportation
has a hard time keeping up. In fact,
by the year 2030,
Denver's population is projected to increase 26%
to nearly 4,000,000 people. Local government officials expect
that to bring a 50%
increase in travel delays for motorists who already
spend plenty of time stuck in gridlock.
In spite of that dire projection for drivers,
Jason said Denver actually does offer other mobility
options. The Denver area has a great transportation
system beyond the network of highways and arterials
and local streets, but just a really strong
network of bikeways and multimodal options. On top
of that, they have a light rail system,
which is a radial system really tying different
parts of the region to the downtown,
and then local bus systems, which really fill
in a lot of those gaps as well
as providing connections to park and rides throughout
the region and a connection now with their
commuter rail system from Downtown Denver
to Denver International Airport. Which sounds like a
robust transportation system
with a lot of different options to meet
people's needs. But even with all that, the
first mile and last mile challenge is getting
people from a station to their workplace or
from their home to a station is a
challenge. The feeder services
really have a more difficult time, you know,
serving lower density areas.
All of the bus transportation is really in
the same traffic congestion with the roadways.
I think that makes the light rail system
maybe less able to do what it could
do for the region in terms of connecting
those places. Transportation
agencies in big cities have been staring down
these kind of problems for years, and in
some cases, decades.
But more recently,
new factors entered the equation,
factors that commanded the attention of policymakers
across the region. Working together,
across a region of about
3,200,000
people,
that doesn't happen every day. That's Rick Pilgrim,
transportation development director at HDR. He also served
for a decade as mayor of Beaumont, Colorado,
a town of less than 1,010
miles Southwest of Denver. Rick said Don Hunt,
former executive director of the Colorado Department of
Transportation,
recognized
new mobility challenges mounting as he retired in
02/2014.
Don learned that technology
was coming at us and coming at us
quick, especially from the private sector. Private sector
was willing to put together
self driving cars
to look at ways that technology would transform
transportation. And then he realized that people were
connected
with cell phone tech or smartphone technology, really.
And using those choices
was going to impact transportation in a great
way. So Don said it was time to
mobilize the transportation agencies in the region and
pull them together with the private sector represented
by the Denver Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce
and take action. Self driving or autonomous vehicles
usually grab the spotlight,
but that's just one change on the horizon.
Connected and electric vehicles,
ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft, electric
scooters and bikes available on the sidewalks,
new transportation
apps, and tolling technologies.
This list of new technologies
goes on and on, in most cases being
driven by the private sector. So understanding how
to manage those different kinds
of disruptors
that are coming at us, agencies are slow
to take action because there's a lot that
they need to consider before they take that
action. Private sector companies are pretty quick
because they're interested in
getting their product out to the public. That
tension is is what we need to deal
with in the future.
As Rick explained, Don recognized that all the
transportation agencies in the region
could benefit from joining forces to create what
they called a mobility blueprint for the Denver
Metropolitan
Area. We looked around the country to see
what other regions were working on these kinds
of plans.
There were
a number of regions where one or more
agencies
were doing their own plans,
but we didn't find any that were collectively
getting their resources together and then working
in a collaborative fashion to develop a single
plan. Rick's colleague, Chris Primus, would become the
deputy project manager responsible for carrying out the
plan Don was envisioning. He realized that there
was a need for the agencies, those agencies
that provide our transportation,
in our everyday lives,
to transform their ways and think about how
to invest their money differently
than they had been for decades. And so
he started talking to his friends involved in
transportation.
And he went to each of those respective
agencies, which are the Colorado Department of Transportation.
He went to the Denver Regional Council of
Governments,
and he went to the Regional Transportation District,
which is our transit agency,
and made a case that they should commission
a study
to investigate
these new mobility technologies to see what benefits
they could bring to the Denver region. Chris
said there was one other major partner or
group of partners
needed at the table. We struggle with congestion
here on an everyday basis, and we all
realize that that hinders economic activity. And
the private sector wants a workforce that is
very adaptable and flexible and mobile to get
to their respective jobs, but also a technology
focused workforce that is at the forefront and
the cutting edge of possibilities
to to transform the world.
