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t's 2021, and you're making your way home from work. You jump off the Expo line (which now travels

from Santa Monica to Downtown in 20 minutes flat), and your smartwatch presents you with options

for the final two miles to your apartment. You could hop on Metro's bike share, but you decide on a

tiny, self-driving bus that's waiting nearby. As you board, it calculates a custom route for you and the handful

of other passengers, then drops you off at your doorstep in a matter of minutes. You walk through your

building's old parking lot—converted into a vegetable garden a few years ago—and walk inside in time to put

your daughter to bed.

That’s the vision for Los Angeles painted in Urban Mobility in the Digital Age, a new report that provides a roadmapfor the city’s transportation future. The report, which was shared with Curbed LA and has been posted online,addresses the city’s plan to combine self­driving vehicles (buses included) with on­demand sharing services to createa suite of smarter, more efficient transit options.

But it's not just the way that we commute that will change, according to the report. Simply being smarter about howAngelenos move from one place to another brings additional benefits: alleviating vehicular congestion, potentiallyeliminating traffic deaths, and tackling climate change—where transportation is now the fastest­growing contributorto greenhouse gases. And it will also impact the way the city looks, namely by reclaiming the streets and parking lotsdevoted to the driving and storing of cars that sit motionless 95 percent of the time.

Arman Thanvir

LA's big plan to change the way we moveThe city is the first in the nation to reveal how it will make shared, self-driving vehicles a key part of our publictransit future.BY ALISSA WALKER • @AWALKERINLA • SEP 9, 2016, 12:10P

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The report is groundbreaking because it makes LA the first U.S. city to specifically address policies around self­driving cars. Autonomous vehicles have logged millions of miles on U.S. streets, but when it comes to aggressivelyplanning for them, American cities are woefully unprepared. A report from the National League of Cities thatsurveyed the long­term transit plans of 68 large cities showed that only six percent even mentioned self­driving cars.Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Transportation solicited grant proposals from 78 U.S. cities as part ofthe Smart City Challenge in an effort to get cities thinking about this future.

To prove to you that LA is thinking about autonomous vehicles in a different way, consider that this plan wasauthored by an architect. Ashley Z. Hand was brought on as part of a year­long LADOT fellowship which ended lastmonth (she is currently the co­founder of CityFi, a smart city advisory practice). She says she believes space is thekey to solving a lot of LA’s transportation problems.

How your commute would changeMany of the major changes outlined in the plan would be imperceptible to Angelenos, at least at first. Passengers can alreadyuse smartphones to get real­time data for local trains, buses, and bike share using trip­planning tools, and book on­demandrides within those apps.

As buses begin to operate autonomously, it will allow them to navigate city streets more efficiently, making those connectionseven more seamless and serving neighborhoods more reliably.

Eventually, on­demand "micro transit"—small, smart buses that can change their routes on the fly—will fill in the gaps forpeople who aren't well served by fixed routes, meaning Angelenos won't need their own cars, especially for short trips.

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Roads could narrow thanks to better vehicular flow, freeing up more space for sidewalks or bike lanes. Crashes and fatalities onstreets would become a thing of the past. And all the infrastructure related to storing those cars—street parking, surfaceparking lots, driveways—could be redeveloped for new uses.

"Transportation and land­use are inextricably linked," she says. "How far things are in your life, like work, home,school, healthcare, shopping, can determine how much time is spent traveling during any given week. With no roomto grow, we need to think of cultivating an ecosystem of choices to give more flexibility to Angelenos."

Hand framed her work using three key policy documents that are already shaping the region’s future: the Mobility2035 transportation plan; the city’s sustainability plan; and Vision Zero, LADOT’s initiative to eliminate trafficdeaths. She extrapolated the goals of these plans and looked at ways that transportation specifically can addressthem—and make connections between them. "We acknowledge that not one technology—shared mobility,smartphones, connected infrastructure, autonomous vehicles—will solve the complexities of an urban transportationsystem," she says. "So we need to understand how they work together."

The report categorizes recommendations into five major areas, ranging from initiatives that are already underway(display real­time arrival times at bus stops), to urban planning mandates (stop widening roads), to solutions thatare six or more years out (launch a fully driverless public transit fleet). Many of them seem impossible to roll outacross a city as large and complex as LA.

But Hand says like any LADOT initiatives, the upgrades would target specific neighborhoods first, namely onesexperiencing exceptionally high numbers of traffic deaths. Those fatalities, which have been increasing in recent

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years because Americans are driving more, could be reduced by up to 90 percent with human drivers out of thepicture.

One underlying goal is clear across the board: To use emerging technology to make our transportation system sorobust and responsive, Angelenos won’t need privately owned, single­occupancy cars—and we won’t need todevote 14 percent of all land in Los Angeles County to parking them.

Even that one small element of the plan—the slightest reduction in the need, and therefore the number and locationof parking spaces—could dramatically change the city, much to the delight of urban planners.

