Urban transportation is one of the most important target sectors for creating more sustainable and livable cities. Many US cities are making huge investments in public transit infrastructure in efforts to lower automobile use, encourage compact development, and curb greenhouse gas emissions. This paper explores how differences in the urban environment impact walking and transit use and how urban residents utilize walking and transit as modes of transportation. I use data from neighborhood mapping, observations, surveys, and interviews to explore these two questions. I find that walking is indeed the main mode of transportation within the urban core of Seattle. In contrast to what mainstream urban planning literature would suggest, residents living in the dense urban core of Seattle do not appear to be transit dependent and continue to drive at higher than expected rates. To help explain this, I explore how the 'theory of urban fabrics' applies to walkability and transit planning. This new emerging theory encourages planners to rediscover how to prioritize different modes of transportation within different parts of the city instead of current trends, which advocate for multimodal and shared streets throughout the city. Evidence indicates that the most walkable neighborhoods are those that have 52 Michigan Journal of Sustainability, sustainability.umich.edu/mjs the least number of conflicts between pedestrians, transit, and automobiles, and that the transit system in Seattle suffers because it is not prioritized over cars in any significant way. This reduces the likelihood that individuals will make the switch to transit over driving, which has important implications for transportation planning policies.
Pilot projects have emerged in cities globally as a way to experiment with the utilization of a suite of smart mobility and emerging transportation technologies. Automated vehicles (AVs) have become central tools for such projects as city governments and industry explore the use and impact of this emerging technology. This paper presents a large-scale assessment of AV pilot projects in U.S. cities to understand how pilot projects are being used to examine the risks and benefits of AVs, how cities integrate these potentially transformative technologies into conventional policy and planning, and how and what they are learning about this technology and its future opportunities and risks. Through interviews with planning practitioners and document analysis, we demonstrate that the approaches cities take for AVs differ significantly, and often lack coherent policy goals. Key findings from this research include: (1) a disconnect between the goals of the pilot projects and a city’s transportation goals; (2) cities generally lack a long-term vision for how AVs fit into future mobility systems and how they might help address transportation goals; (3) an overemphasis of non-transportation benefits of AV pilots projects; (4) AV pilot projects exhibit a lack of policy learning and iteration; and (5) cities are not leveraging pilot projects for public benefits. Overall, urban and transportation planners and decision makers show a clear interest to discover how AVs can be used to address transportation challenges in their communities, but our research shows that while AV pilot projects purport to do this, while having numerous outcomes, they have limited value for informing transportation policy and planning questions around AVs. We also find that AV pilot projects, as presently structured, may constrain planners’ ability to re-think transportation systems within the context of rapid technological change.
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