Jason Longsdorf, the transportation policy lead on the
blueprint,
explained the different challenges each transportation
agency faced.
For example, the regional transportation
district operates more than 170
bus routes in nine rail lines across eight
counties and more than 2,300
square miles.
Well, there was a real concern
from our local transit agency, RTB, that they
were beginning to see a dip in their
ridership,
and we're assuming that it was coming from
a couple of different forces in terms of
emerging technologies.
There was the presence of Uber and Lyft
services, and they thought that they were losing
some of their choice riders. And then there
were also some new micro mobility solutions like
electric scooters and bicycle sharing programs that they
thought were also kind of pulling from some
of their shorter trip ride. Meanwhile, services like
Uber and Lyft are having a different impact
on the Colorado Department of Transportation.
That's the agency responsible for maintaining the state's
9,144
mile highway system, including
3,429
bridges.
At the same time, the Department of Transportation
was looking a little further into the future
and thinking Uber and Lyft have some kind
of an impact, but the bet that Uber
and Lyft have made on the presence of
autonomous vehicles was another thing that CDOT really
felt like they had not studied and could
have
well, they just really didn't understand what that
impact could be, but anticipated that if we
have a fleet of vehicles that can drive
themselves, then this challenge we've had in terms
of trying to solve congestion may become compounded
by the fact that now we might have
empty vehicles driving themselves around from place to
place. The third partner, the Denver Regional Council
of Governments,
uses the memorable acronym Doctor COG. Doctor COG
is a regional planning organization
with representatives
from more than 50 cities and counties in
the Denver area.
Each one is represented by a mayor or
senior elected official. There were a lot of
folks that were interested in what was happening.
A lot of the local municipalities
were working on their own kind of technology
programs, everything from smart street lights to more
advanced pedestrian detection at intersections.
Curbside management was particularly important in how precious
on street parking and bicycle lanes might be
impacted by Uber and Lyft services or other
micro mobility services.
Although some of the emerging technologies coming from
the private sector present policy challenges for public
officials,
Jason said everyone also recognized
that they present opportunity.
Good side is that all of these technologies
bring with them massive amounts of data that
the companies that own the vehicles or the
services can harness, but that could be really
beneficial
for a safety and planning perspective for the
agency. Including that fourth partner, representatives from the
Denver Chamber of Commerce gave the study an
entirely different dimension.
Here's Chris Primus again. But what was unique
was having the Denver Metro Chamber at the
same table.
That was the first time that had occurred
for the private sector and their interest in
furthering the economy of the Denver area and
the businesses and firms that they represent
to sit at the same table with the
chance transportation agencies. And it's kind of two
worlds coming together, learning each other's languages
and
perspective and needs. With all the right people
on board, a study known as the Denver
Mobility Choice Blueprint
began. This was an umbrella study to consider
all types and all kinds of new mobility
technologies and to investigate them and to, one,
state the problems the metropolitan region is facing
due to growing population,
more congestion,
inequitable
provision of mobility to its residents. Face with
the and then pair that with the opportunities
afforded by these potential new technologies
and how those two aspects can be brought
together
to improve the quality of life in the
region. So the team called in some national
experts to help sort through all the new
technology
flying at communities like Denver.
This wasn't about just making Denver the best
just to be the most technological
city. This was really about trying to roll
up our sleeves, and they really got to
the root of it. How can these three
agencies work together and really make Denver a
better place to live? That's Ben Pierce, the
transportation
technology program lead at HDR. Ben has a
background in statistics.
He loves to be an early adopter of
technology,
and he's a big Star Trek fan, as
he says, a nerd at heart. His career
became focused on transportation
as the rapid growth of new technologies
began to impact how we move. I mean,
the relationship between cities and transportation has definitely
come a long way. You know, at first,
cities are all about growth, expansion, and then
they get congestion, and then they're, oh my
gosh. We got a congestion problem. What are
we going to do about it? And then
we're going to build this roadway or that
roadway and they tend to want to build
themselves out of it. And as the city
matures and the population grows,
you just can't continue to build your way
out of the problem. And that's where typically
we start looking for alternative solutions, and that's
where technology starts to come up. Whether you're
into science fiction or not, driverless vehicles sit
atop the list of disruptive technologies
that are coming whether we're ready or not.