"This plan sets a visionary path to using the latest technology, data, and approaches to solve LA's urban mobilitychallenges, particularly with parking," says Juan Matute, associate director for research and administrationfor UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies.

"Right now we can use one of dozens of apps to locate and navigate to a nearby coffee shop, but continue to rely onour eyes to locate an open parking space," he said. "Smarter parking management can lead to innovativeneighborhood change so that in the future coffee shops are allowed to locate closer to people craving caffeine,reducing the need to drive and park."

That sounds good in theory, but let's be serious: Are enough people in LA ready to trade their BMW for a minibus—even one that comes to their door?

Small, self-driving buses, like these EasyMile buses recently launched in Helsinki, will provide on-demand rides

Preliminary studies say yes. A recent American Public Transportation Association report showed that the people whouse on­demand rideshare the most are more likely to ride transit and less likely to own cars. Susan Shaheen, of

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the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, is studying the impactsof (human­driven, for now) on­demand rideshare companies as part of an ongoing study in partnership withthe National Resources Defense Council, Uber, and Lyft. The results of the study will not be available until this fall,but, anecdotally, she agrees that Uber and Lyft are being used as a way to complement public transportation,especially in big cities.

That's another encouraging component of LADOT's strategy document—it’s heavily focused on the power of public­private partnerships. This means not only working with companies like Waze and Syncromatics to gather andanalyze transportation data, but also partnering directly with on­demand car services. Uber and Lyft have alreadybeen working with many cities, including LA, to help get people to and from transit hubs. (It's notable that Hand’sfellowship itself was funded by a partnership with the Goldhirsh Foundation, the nonprofit which also doles out LA2050 grants, in partnership with the Mayor's Fund of Los Angeles.)

But working with existing networks like Uber and Lyft also raises issues about how a plan like this could reach lower­income Angelenos. Can a system that largely relies on summoning a ride via some kind of device be as equitable aspublic transit, regardless of what model smartphone you own?

Why Westlake?

As one of several Promise Zones in LA, Westlake gets prioritized for federal funding. The MacArthur Park­adjacentneighborhood also sees an exceptionally high number of pedestrian fatalities. Working in Westlake would allow LADOT to testthese solutions which address how technology can serve the most transit­dependent communities.

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Infrastructure that delivers transit information, like Metro's real­time bus arrival signage, which will be installed city­wide

Sensor­outfitted crosswalk designs that help reduce pedestrian fatalities

A universal fare system that guarantees all forms of transit are priced affordably, with standardized rates

Sidewalk kiosks that let anyone summon and pay for rides

Autonomous DASH buses (LADOT's neighborhood circulator buses) that could change routes to pick up disabled or elderlypassengers

"It’s so exciting to see a plan like this come together, particularly preparing for driverless cars and expanding sharedservices to low­income neighborhoods, and we love the focus on key corridors to increase safety for people walking,"says Jessica Meaney of the transportation policy advocacy group Investing in Place. "But we need to make sure wealign the funding with high­needs areas, especially neighborhoods historically neglected by transportationinvestments. We see this attempt several times throughout this plan, and look forward to how this plan will beimplemented and monitored."

That's definitely a concern, and the reason that LADOT wants to launch a pilot program first in the transit­dependent neighborhood of Westlake, says Hand. She also points to the way the plan will measure success: byhappiness. "The idea behind transportation happiness is to refocus on the customer," she says. "Providing a higherstandard of amenities for public transit, improving the experience, comfort, safety for all Angelenos, regardless ofwhat mode of transportation they choose to traverse our city and region."

Still, this document is only a preliminary framework. There’s no mention of moving freight around the city, which isa huge contributor to emissions and congestion. And what happens to the cars of existing rideshare companies likeUber and Lyft as they move towards autonomy, or people who want to share their Teslas, per Elon Musk's vision?

If and how those privately owned, single­occupancy cars—autonomous or not—will continue to navigate LA has to beaddressed now, or the fears about self­driving cars creating more traffic and sprawl will become a reality. Eventuallythe city will have to introduce some kind of congestion pricing that will make it prohibitively expensive to bringprivate vehicles into denser neighborhoods—something that will surely not be popular with some car owners.

But that's why it's so important that LADOT has taken a stand on this issue, says Mark Vallianatos, an urban policyadvocate and co­founder of Abundant Housing LA.

"Nearly 90 years of planning for driving in LA has led to bad urban design and NIMBY fear of traffic that drivesopposition to density and blocks badly needed housing," he says. "It's exciting that the city is planning for a future inwhich the equation is transformed, freeing up space for more housing of all types, more open space and otherpositive urban evolutions."

That's potentially the most intriguing proposal put forth by this plan—if LA could start working towards a futurewhere it's easier for everyone to get around, and people didn't have to worry about parking two (or more) vehicles, itwould alleviate many of the current concerns about development and growth. This vision is poised to radicallyreshape the way LA works, giving the city a second chance to serve people, not cars.

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