Brice Wallace
Imagine a few years from now and the look of urban environments could be quite different from what’s there now.
The future could hold less building-front parking as people turn to Uber, Lyft, electric scooters, self-driving cars or air taxis to get around. That former parking area is instead used for drone delivery pickups and drop-offs. Delivery lockers could line the street, next to charging areas for electric scooters. And pedestrians could be dodging “coolers on wheels” sidewalk delivery drones.
How we move — and, in some cases, how our stuff moves — is itself moving in new directions, with ramifications for how cities master-plan their communities, how developers envision them, and how contractors build them.
The questions about transportation’s future and how the various stakeholders should answer them was the focus of Envision Utah’s recent spring breakfast event. Nico Larco, professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Oregon, director of the Urbanism Next Center and co-director of the Sustainable Cities Institute, encouraged those stakeholders to think about how to incorporate the new mobility technologies to meet their aims.
While some new mobility technologies have stalled — self-driving cars are one example — use of others has ballooned in recent years. For example, users climbed insider Uber vehicles for 9.4 billion trips in 2023. Electric scooter use climbed from zero to 38 million rides in their first year of use, in 2018, and reached 58.5 million rides in 2022.
“Even though we sometimes think of ourselves as set in our ways, that we’re only willing to move around a certain way, we’re used to certain things, if you give us an option which fills our needs, is affordable to us and works with the constraints that we’ve got, we will make those changes,” Larco said.
Package delivery also is undergoing revolutionary changes. Boosted by e-commerce, delivered packages now account for 15.6 percent of total retail sales. About 21 billion e-commerce packages were delivered in the U.S. in 2022, a figure Larco noted equates to 165 packages per household that year, or about one package every other day.
No such near-term push exists for aerial drones, he noted, because of issues related to safety, noise, privacy and cost.
E-commerce already is impacting community development, he said. Big-box retail centers have shut down due to increased online competition. To accommodate the large number of packages, e-commerce companies have either built “mega” distribution sites, or smaller but more-numerous distribution centers — shoppers will buy more stuff if they can get it quickly—all the while adding to congestion, land-use, air quality and safety issues, he said.
“It’s not only a retail issue,” Larco said. “There’s all these other cascading impacts that we have.”
Meanwhile, moving from home to work and back is also changing. Many people are commuting to work fewer days a week than just a few years ago. The average commute time in the U.S. is 27 minutes, but Larco theorizes that if workers can toil at home more rather than driving to work, they might be willing to commute 40 minutes or more. As a result, they might be tempted to live further from their offices. That encourages sprawl and requires cities to pay for infrastructure and public services to serve those newly developed areas. Plus, those additional miles traveled can actually add to congestion and air quality woes.
With all those issues and more, cities will likely confront mobility changes and wonder how to address them, Larco said. He suggested they have flexibility in planning, with the stages being planning, piloting, evaluating and pivoting as necessary. The mobility world is shifting and cities should do the same, he said, testing and trying new approaches, even conflicting approaches, to see what works best.
“With all the innovations I just talked about, nobody knows how these things specifically are going to work out, right?” Larco said. “We do a lot of this work. We talk to people who are steeped in this work in the private sector and the public sector, and everyone asks, ‘What do you think is going to happen?’ Everyone, public sector and private sector. This is all-new territory.”
Generally, he said, the “old rules” about development still apply, with the future bending to compact, centers-based, dense, mixed-use areas with good access via walking, biking or public transit. Likewise, downtowns that serve exclusively as a central business district will struggle because they lack restaurants, housing and mixed uses that can keep them vibrant at all times.
Larco called upon the public and private sectors to collaborate on issues related to transportation so that they know about each other’s goals and plans. That requires a great deal of trust, he added.
Ari Bruening, CEO of Envision Utah, said many of the organization’s projects relate to transportation.
“And that’s because ensuring that people can get around safely and conveniently — not just by car but also by public transportation, walking and biking — can make life more affordable, reduce barriers to opportunity, and improve quality of life,” he said. “But what happens when the world changes?”
When promoting the spring breakfast, he said, Envision Utah discovered that transportation “maybe wasn’t the sexiest topic that we’ve ever tackled at one of our events.” Recent surveys ranked transportation low on lists of people’s priorities. However, the impacts extend to infrastructure, air quality, commute times, traffic congestion, water usage and cost-of-living implications, he said.
“So,” Bruening said, “transportation affects how we grow, how we develop and then that affects a lot of the things that we care about.”
Brice Wallace is the associate editor and a senior writer at the Business Journal.