Disrupting Mobility Now, Not in Some Distant Future

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Communicate how you’re disrupting mobility in real time right now.

At the Disrupting Mobility 2015 Summit, Paul DeLong of car2go said he’s sick of fighting with wife about missing his kids grow up because of the horrendous traffic between work in downtown Austin and his home 17 miles north of the city.

“The more people talk about this and the more we can tell this story [and demand our leaders do something about traffic], then we can do the disrupting you all are talking about,” DeLong said.

Not only is his message about storytelling powerful, but it’s crucial for all of us to step back and consider how we all are not just talking about disrupting mobility in the future, but how we are disrupting mobility already.

An example of DeLong’s belief in storytelling being the real deal is, well, Mobility Lab. It is really one of our three pillars: research, collaboration, and communications (which is just another word for what we’re trying to do really well: storytelling).

Most people think Mobility Lab is one of those “silly little companies doing start-up apps,” as Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab described those business types at the summit. And it kind of is that, but most people don’t know that Mobility Lab was started by and is mostly funded by Arlington County, Virginia’s government?

We have been “disrupting mobility” from within the government for about four years now. It’s truly forward thinking that the county lets us do this. But the transportation leaders there know Mobility Lab is one of the big reasons Arlington is considered a national leader in transit-oriented development. Sometimes we trumpet the innovations happening at home, but mostly we bring the best practices from around the world back to Arlington so the locals can constantly learn.

Arlington was great long before Mobility Lab came around. But before the Orange Line of Washington, D.C.’s Metro opening in the late 1970s, Arlington was little more than an interstate buzzing into the District. It took a long time, but now the Orange Line contributes to a pleasant walkable and bikeable three-mile stretch between the Potomac River and the Ballston neighborhood. This area is why Arlington was recently named the top location in the country for millennials: it has a bustling business climate, and there is rarely bad traffic – even though the area is dense with housing and offices.

Nearly 20 years ago, the county’s transportation department began researching its results for the TOD and transportation-demand planning. And eventually it was decided that research needed a home, which was originally going to be used a background information for something called TDM University that would help other regions learn how Arlington had transformed so they could do so as well.

There are TDM (transportation demand management) agencies and TMAs (transportation management associations) all over the country, but they are underfunded and little known. Arlington has the largest TDM organization in the country, and it is part of the transportation department.

So building on the years of research that the new Mobility Lab began housing, it was wisely decided that the research needed to be unwrapped. Its stories needed to be told not only to Arlington but to the entire TDM industry.

Mobility Lab has recognized over the past three-plus years that we have an opportunity to reframe this TDM concept by communicating it in ways that people care about. We needed to connect this obscure TDM ideas to their lives by making it relevant to the issues that connect with their lives beyond transportation: economics, tech, sustainability, education, planning, policy, and many others.

We recognized that fewer transportation reporters existed in the mainstream media, so there was an information gap we could help fill. We are now a media company, of which there are far too few in the transportation space. We take all we are learning and put it out in front of large audiences because, for far too long, we’ve all been talking amongst ourselves, and the car companies and car-only roads have been winning.

Think about the beautiful cars on beautiful open roads you see again and again in Super Bowl commercials. Contrast that to any Super Bowl commercials you see about people happy on public transportation.

Every organization at Disrupting Mobility, and all the other groups working on transportation and urban planning, need to go out and hire journalists and strategic communicators to tell their stories. And to tell the very simple story that our cities need fixing and we will have to look for low-cost yet effective ways to connect people that are popular, fast, and affordable. We need to shape the mainstream media conversations or our ideas will continue to exist in our inner sanctum of experts.

As part of our goal of collaboration, we work closely with Arlington Transportation Partners, which helps about 700 employers, 300 residential communities, and 80 commercial properties learn about commuting tax benefits and how they can install bike parking and showers, among other issues that make it easier to stop driving so much. We also are housed with the county’s educational organizations BikeArlington and WalkArlington, as well as goDCgo and Capital Bikeshare.

We run TransportationCamp, an unconference paired with the annual January Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington, D.C., that gets people excited about transportation and is now being replicated in many cities throughout the U.S. and world.

Our Transportation Techies has grown to about 1,200 members over the course of its 23 monthly gatherings, the last of which was featured in a major Washington Post article. Who knew there were so many transportation hackers and geeks in D.C. alone? They are starting to create really compelling products out of the open data that many transportation agencies and companies provide, yet there is still room for much more of this data to be turned into stories that will captivate people who could potentially change their travelling habits.

We have also provided a space for products like TransitScreen and CarFreeAtoZ to be tested before hitting the market.

All of our endeavors are designed to make planners, policymakers, and other important people sit up and take notice that the status quo has got to stop. Citizens are thinking creatively in ways that many planning and transportation-industry lifers are not. We don’t have space for more roads and we don’t have money for major new public projects, but if we think creatively, we can make a myriad of improvements.

The public sector has a chance to create pop ups and pilots that better connect existing transit systems. If they prove popular, some of those will turn into full projects and programs. The private sector can keep doing what it’s doing and hopefully governments will loosen up and play nice.