Well, we paid a lot of attention to
automated vehicles. I think that's obviously
has the potential to be a significant disruptor,
much like we've seen transportation network companies kind
of disrupt the public transit.
The ability for a car to pick you
up and drop you off at the door
and then have the cargo on its way
has all kinds of serious repercussions,
not just to the cities, but to the
traveling public and how we plan and build
buildings. I mean, we don't build buildings to
drop everyone off at the door at 08:00
in the morning. Examples like that, the tangential
effects of a new technology
have a ripple effect
beyond the obvious legal and safety considerations.
Right now, we have a parking lot system
where some people get dropped off at the
door, some people get dropped off at a
parking lot and walk, other people,
take a bus. If we have automated vehicles
and everyone wants to get dropped off with
the door to door service, we may have
to redesign
the buildings to accommodate that and their curb
space. The design of curb space and the
amount of land needed for parking lots
also comes up when you talk about ride
hailing services like Uber and Lyft. They've already
forced property owners and municipalities
to reconsider
Another consideration,
if people can read a book or play
games on their phone while taking an automated
vehicle to their destination,
how does that affect their decisions about taking
public transit?
Ben said that's an example where the way
we choose to use autonomous vehicle technology
will determine its impact on society. In Denver,
they've just launched a first mile, last mile
connectivity
with an automated shovel out at Pena Station.
So that's taking an automated micro transit shuttle
and connecting it to a fixed route mass
transit system.
And that extends the reach of transit out
into the community and that would be a
good thing. On the other hand, if you
have people that are not taking public transit
because they want to take an automated vehicle
instead of a public transit trip, then that
could be a bad thing because that would
create more congestion
and delays on our roadways. For autonomous vehicle
technology to work, roadway design becomes part of
the conversation too. And when it becomes commonplace,
it will also change traffic forecasting and roadway
capacity. You know, making sure that the vehicle
can position itself in the lane and whether
that's from triangulation
off of fixed objects, which require
high definition mapping or LIDAR mapping or good
clear lanes demarcations.
Other things to consider would be how do
you handle zero vehicle
trips.
Right now we have a preponderance of single
occupant vehicle trips and now we could have
zero occupant vehicle trips. And what does that
do for capacity and congestion? These are all
kinds of things you have to start thinking
about and start planning up. Ben's colleague, Justin
Robbins, said the scenario of a single occupancy
autonomous vehicle takeover
is exactly why cities need to be proactive
so they can plan for, rather than react
to, technology. So in a sense, you can
all imagine a future in which autonomous vehicles
overtake our roadway networks. Everybody has a single
autonomous vehicle. They just drive around looking for
passengers by themselves. It wouldn't be a great
future, but if they are shared, if it's
something that's managed, then all of a sudden,
it makes a lot of sense. So that
framework really informed
how those technologies
should be used. Justin's a transportation planner who
specializes
in automated and connected vehicles.
But at heart, he's a student of cities.
Those passions connect by looking at how new
technologies
will change urban landscapes across the world. Quite
honestly, I mean, this is my interest in
autonomous vehicles. The transportation part, the technology part,
it's fun. It's interesting.
But really what catches
my attention is what it means for our
cities. All the secondary effects that I think
we're still trying to grapple with. To the
extent that cars change the way we develop
cities and the way that we look at
land use, autonomous vehicles are going to have,
I think, the same amount of effect. Justin
sees the mobility blueprint
as a way to help steer the community
toward more favorable scenarios
as new technologies arrive. Part of the reason
to have a document like this is to
make sure that as things happen, even things
that we can't predict, we at least understand
where we want to go and what we
want the Denver region to be. And I
think that's one of the critical pieces of
that is we are living in this age
of uncertainty right now where we can see
on the horizon all these changes that are
gonna happen. And I think cities and communities
and regions are struggling to understand how we
react to something where we don't necessarily
know for certain
how it's going to turn out. Of course,
driverless cars aren't the only transportation technology
challenging city planners. Things like the electrification of
the roadway, the electrification
of the transportation fleet, this is a trend
that we all know is coming. The vehicles
are anticipated to reach cost parity with internal
combustion engines by about 2023.
