Communication and sharing of knowledge is key for sound decision-making. The Resources section brings you the latest developments, materials for continuing the conversation with others, and an in-depth bank of research on emerging technologies and their impacts.
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Our curated collection of helpful articles, reports and other resources—each including summaries, key takeaways, and searchable tags.
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The Urbanism Next Framework
The Urbanism Next Framework organizes the potential impacts of emerging technologies into five categories and five types of broader implications.
Fact sheets, slides, and reports
Report – Academic
AARP Public Policy Institute, RAND Corporation and Urbanism Next collaborated to better understand the ways in which shared mobility and AVs will be impacting older adults. Through a review of literature, interviews with public and private sector players in this arena, and a roundtable with over 25 experts from around the country, the project team developed a framework that identifies a range of factors around new mobility and AVs that will be affecting older adults’ mobility, independence and safety. The framework is a guide for governments and private sector companies to help them think broadly about impacts, understand barriers, and can serve as an internal checklist to guide future policy, research and development.
Report – Academic
Using experience from working on the Knight AV Initiative, Urbanism Next created this white paper to provide a foundation for public sector agencies to approach autonomous vehicle deployment and policy with a focus on equity. This report outlines ways that public agencies can identify community needs and shape deployment to ensure that AVs will be accessible for all.
Report – Academic
From June to October 2019, researchers at Urbanism Next identified 249 new mobility and AV delivery pilot projects, completed and in-progress, in the United States and Canada. Relevant information about all 249 pilot projects, including sponsoring organizations, key dates, and geographic area, are recorded in this file. This data set provided the foundation of the report Perfecting Policy with Pilots. Ultimately, Urbanism Next used information from 220 of the pilots in the report. The new mobility modes included in this data set include shared micromobility devices such as e-scooters and bikes, transportation network company partnerships, microtransit, autonomous passenger vehicle pilots, autonomous delivery pilots, and non-autonomous goods delivery pilots. The information collected by Urbanism Next researchers is limited to publicly available information collected from online resources, such as reports, government websites, public and private press releases, and news articles as well as a limited number of follow-up phone calls requesting information.
Report – Academic
Before the pandemic, Urbanism Next developed a framework organizing the disruptions to cities caused by emerging transportation technologies on land use, urban design, building design, transportation, and real estate. COVID-19 has disrupted the trajectory of these emerging technologies and will, in turn, change some our original assumptions. This paper revisits the original Urbanism Next framework, taking into account the cascading impacts of the pandemic. This report is one of two reports completed by Urbanism Next on the impacts of Covid-19.
Pilots
Report – Government
In this report, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) evaluates the second e-scooter pilot project conducted in Portland, Oregon. PBOT used data and feedback from the community to evaluate the e-scooter pilot project, specifically evaluating "the potential for e-scooters to advance equity, ease traffic congestion and reduce climate-harming emissions."
Report – Government
"The City of Santa Monica designed a pilot program to test shared electric scooters and bikes operated by private companies, using a flexible approach that could be responsive to community needs, technological advancements, and a nascent and evolving industry."
Report – Academic
Common carrier locker systems are a way to provide secure, high density delivery locations in public spaces while improving delivery drivers’ efficiency. The University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab conducted a pilot project of this locker system in the Seattle Municipal Tower.
Tools have been organized in collaboration with
Tools
Tools
COVID Mobility Works is an independent platform dedicated to collecting, synthesizing and sharing mobility initiatives that are keeping the world moving during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this platform is to help policymakers, innovators, researchers and advocates rise to the challenge of creating more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable transportation systems for all.
Tools
Urbano has been developed by Cornell University and other organizations. This software has some special features like download geospatial data, import and aggregate data, lookup and modify metadata, routing in different modes, analyze amenities and streets, integrated cad workflow, etc. Also, is useful to quantify urban parameters like amenity demand, streetscore, amenityscore and walkscore. It has a friendly interface to visualize different urban planning parameters.
Tools
Make pedestrian ways, particularly sidewalks, first class members of an open data transportation network. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has made available extensive, user-contributed open data on transportation networks, providing the basis for many use cases and downstream activities, including rich analytics, travel route optimization, city planning, and disaster relief. Sidewalks in the built environment have generally been treated an addendum to streets, failing to serve people with limited mobility.
Featured
Report – Academic
AARP Public Policy Institute, RAND Corporation and Urbanism Next collaborated to better understand the ways in which shared mobility and AVs will be impacting older adults. Through a review of literature, interviews with public and private sector players in this arena, and a roundtable with over 25 experts from around the country, the project team developed a framework that identifies a range of factors around new mobility and AVs that will be affecting older adults’ mobility, independence and safety. The framework is a guide for governments and private sector companies to help them think broadly about impacts, understand barriers, and can serve as an internal checklist to guide future policy, research and development.
Report – Academic
Using experience from working on the Knight AV Initiative, Urbanism Next created this white paper to provide a foundation for public sector agencies to approach autonomous vehicle deployment and policy with a focus on equity. This report outlines ways that public agencies can identify community needs and shape deployment to ensure that AVs will be accessible for all.
Report – Academic
Before the pandemic, Urbanism Next developed a framework organizing the disruptions to cities caused by emerging transportation technologies on land use, urban design, building design, transportation, and real estate. COVID-19 has disrupted the trajectory of these emerging technologies and will, in turn, change some our original assumptions. This paper revisits the original Urbanism Next framework, taking into account the cascading impacts of the pandemic. This report is one of two reports completed by Urbanism Next on the impacts of Covid-19.
Newest additions
Journal Article
Report – Academic
Researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School's Taubman Center for State and Local Government outline potential policy issues that will arise as autonomous vehicles become more popular. The authors recommend five policies cities can implement to get out in front of autonomous vehicle deployments to ensure that autonomous vehicles can support community goals.
Report – Academic
AARP Public Policy Institute, RAND Corporation and Urbanism Next collaborated to better understand the ways in which shared mobility and AVs will be impacting older adults. Through a review of literature, interviews with public and private sector players in this arena, and a roundtable with over 25 experts from around the country, the project team developed a framework that identifies a range of factors around new mobility and AVs that will be affecting older adults’ mobility, independence and safety. The framework is a guide for governments and private sector companies to help them think broadly about impacts, understand barriers, and can serve as an internal checklist to guide future policy, research and development.
Book
Re-allocating space on streets to accommodate new uses – particularly for walking, biking, and being – is not new. COVID-era needs have accelerated the process that many communities use to make such street transitions, however. Many communities quickly understood that the street is actually a public place and a public good that serves broader public needs more urgent than the free flow or the storage of private vehicles. This book captures some of these quick changes to city streets in response to societal needs during COVID, with two open questions: 1) what changes will endure post-COVID?; and 2) will communities be more open to street reconfigurations, including quick and inexpensive trials, going forward?
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