Mobility Lab couldn’t be more excited to be thinking about Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, car2go, Bridj, Split, Capital Bikeshare, and all the other companies operating in D.C. and beyond. We plan to continue finding ways to better integrate these systems into transit and to continue educating everyone about their transportation options.

Photos: Top, pedestrians in Crystal City, Arlington (Sam Kittner/kittner.com for Mobility Lab). Middle, left to right: Panel at Disrupting Mobility 2016 (Philipp Rode, via Twitter).

This article was originally published by Mobility Lab.

Academia Giving Cities Lots of Ideas to Improve Traffic

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Exciting academic research is happening and city planners need to use it in practice rather than placing it into 20-year vision plans.

It’s a really good thing that some of the very best academic institutions in the world are moving to influence business and government.

Take the anecdotal of my voyage to attend and speak at this week’s 2015 Disrupting Mobility Summit: I Uber-ed from home for the first-mile to the D.C. Metro, which took me right to National Airport. A breeze.

On the other end, in Boston, I took a free airport shuttle to the T subway up to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The T got me woefully not-that-close to my hotel. I walked with two bags through a light rain for what was supposed to be a 20-minute walk. Because my phone died before I looked at where I was actually going, my roundabout walk turned into about 45 minutes (the Citymapper app was doing a tremendous job of getting me to where I was until the point when my phone died … don’t ask).

Granted, I stopped for a lunch in Chinatown in downtown Boston, but my commute should not have taken from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. to get from my home in D.C. to my hotel in Boston. Clearly the Uber part of my trip was more reliable and enjoyable than the transit and walking elements, which, it should be noted, were both actually very enjoyable but slow-going.

With the likes of the University of California at Berkeley, MIT, and the London School of Economics so heavily researching the on-demand economy, travel of the non-driving variety – for ride-hailing and transit options like buses, trains, and bikesharing – will no doubt make our transportation networks more efficient and less frustrating in the near future.

Just a sampling of the exciting academic research being done to “disrupt mobility” includes:

• Bikeshare is gaining wildly in terms of both sheer number of systems across the U.S. and the basic idea that people are beginning to envision more utilitarian uses of bicycling. But there’s a huge opportunity to get less wealthy people to use bikeshare; they currently tend to be some of the most frequent users of bicycles, but not bikeshare. Governments don’t have the resources for a lot of things, but this is one they could actually embrace. Connecting poorer communities by bikeshare and adding better bike infrastructure are the kinds of affordable projects  that make sense for the cash-strapped public sector. Groups like UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center have already illuminated the problem, now it’s up to governments (hopefully with collaboration from the private sector) to figure out solutions.
• Kent Larson of MIT’s City Science Initiative was quoted by NPR that he’s seen “estimates that in New York City up to 40 percent of the energy consumed by automobiles is by people circling the block looking for a parking space.” So engineers at MIT have gone through a series of prototypes of the perfect pod cars that could essentially be like bikeshare, in which people could pick up one-person pod cars all over the place to rent for one-way trips. Since so many more people are willing to drive than bike, it certainly seems like the prototype that inspires people will be the one to catch on.
• The London School of Economics Cities Research Center has created fingerprints of cities in order to better understand how to integrate transportation options into the way places have been planned. And it has also researched how sprawl costs the U.S. more than $1 trillion annually. That number alone would seem to cause at least some planners and city officials to take notice that we’ve got to put great academic ideas and research into real practice now, and not within some 20-year-plan that will be obsolete in five years.

What are some of the other best ideas to help reshape places around people rather than cars that have been backed up by convincing university research?

This article was originally published by Mobility Lab.

Handful of Old Movies Get a Look in My Queue

I've been catching up on some old movies lately. Some classic, some a little less than classic.

Funny Farm: This is a relatively terrible Chevy Chase flick from 1988, the downside of a time when he was arguably the funniest movie-comedian in America. Gene Siskel once called it Chase's funniest film, a serious stretch for one that has a few laughs but is pretty badly dated by now. I had never seen it. Must have been going to too many Boston and AC/DC concerts that year.
**1/2 out of ***** stars

Dazed and Confused: After my favorite movie of 2014, Boyhood, I had to go back and watch Richard Linklater's other great Texas epic. This one was named Quentin Tarantino's 10th favorite film of all time for good reason. Beyond star-cameos galore, this view of high-school life in Austin captures the ethos of an entire generation of kids growing up in the 1970s and 1980s.
***** out of ***** stars

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure: I somehow never saw this, although I recognized the numerous catchphrases that still hold strong today ("I know you are but what am I?"). It's pretty funny and even educational stuff, and, as my 7-year-old said, "Pee-Wee makes funny faces."
**** out of ***** stars

The Man With Two Brains: Steve Martin comes nowhere close to The Jerk or Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid in this completely wacky script. Playing a neurosurgeon with an unpronounceable name (in the grand tradition of Chase's Fletch), Martin is nevertheless still funny and this one is still worth watching.
***1/2 out of ***** stars

