Resources

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.

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?

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. 

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will impose challenges on cities that are currently difficult to fully envision yet critical to begin addressing. This research makes an incremental step toward quantifying the impacts that AVs by examining current associations between transportation network company (TNC) trips — often viewed as a harbinger of AVs — and parking revenue in Seattle. Using Uber and Lyft trip data combined with parking revenue and built environment data, this research models projected parking revenue in Seattle. Results demonstrate that total revenue generated in each census tract will continue to increase at current rates of TNC trip-making; parking revenue will, however, start to decline if or when trips levels are about 4.7 times higher than the average 2016 level. The results also indicate that per-space parking revenue is likely to increase by about 2.2 percent for each 1,000 additional TNC trips taken if no policy changes are taken. The effects on revenue will vary quite widely by neighborhood, suggesting that a one-size-fits-all policy may not be the best path forward for cities. Instead, flexible and adaptable policies that can more quickly respond (or better yet, be proactive) to changing AV demand will be better suited at managing the changes that will affect parking revenue.