So, understanding what that means, what types of
amenities
or charging infrastructure need to be in place
to support that type of transportation system, understanding
communications.
So, with the rollout of five gs, what
that means for our transportation system. You know,
everybody has a handheld device in their pocket
now that can communicate instantly.
Now, cars will be able to communicate, transportation
will be able to communicate. How you actually
manage a system that facilitates that type of
communication. As new models of transportation arrive, such
as electric bicycles and scooters,
planners are also finding they have to rethink
something as seemingly commonplace
as streetscape design. The way that we divide
our streets right now, the way that we
divide up our right of way is typically
exclusive of mode or or mode exclusive, I
should say. So you have vehicle lanes that
are specifically for privately owned vehicles or bus
transit. And then you might have a transit
lane where it's only transit vehicles can move
and then you have bike lanes and then
you have sidewalks.
So the way we do it now is
we have a limited amount of right of
way and we divide it up by mode.
And one of the things that I think
is concerning is that in the world where
transportation
innovation is happening really, really quickly, how do
we start to redefine our right of way
to be
accommodating for all the modes that even we
don't know exist yet? Technology experts like Ben
and Justin brought national perspective to emerging technologies
and how other communities are facing them. Meanwhile,
colleague Jason Maglachen
led a team responsible for modeling and analysis
of the potential
impacts.
There's not a lot
of literature and research on this yet, which
is why we had to present these as
scenarios
of what if, if you will. And so
it was challenging. I wouldn't say it makes
my job more difficult. I think it makes
it that much more exciting. Transportation planners like
Jason use travel demand models to forecast
how population increases,
new development projects, and different types of travelers
will impact traffic.
This helps communities determine which projects will bring
the greatest benefit to the most residents
and which ones get funding. The forecasting goes
well beyond counting cars. The models are all
data based, and so the model for the
Denver region is what's considered an activity based
model. And within it, it represents every household
in the region with data and information
about households
more on aggregate sense by zones or by
neighborhoods.
So things like auto ownership,
income levels, the types of work trips that
individuals would make, and those are also matched
to travel opportunities, whether it's for jobs, education,
for recreation,
or whether it's travel even outside of the
region. So the model starts with this data
framework, and this has been the tool that's
informed transportation decision making for a number of
years. But Jason described it as a new
frontier to account for factors like autonomous vehicles,
ride hailing apps, and new microtransit
options. When you introduce
new concepts like ride hailing apps and with
a more saturated network of those, how does
that affect affect travel for what was previously
a zero car household that may have been
dependent purely on transit or may have not
had access to rides at all for work
opportunities or for education. And then making adjustments
in the model to identify
where are these zero car households If we
can provide an accessible and affordable service that
allows them to get access to transportation,
how would that change their travel behavior?
While new ways to travel by car enhance
mobility for certain people,
they also can result in more cars on
the road. At the same time, you have
to also look at what are the potential
negative consequences.
So for drivers who can afford an automated
vehicle, completely self driving level four, level five,
and if we couple that with transportation infrastructure
that provided for places for those vehicles to
operate
and and potentially park, would that change
people's trip making decisions now? Maybe they live
further away from downtown and drive more miles
because the journey itself is less onerous.
So his team considered multiple scenarios for the
year 2030, which accounted for 800,000
new residents in Denver, emerging transportation choices,
and whether transportation
agencies maintain the status quo or act boldly
to get ahead of change. And the scenarios
were used just to inform
our group of how these different changes might
impact some of the the broader metrics of
transportation,
things like vehicle miles of travel, hours of
congestion,
or number of crashes on an annual basis.
But it also allows us to do some
more personal insights
into
individual travel. And I think that was really
a key feature of this study was using
a traditional
large network tools to try to understand at
a more microscopic
level how these different types of changes
would impact the individual person. The people side
of the Denver Mobility Blueprint
added an entirely different dimension to the study.
So if you think about a triangle,
there's one end that is about technology,
one end about transportation.
