Creating better mobility solutions, while reducing the environmental impact of moving people, are the seemingly contradictory goals laid out by Gil Friend, the Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Palo Alto. Friend was part of a panel of experts at ProspectSV’s Connected and Charged conference at the SAP campus in Palo Alto who discussed the shift from ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) to ACES (Autonomous, Connected, Electrified and Shared). There were many examples of ACES from the myriad of start-ups and established companies at the Connected and Charged event.
Mobility and land-use are inseparable and Friend suggests that cities need a holistic view when looking at transportation and land-use. This means making decisions that may be somewhat counter-intuitive, such as reducing parking and charging for parking to account for the true cost of the underlying public land. Reducing parking has the added benefit of reducing emissions, as people will employ alternative transportation methods. He points to nearby Stanford University and the success it has seen in reducing traffic and pollution since they have starting charging for parking, while adding an on-campus shuttle service.
Friend points out that the smart phone may be one of the most important developments for reducing traffic and pollution. It has led to the rise of ridesharing services, such as Uber and Lyft. He stresses that cities can influence alternatives to the automobile by working with developers to provide desired outcomes.
He cites Park Merced in San Francisco as an example where the developer is helping to provide residents with an alternative to a car. This development, originally constructed in the 1940s as military housing, is being refreshed and expanded from approximately 3,200 to 9,000 units, while using only 40% per unit water and being a net-zero consumer of energy. To reduce congestion and pollution, they have initiatives to use shuttles from their facility to public transit hubs and, as Friend alludes to, on-demand transportation with Uber, whereby residents will be given $100 vouchers to use some form of shared transportation.
And this idea isn’t unique to San Francisco, as Mountain View with its North Bayshore project, is putting caps on trips, whereby developers have an incentive to find solutions to the problems of parking, traffic and associated pollution. Implicit in Friend’s comments is that cities need to specify outcomes, but not necessarily prescribe specific solutions. As he suggests, “It is a question of wiring together the right incentives that make it worthwhile for people to be creative to make a result that ultimately works for everybody.
[Note: With technology changing everything, it is important to imagine how life is going to be different in the future. Here is a story from Gil as to one possible outcome http://www.masdar.ae/en/adsw/detail/gil-friend-palo-alto-in-2030-how-one-small-city-advanced-the-sustainability]