An Affair to Remember: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr star in this exceedingly romantic film, which suffers just a bit because Grant's typical comedic touches are largely missing. Instead, he is very George Clooney, meaning suave and very handsome, as he becomes friends on a passenger ship with Kerr between Europe and New York before slowly falling in love even amidst some traumatic setbacks.
***1/2 out of ***** stars

The Object of My Affection: The acting talents of Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd are pretty raw in this 1998 film. But it's entertaining enough and is pretty important in bringing societal acceptability of gay relationships to a more mass audience.
*** out of ***** stars

Take a Bikeshare Ride This Fourth of July, Let Freedom Ring

I took a bikeshare ride in Boston on Sunday and, with Americans feeling less free these days, it makes me sad to know that one solution that is so obvious and simple is sitting right in front of our eyes.

The one thing that struck me above all else as I wheeled along the cobbled streets of South Boston, comforting breeze in my hair, was how free I felt. I was able to take a two-and-a-half-hour tour on Hubway, Boston’s excellent bikeshare system, for a total of $6. In the old days, it would have easily cost $30 or so to take a bike tour of any city.

Before I left, I printed a map of sites to see on bikeable roads. I loaded the Hubway app on my iPhone, which I especially love because a compass arrow appears that points you to the nearest bikeshare station, of which there are plenty in Boston. And I took out five different bikes over 150 minutes in order to keep each bike rented for less than 30 minutes, thus avoiding any extra fees.

There is clearly no better way to experience a city, and in a way so equitably for all. You could barely see any sites in that timeframe riding in a car. And you wouldn’t see nearly as many if you walked.

Having never been to Boston before, it was heartening to see a city truly in love with bicycles. Lots of bike lanes. Hubway. Clearly tons of infrastructure geared to cyclists in Cambridge around Harvard University. Dozens and dozens of bikes parked at the Beacon Hill Whole Foods and various other bustling spots throughout the area.

The route I took would be ideal for any bicycle tourist. I started between Faneuil Hall and the Inner Harbor, went up through the North End Italian district, to the beautiful greenways along the Charles River, around Fenway Park, past the brownstones of South Boston on Rutland and Concorde squares and the SW Corridor Path, and ending near Boston Common.

Gratuitous photo of my baby daughter next to Larry Bird's shoes.

Nothing against the many Duck tours that circle through the city loaded with tourists, but there is something distinctly “unfree” about being stuck on those tours – fun as they may be, from a different perspective.

Yes, if there’s one thing Americans can do this Fourth of July to reclaim our freedom, it’s hop on a bike … or a bikeshare.

Classic Reads: The Scarlet Letter Explores Sin in 1800s New England

The is the first in a (hopefully) long series of posts about classic books that I, as an English literature undergrad major, really need to read or re-read to make my life complete.

One of the things about Nathaniel Hawthorne, like with other authors such as William Faulkner and James Joyce and David Foster Wallace, is that it never feels like there's enough time in life. Ernest Hemingway is short and to the point. So is F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But Hawthorne fills his writing with diversions into the deep thoughts of his characters and interruptions in story flow for his own speculations on motives and the narrator's interactions with the reader, like an 1800s version of TV's The Office.

But beneath all of Hawthorne's quirks, The Scarlet Letter is one heck of a story, especially considering he wrote it in Salem, Massachusetts (amazingly over the course of a few short months). Home to the Salem Witch Trials a century-and-a-half earlier, this feels like the reflection of a past that still haunts the town and the Boston region at the time of publication in 1850.

Hester Prynne is condemned to wear a bright red "A" on her breast at all times for being convicted of adultery for having a daughter in her husband's long absence. Minister Arthur Dimmesdale, one of the Puritan leaders prosecuting her, is the secret father of her illegitimate child.

Also in the public square watching Hester admit her sins that day is Roger Chillingsworth, the old man married to Hester who has been away exploring the western wilderness for years. Exacerbating the townfolk's impressions of her as a witch, her daughter Pearl is a wild and undisciplined child who appears to be an evil spirit unfit for Christian society.

Chillingsworth follows the proceedings from afar until he intentionally becomes Dimmesdale's roommate, suspecting the priest of being his wife's lover. Dimmesdale, meanwhile, becomes weaker and weaker with guilt over the situation, oddly appearing stronger and stronger in his fervent sermons to his congregation.

Seven years after her public condemnation, Hester and Pearl are walking through the woods when they come upon Dimmesdale. The priest says, "Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter on your bosom! Mine burns in secret!" Hester informs him that Chillingsworth, his roommate, is her estranged husband, and is cruelly making Dimmesdale's living hell far worse. She convinces him to make one more sermon and then escape to Europe to live with her and Pearl.

Dimmesdale admits his adultery to his congregation, exposes Chillingsworth's sinister nature, then collapses to his death. Chillingsworth dies a hunched and shriveled man within the year, leaving a fortune to Pearl, who takes her mother to Europe. Hester lives the rest of her life in better stead, but never does remove the "A" from her chest and is buried back in Salem with a gravestone labeled only with a red "A."