Those are two areas that our clients and
our team, our consultant team were very comfortable
with. But what we also knew is that
there was a very important third side of
that triangle,
which was about livability and that if we
thought about those three things holistically,
we might end up with a very different
solution
than if we had only focused on the
technology and the transportation aspects of this problem.
That's Kya Nesbitt, who led a community engagement
team as part of the blueprint. Kaya began
her career as a product development engineer at
Nike.
Eventually, she wanted to expand her interest to
design to see the impact it could have
on the scale of a city.
That led her into urban design and landscape
architecture.
Kaya's team conducted extensive community ethnography
to gain deeper insights into the needs, the
hopes, and the fears of the people who
travel around Denver every day.
Community ethnography
is a method used often by anthropologists, and
it's a research method essentially
of understanding a population and its need.
We have
borrowed the inspiration
around that deep research process,
and we utilize it as part of our
community engagement.
And essentially it's a way
of having,
small group in-depth conversations
that try to reach,
ask questions that aren't as direct as you
might ask in a public survey, for example.
And essentially, the intent is to try and
uncover
more needs and mindset
and understanding
of why people make the decisions that they
make and the choices that they choose. So
Kya's team went into the community to listen
to a wide variety of perspectives
of how people travel every day. We had
a series of one on one conversations with
people in their living rooms or around kitchen
tables, and we had those conversations,
with a wide variety of people across the
Denver Metropolitan
Area.
Those in-depth conversations
didn't just ask about what kind of transportation
do you use, but they asked about how
do you define quality of life. We had
various little games and exercises
that asked people to rank quality of life
factors and those include everything from health and
safety,
work and productivity,
heritage,
as well as access to transportation.
Hearing individual perspectives from about 25 pairs of
people
cast a new light on what transportation
means to people from different walks of life.
So what we learned from some of those
early conversations
is that transportation
is an enabler to quality of life. It's
not only about how you get from point
a to point b. It's a part of
how you connect with your community,
your ability to have choices for mobility. So
whether you are able to feel like you
can bike safely to work and that might
make you feel like you've had some exercise
and you are able to see your community
in a new way. You may arrive home
after a long day in a better mood
because you've had a positive
transportation experience
through biking or walking
or carpooling.
Transportation is about connecting to our community.
It's not just about the movement
and the details around vehicle miles traveled
and congestion.
Armed with the depth of those conversations,
Kaya's team then sought to gather feedback on
a wider scale. So in order to test
what we heard from that that small representative
sample, we used social media, and we used
technology
to build essentially a small game almost like
some of those games you see on Facebook
like what kind of spirit animal are you
and answer a number of questions and then
in the end it tells you oh you're
this type of spirit animal perhaps an eagle
or a fox And so we took inspiration
from that kind of fun way of engaging
and applied it to transportation.
People answered simple, fun questions such as, would
you rather be the driver or be the
passenger?
Or are you the type of person who
buys new technology right when it comes out?
Or are you the type who couldn't care
less? Through that social media game, the team
reached more than 1,000 additional residents.
That gave them more data to support or
enhance the findings from the initial interviews.
Then they added one more layer by hosting
workshops with about 40 participants,
which they called mobility ambassadors.
In total, the team hosted more than 70
events to explain the blueprint and collect feedback.
We engaged a number of agencies
and regional transportation
management associations
and included them in our workshops
as well as a number of stakeholders
from doctor Cog, Cog, our regional councils of
government, our client team from the Colorado Department
of Transportation,
RTD, and the Denver Metro Chamber.
Perhaps not surprisingly,
the findings of the community engagement
activities often reminded decision makers of the human
side of transportation.
There was a lot of concern
around these new technologies
and some fears
around how they might disrupt people's connection
to their neighbors
and it became clear that even some simple
things
like connection of sidewalks
and trails that connect people's communities to their
jobs,
Those simple
infrastructure elements were as important if not more
important to them than how they thought about
the future of mobility technology.
So it was a good reminder for us
that the human nature is such that we
can often get ahead of ourselves in thinking
about the future, but we need to remember
that there are some simple things around transportation
and connectivity
of communities
that we need to address. When it comes
to new technology specifically,
residents' biggest concerns revolved around safety and security
in many forms.
