How Cities Can Reclaim The Digital Version Of The Physical Streets They Manage, Regulate & Operate
Imagine you live in a residential neighborhood where kids play and people jog and walk their dogs, and your neighbor puts a 65 miles per hour speed limit sign in front of their house. Your city has determined that 25 miles per hour is the maximum speed. But drivers coming and going now believe 65 miles per hour is appropriate, because of your neighbor’s sign.
Thankfully, we live in a world where this doesn’t happen. And if it did, your city would have the authority to remove it.
Ever since the very first stop sign went up in 1910 in Detroit, MI, governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and countless hours to research, model, and develop a transportation ecosystem to express public policy through the use of such things as paint, signs, light and sound. Today, the authoritative guide for all these “traffic control devices” is the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), now in its 9th edition. And how they are applied in the physical world to achieve policy outcomes – we call this “stewardship” – is the responsibility of cities.
From uniform signage and signals to thoughtful street design for commercial and public use, a city’s job is to govern what happens on our streets, sidewalks, and public spaces, or the “public right-of-way,” through a lens of socio-economic equity. As a result, we all intuitively know what to do with a blinking red hand, yellow light, or white dashed lines on the pavement versus solid yellow ones.
I’m an engineer by training. I spent much of my career at Motorola and then Ford developing the connected vehicle technologies and standards that we see on the road and in the air today. I know how digital technologies transformed the mobile and auto industries’ business models because I helped make it happen. That’s why I deeply appreciate what cities have been up against in the years since the private sector took the public right-of-way out of their hands.
Seemingly overnight, transportation technology companies created a digital version of the public right-of-way that revolves around the smartphone. Nearly three out of every four smartphone owners regularly use navigation apps to find their way in the world.
Today there is a whole new digital world of technologies exerting force over the physical public right-of-way.
Companies like Waze are directing drivers to make a left turn, even though there’s a ‘No Left Turn’ sign in front of them in the physical world.
A driver operating a heavy-duty truck is told that they can go down a residential, one-lane road where that vehicle class is not physically allowed.
Smartphone games like Pokemon Go can accidentally send players absentmindedly chasing digital objects into oncoming traffic.
Commercial fleets operated by companies like UPS take instructions from telematics services about where and how to drive, park, and operate.
These events in the physical world are a result of the lack of city stewardship and oversight in the digital world. And just like the MUTCD that helps cities to express policy in our physical world, cities need a digital version of the MUTCD to help them express policy in the digital realm. Since the public right-of-way now exists in those two planes, cities must be present in both the physical and the digital to fulfill their stewardship mission entrusted to them by residents.
In my work as Ford’s global technologist, I led the company’s developer program, where I helped create the language that allows new technologies like Apple CarPlay and Android Automotive to ‘speak’ to vehicles. At Motorola, I spent five years building MOTODEV, the first ever mobile phone developer program to allow third parties to build applications on top of Motorola mobile phone products. By witnessing this digital transformation and the building of software technology on top of hardware, I understood that in order for cities to govern the new digital public right-of-way, they needed to be fluent in the vocabulary and standards that tech companies use. That’s why I was honored to begin working with pioneers in city government who understood this and were championing a way forward.
To have a tool that mirrors physical policy in the digital realm, the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) created the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), a digital tool built in open source code, now under the stewardship of the Open Mobility Foundation with a governing body composed solely of cities, an incredible first in the field of government technology.
As in many cities around the world, in early 2018, tens of thousands of e-scooters operated by several independent companies descended upon Los Angeles almost overnight, without the City’s permission or oversight. They were left in the middle of sidewalks, on private property, or in huge, chaotic piles in tourist areas.
MDS became the first digital tool to allow cities to express policy (such as “scooters can park here”) digitally in a way that mirrors the policies they represent in the physical world. It enabled micromobility operators to send LADOT a notification about their use of the public right-of-way. The efficiency of expressing policy digitally reduced the need for physical enforcement, which in turn allowed LADOT to welcome any operator who was able to meet the insurance and performance bond requirements, without an artificially low vehicle cap, and with no geographic restrictions within the city.
In real numbers, from April 2019 – April 2020, this translated to 8 operators, registering almost 55,000 vehicles that were used in over 10.3 million trips throughout the nearly 7,500 miles of Los Angeles streets.
Shortly after the MDS pilot program began, and the city could express policy digitally, complaints about scooters from residents fell by 73% percent.
Even environmental impacts were notable as LADOT, through MDS and surveys, calculated 1,802 tons of CO2 emissions were avoided through e-scooter usage during the pilot program. Moreover, since LADOT had developed MDS software in open source, nearly 100 cities around the world adopted it in their pursuit of managing their public right-of-way.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made the need for digital tools like MDS all the more urgent. As cities chart a path forward to ensure a safe, equitable, and reliable transportation system for all, they need a full, reliable picture of how demands on our roads and airways are changing. They need oversight of their curb spaces to make room for emergency vehicles and food deliveries. They need to know where micromobility vehicles like bikes and scooters are being deployed to ensure public health, safety and equitable access to transportation resources. Looking ahead, they’ll need to oversee drone delivery takeoff and landing locations to ensure vital supplies are reaching their destinations as quickly as possible while accounting for the quality-of-life of people in those cities. Only a city working with a dynamic digital tool can make all this happen, happen successfully, and happen equitably at that.
And so now, Lacuna is engaged in an effort to take everything that we’ve learned about the transportation ecosystem and translate it from the physical to the digital public right-of-way. We are creating true alignment between these two planes so that cities may reclaim the stewardship that the public has entrusted them with and fulfill their obligations to manage, regulate and operate our streets through the lens of socio-economic equity.
