Laura Snebold and Jordan Sanders contributed to this article.
This Friday, thousands of my Deloitte colleagues and I will volunteer at 950+ Impact Day events taking place in 80 communities across the country. As a firm, we are committed to making an impact in our communities. On Friday, we will step away from our day-to-day work to give back to the communities in which we live, but our focus on positive social impact goes beyond one day of service. For example, teams in our Federal practice are exploring how changes in the mobility landscape can be a force for increasing access, affordability, and opportunity.
The convergence of autonomous, connected, and electric vehicle technology and Uber/Lyft-style ridesharing promises to drastically change how people and goods move, and offers many potential benefits. As discussed in our white paper on the Future of Mobility, Deloitte predicts that these advances in transportation technology have the potential to save 32,000 lives per year, reduce automobile emissions by 40-90%, and increase annual productivity by 100 billion hours.
These mobility advancements could also increase access to transportation and socioeconomic mobility for traditionally-underserved populations, including low-income individuals, children, the elderly, and the disabled. Various disciplines, including public health, are beginning to explore the potential social and economic impacts of transportation innovations. For example, autonomous vehicles may help people access health care more easily, improve how land is used by repurposing parking lots for parks, and improve access to neighborhoods not serviced by public transportation.
While the potential social and economic benefits of the Future of Mobility are significant, they are in no way forgone conclusions. Government and private sector leaders must anticipate how the positive and negative consequences of their decisions will unfold at the community level, and work across disciplines and alongside community members to address the interplay between transportation, urban design, and community development as a determinant of social and economic well-being.
Where do we start?
To help inform the decisions we make today, we should first look back in history to lessons from the last era of major transportation innovation: the construction of our Nation’s interstate system.
The National Highway System was once deemed a ‘silver bullet’ for improving the well-being of communities. After WWII, people began moving away from city centers to suburbs and creating more traffic than ever before. The solution? To build a highway system that would reduce congestion along the paths between cities and suburbs. By the 1950s, the Federal Government covered up to 90% of the construction costs of these new roadways. However, discriminatory policies (like those that prevented African Americans from accessing home loans in suburban communities) paired with fast-paced investment evolved into a network of highways that not only transformed the mobility of people and goods, but also shaped pathways to social and economic mobility for only certain segments of communities.
Over half a century later, communities are still affected by the initial design and policy context of the interstate system. In some cities, people living in neighborhoods on one side of a freeway have life expectancies decades less than those in neighborhoods on the other side. This speaks to the importance of engaging diverse perspectives and experiences in the development of sustainable and innovative transportation models.
What is happening now?
As key players in Silicon Valley, DC, and Detroit race to understand and implement new transportation technologies, they are recognizing that they need each other to accomplish their goals. Take the United States Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) Smart City Challenge, for example. This month, the USDOT will grant $40 million to one city chosen out of 78 applicants from across the US that proposed innovative visions for new urban transportation models. This initiative is one example of US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx’s commitment to working with federal, state, and local leaders and private sector suppliers to create an effective regulatory framework and implement transportation systems that “connect people to opportunity.”
Where do we go from here?
Based on lessons from the past, we know that decisions made over the next decade will have lasting, compounding effects on how transportation innovations evolve and impact daily life. Automakers and technology companies should design and implement technology with and for the communities they aim to serve. While the Government’s primary role is to ensure the safety of its citizens, decision-makers should avoid creating reactionary or misinformed policies that stifle innovation or disproportionately impact certain communities. By working closely with the private sector and communities to use data generated from new transportation technologies combined with local data on social and economic well-being, officials can create inclusive policies that have the flexibility to scale up and down as both technology and community needs evolve.
The path ahead requires continued collaboration between public, private, and community leaders. One company emerging as a leader in collaborative urban innovation is Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet. The new company is teaming up with USDOT, city officials, and community leaders to use technology and analytics to develop solutions that can help shape policy and drive positive impact. The public and private sectors must work together at the city level where new technologies are being implemented, and may consider methodologies from urban planning and public health like Health Impact Assessments and Community-Based Participatory Research principles to explore the possible social and economic impacts of new transportation models.
Shared fleets of autonomous, connected, electric vehicles will not be the silver bullet for all of our current transportation, economic, and social challenges. However, these mobility innovations present an opportunity to ensure that inequities that exist today are not perpetuated, and that new technologies and policies foster opportunity and positive outcomes for all.