Both the fears around how transportation
technologies
might have less human connection
and therefore
create more safety problems on our streets. But
they also talked about security and sometimes that
relates to
data security
as well as your own feeling of personal
security.
So as we have greater and greater connectivity
of things through the Internet and as our
online
personalities
become more connected with transportation,
there was concern around wanting to
share more and more of that information
and have both our whereabouts
as well as our personal data
be held in a secure way. As for
the safety of technologies such as autonomous vehicles,
how they're introduced to the community will go
a long way toward building rider's comfort level.
That's something that we learn through our community
engagement. The idea of having almost like a
concierge service the first time you try an
autonomous bus, for example. If there's actually a
person on the bus that can help you
understand where you're going, welcome you, and help
you understand what the experience will be like,
that can help people feel a lot more
comfortable with trying a new technology such as
an autonomous vehicle for the first time. However,
even the demographic most uncertain of new technology
recognized the benefits it can bring to their
lives. One thing that was very surprising when
we talked to some of our older residents
in the Denver Metro Area was many of
them were very excited about technology such as
autonomous and connected vehicles.
Some of them really expressed how they expected
those type of technologies would enable them to
stay more mobile for longer in their lives
and staying more connected to your community for
longer is only a benefit.
With the three sides of the triangle in
place, the technology,
transportation,
and livability,
it was time for the team to put
together a blueprint. This is really not about
trying to come up with the precise
answer. That's Jason McGlashan,
the transportation planner we met earlier who was
responsible for modeling and analysis.
Because there's just so much uncertainty, what we
really need to do is step back and
try to paint the picture of what we
want the future to be like and then
go backwards and say, alright. If that's the
end result we desire, what are the steps
or the tactical actions, in this case,
we need to focus on to push us
towards achieving that goal? And so it's somewhat
of the reverse engineering approach, starting with your
answer first and then going backwards to how
do you get there, as opposed to putting
in all the constraints and letting the problem
unfold.
In doing so, the blueprint consisted of a
long list of tactical actions to help achieve
the transportation
future
the community and its leaders want. Kiernan Miletsky,
the young professional who we met at the
beginning of the episode,
explained how the community outreach that Kaya described
helped give a human face to that list.
I think one of the more unique tools
we used on this project, we built these
personas based on some in-depth interviews with various
people from across the region. And then when
we got to the end of the project,
we used those personas to try to explain
how the recommendations of the blueprint might change
life for certain kind kinds of people across
the region. The blueprint included five distinct personas
of mile high travelers,
then evaluated how different actions would impact each
person. We found that trying to articulate those
changes at a macro
regional level is really hard, and you kinda
lost the meaning, the significance of some of
the recommendations at that scale. But if you
drill down and sort of explained how
the life of, say, a single mother living
in Aurora and working in Downtown Denver might
change if we took this coordinated approach to
adopting these new technologies, we're able to tell
a much more powerful story. Example, the persona
of the single mother was named Maria.
The blueprint showed a map of the places
Maria travels in a typical day, from Aurora
where she lives to her mother's house in
Five Points to drop off her son, Gabriel,
then to class at Metro State, followed by
her part time job downtown,
then back to her mother's house to pick
up Gabriel and return home to Aurora. The
plan explained
how long it takes now, how much it
costs Maria, what her current transportation options are,
and how that trip might look with new
technologies,
such as autonomous micro shuttle. I think it
was the fact that it was rooted in
these really in-depth, really thoughtful ethnographies
that the team conducted early in the process
that really surfaced people's frustrations
and
aspirations
and fears and concerns.
And being able to use those in the
development of the personas made them a lot
more real. I think the personas struck people
as authentic
because they came from this earnest process that
was really, truly rooted in what we heard
from the community. Chris Primus, the deputy project
manager,
explained how the group arrived on the final
list of tactical actions.
We identified
over a 30
tactical actions, and we iteratively
whittled those down through a variety of meetings
and workshops with our client team and stakeholders
down to what became a set of 34
tactical actions that the blueprint recommends the agencies
to implement. The blueprint places the actions into
seven main categories,
regional collaboration,
system optimization,
shared mobility,
data security and sharing,
mobility electrification,
driverless vehicle preparation,
and new transportation funding. The recommended actions
are each tagged with initiator
of primarily being one of the agencies
who have assigned on to be responsible for
making sure that recommended strategy
is is initiated,
not necessarily that the agency will do it
themselves, but they're responsible for finding somebody or
some agency to make it happen.
Some actions are smaller,
practical tactics
that can enhance how new technologies
integrate into the existing infrastructure.
So for example, implement curbside management standards, which
focuses on how new technologies can help the
activities occur along a curve, including Lyft or
Uber, drop off and pickup, and flexible parking,
and other smart technologies.
Jason Longsdorf,
the Blueprint's policy lead, provided examples of actions
with a much greater scale. So there were
a number of different kinds of policy recommendations
that we landed on, things like a goal
to
more aggressively
electrify
the fleets in the Denver region. And each
of those agencies had different challenges with their
fleets. Buses are one. It's a massive vehicle
and takes quite a bit of infrastructure to
generate the amount of electricity. So they were
actually at the time contemplating
creating their own mini utility that create their
own energy. But in working with the Department
of Transportation
and then through the MPO as the MPO
was thinking about all of the fleets that
all of the different cities and counties around
the metro area had there, They were able
to agree on kind of what a goal
was and decide how to move forward on.
Other tactics
looked at how technology could help to improve
traffic flow on roadways.
We were looking at things like
synchronization
of signal timing on certain corridors
or essentially creating, like, a smart highway with
some advanced
ramp metering
programs
and algorithms to try to keep the highways
flowing efficiently
by not letting too many vehicles onto them
and keeping kind of a maximum capacity and
and controlling speeds. Jason also gave an example
of how partnering with the private sector could
benefit travelers.
The transit agency formed a partnership with
both Uber and Lyft so that anytime you
open any of the three entities' apps, both
Uber and Lyft, once you open it, you
can click on the transit option to compare
the travel time and cost comparison of taking
transit versus taking Uber or Lyft. And a
transit agency has a similar option where you
can go and see the other two services
as well. Having the transportation agencies in all
the cities and counties in the area working
together
also makes a big impact on travelers.
Whereas on one hand that might sound obvious,
it also might not sound like a big
deal. But during the course of the study,
a perfect example appeared on sidewalks throughout the
community
in the form of shared electric scooters.
The policy around how
electric scooters and electric bikes are to be
used in the region and
the fear with
fifty fifty six different cities and counties in
the metro area
was that we might end up with 56
different policies that those companies
had to figure out independently.
And so one of the policy goals we
came up with was that there would be
a single
committee at the Regional Council of Governments
that would help develop kind of boilerplate policies
so that as those companies came in and
wanted to introduce their services, every local municipality
would have at least the same starting place.
Do you ride them in the street? Do
you ride them on the sidewalk? Do you
need to wear a helmet? How old do
you need to be to ride them? Do
you need a driver's license?
What's the speed limit for them? Because all
the partners were already at the table working
on the blueprint,
the scooters gave everyone a chance to develop
a common policy,
at least as a starting point for each
city. Yeah. They are allowed in bike lanes
wherever there are bike lanes as long as
the speed limit is less than 30 miles
an hour or less. Where there are no
bike lanes that are allowed on sidewalks, but
they can only go seven miles an hour.
So trying to communicate that to the tens
of thousands of people that wanna use scooters
all over the the metro area
to have a common set of rules. And
I'm not saying that everybody's gonna follow them.
Clearly, they don't. But at least there's essentially
a common set of rules for everyone. If
each city developed its own policy,
a rider traveling from one suburb to the
next
might not know when the scooter should be
on the street
versus when it should be on the sidewalk.
For that matter, neither would drivers or pedestrians
trying to safely avoid those scooters. That's one
example, and Kya Nesbitt said there will continue
to be more decisions best made as a
region. When you think about how, say, for
example, an autonomous vehicle
moves about a city, it's not like you
can have different rules from municipality to municipality.
That's just not how people move about their
lives. We need to think about this in
a broader scale. So this project really addressed
a regional scale, which I believe is very
important as we think about technology in the
future. In the end, Kya said she's proud
of the unique perspective the blueprint provided
by focusing on how mobility technology will affect
quality of life. As technology becomes even more
pervasive throughout our lives, as we are more
and more connected
digitally,
there are issues around safety and security. There
are concerns,
but there are also great opportunities
for ways that mobility technology
can help us become more connected.
That point of view makes you rethink transportation
beyond asking how long it will take or
if you're going by car or by train.
Help us get to our health care appointments
faster. Help recognize
when there's a safety issue on the road
and have emergency response vehicles
address that more quickly. It might help us
as we age. It might help us enable
to stay more connected and mobile within our
communities.
Realizing the potential of technology to improve people's
lives
was one of the most exciting parts of
the project for Chris Primus.
There are some people who have limited means
to travel, whether those means be physical means
or financial means. And these new technologies
offer opportunities to help solve some of those
problems that we've had so long. And if
you keep the focus right, you can provide
a better quality of life for your citizens,
for your residents. Rick Pilgrim, the project manager
and former mayor of Beaumont,
said one of the key takeaways was the
benefit of getting multiple agencies,
cities, and private companies at the same table,
looking at the same data and working together
on solutions.
The private sector needs to be a partner
here. And especially as the consumer,
the transportation
user,
makes different decisions
than they have over the last fifty years.
So we have to change the way we
think in terms of transportation planning because people
are choosing,
much different ways to travel. So
working together is gonna be the solution,
and partnering with the private sector
is gonna be a key to the future
success.
Communities that go the extra mile to embrace
changes and plan for them can help shape
their mobility future.
But for those who don't, that technology is
still coming whether they prepare or not. I
think those cities are gonna find that they
lose the ability
to manage
the outcomes,
and they wind up with a community that's
less robust.
It's subject to
the private sector doing the easy stuff and
leaving the hard stuff for the public sector.
Jason McGlashan said he believes the proactive approach
taken in Denver can help other communities
take on similar issues. I think every metropolitan
area in The US and, you know, and
the world are all wrangling with this issue
and trying to understand, you know, how do
they need to adjust and address
technology and new mobility and just societal changes
that are going to be occurring. And so
the work that was done as part of
Denver Mobility Choice Blueprint
and mapping out a range of thoughtful tactical
actions that
address everything from policy framework, from intergovernmental coordination,
to maintenance and funding,
to safety, to operational controls. And there's really
a lot of good thought that went into
this, and that is all directly
applicable to just about anywhere. Being involved with
the blueprint
completely changed how Kiernan Miletsky thinks about transportation,
and he has a pretty good analogy to
illustrate his point. Transportation is something that you
have to do to survive. You have to
move around
to get to work, to participate in society.
You have to move around. You have to
do it every day. And for most of
my life, I felt like a lot of
transportation is kind of a means to an
end, point a to point b, that sort
of thing. But that's not actually how we
think about most things in our lives that
we have to do in order to survive.
It's not how we think about eating, for
example. If we all if all we cared
about eating was
getting the nutrients we needed to survive, and
we're just eating whatever gelatinous
protein block. But we don't do that. We
go to restaurants. We cook. We think of
food as a way to experience culture and
community
and the way to just enjoy life.
And the main thing that I've learned so
far at HDR
is that transportation can be the same. There's
no reason that transportation can't also be a
way to build community, a way to bring
people together,
a way to be healthy, a way to
just have more fun in life. And Kiernan
believes that through the blueprint,
transportation
can make that kind of impact
on the residents of the Denver region. And
I think
mobility choice, as I said, was not really
in the end a technology project. It was
about
building that community,
about thinking about how to make people's transportation
experience more valuable to them
in the future using these technologies.
So So it's not just letting technology happen
to us. It's it's taking a proactive
stance and articulating
what we as a region care about from
a transportation perspective and making sure that technology
helps us move towards that.
For more information on this podcast,
visit hdrinc.com/speakingofdesign.
You'll find links to pictures, articles, and more
information about this project.
If you like what you heard, be sure
to rate us or leave feedback on iTunes,
Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.