- Perhaps you could say
a couple words just about
you know, what you do in your
company or what your company
does or what you do at the
city as we go through this,
but we have, we're gonna start
with kind of a big picture
question about just what
you think the number one
biggest transportation
challenge is facing cities.
So, let's get started with that and
however you want--
- You want me to start?
- Sure, yeah absolutely.
- Great, well I'm Tracy, I was just here,
President of Zipcar.
I think the biggest challenge that we see
is really around, it's sort of,
it's growth, right?
And this growth of urbanization.
The city's getting more congested,
more people, and for I
think the stat is for,
in council there's about 70%
have only personal vehicle,
and when you think about how do
you accommodate that growth,
and the simple answer is,
oh we just add more parking,
add more car plates,
expand our highways
and so on and so forth,
but I think for the long term view is not
is not very sustainable,
as we know, so that's
why we're big advocates
of sharing and putting driving
more car sharing or any type of sharing,
mobility, service will be I think
a solution, but to your points
there's other, sort of that how
is that ecosystem work together,
that's still a challenge though.
- So I'm Chris, I co-chair
the Mayor's office
at Euro Mechanics, we're an R + D lab
kind of based inside the city.
We work on a lot of transporations,
state related projects.
Growth is gonna be my answer,
so I'm gonna have to say
three different things now.
So I'll tie it back to the city recently
through a different planning process
called Go Boston in 2030,
so thinking about our future over the
next 15 years and the three things
that came out of that were
safety and access and reliability.
Sort of three big targets that people
were sort of concerned with.
So how do we make our streets safer?
How do we make our transportation system
both more accessible and more reliable?
And just kind of three
numbers that tie to that,
for me, the first is 22,
so 22 people were killed
on our streets last year.
Another 4500 plus people
were injured in crashes.
17.9, this is a hard number to remember,
but it is the difference between
our high income and low income earners
in the City of Austin, so the top 1%
make 17.9 times more than the bottom 20%.
So growing inequality in cities is
a huge burden, not just on housing
but on transportation and
what people are spending
out of their wallet on
transportation costs.
And the last one is about growth,
so Austin is projected to
be 724000 people by 2030.
For us it's another 50,000.
Right now we're in the
highest pace of growth
that we've been in the past 60 years.
And we can't actually
accommodate all those people
to get into a car and drive somewhere,
so we need to be thinking
about shareability,
thinking about public transit,
thinking about walking and hiking.
- All right.
I was not gonna say growth.
(laughs)
It's a little easier.
- You can say apps.
(laughs)
- Yeah, Tyler George,
general manager of Lyft
in New England, I think most of you
probably know what Lyft does.
So I won't get into that but
I'll get into my biggest problem which
I think is actually, this
is kind of cheating maybe,
so it's so broad, it's infrastructure.
Boston, where I've lived
pretty much my whole life
is still really a city that was built for
horses and wagons, and what way someone
had the foresight to dig some tunnels
and put some trains in, that was popular.
But even the last five years,
you look at it, there's
no such thing is Lyft
five years ago, there was no smart phones
10 year ago, and (mumbles) 15 years ago.
We're still dealing with
the same infrastructure
for the most part that
we had here in Boston
100 years ago.
So you look at things
like the transit system
which is pretty big but underfunded,
getting a little long in the tooth,
hard to find money to improve it,
and just do basic maintenance.
Things like housing,
so you'd love to have
really dense developments
near transit hubs, hard to do.
You don't wanna just tear
down old neighborhoods.
And then the infrastructure on streets
is a big one obviously for companies
like Zipcar, still left side
and the right side, almost every street
in Boston and around it are parked cars,
and almost every mode
that we're moving toward
doesn't require parked
cars in the same way.
But does require road space,
and that's gonna be a
very hard thing to change.
- All right hi, Gretchen Efkin,
I lead the business team Utonomy,
we build autonomous software systems
for cars.
I think congestion is one of the things
I think the most about
because the initial ripple effect
of reduced productivity for the amount
of time that we spend commuting,
and then secondarily, distracted driving
as a result of slow commute times.
I commute every day and every day
I see people texting.
My favourite was the
guy that was balancing
an iPad, reading the
newspaper on his driving leg,
while driving, and so I think about
this every day, like the effects of
congestion means you're moving slowly,
which means you get distracted and
people wanna save time,
get a jump start on work
and then that causes more accidents
and leads to catastrophic events,
and so I think about congestion
as one of the key things (mumbles).
- How do you see Boston stacking up
against other cities in the US,
and kind of how do you think it can
meet some of these challenges without
destroying the positive
part of the infrastructure
that it has.
- Yeah, that's a great question.
I think one of the things
that's really exciting
about Boston is just the breadth of
innovation when it comes
to transportation here,
I think there's an incredible community.
When Zipcar was founded, came out of
this ecosystem, there
are tremendous number
of transportation innovation companies
here in Boston that are
really pushing the envelope
and encouraging people to have that
multi-mobile shift in their mindset,
of being able to live a car light
or a car free lifestyle,
so I think that's something that
Boston really stands out in terms of
the top tier Universities, in terms
of population, for sure.
Second part of your question was around
how do we continue to
address the challenges
while maintaining what's
special about Boston.
That's where we can really leverage
some of the innovations
that we're talking about.
The more people feel like they can
go car light or go car free,
the more people you can
plow through the system,
and so I think it's a two part,
having the multi-mobile available,
but also the societal mindset shift
toward giving up a car, and
if that's generationally,
it'll be easier now that it's ever been.
- Yeah, I'd agree with all that,
and maybe taking it in
a different direction.
I think that
Boston actually has really
good city governance,
and the region as a whole actually does.
There's pretty noble exceptions.
Kidding.
(audience laughs)
It's actually true,
I've worked with a car for a while,
I've never dealt with
governance of any stripe,
and I had certain stereotypes about them.
And in this role I'm in,
just a different sort of role,
and I'll meet people like Chris,
and people at the NMBTA,
people in the state government,
and I have been so impressed
with the quality of
people at sort of every level.
And I've worked with a
lot of people at Lyft who
work with all sorts of
cities across the country,
and I know that that's not something
to take for granted,
not every city is run so well.
You all probably thinking of a city
or two right now that's not Boston that
is sort of known for not being
as top of these things as Boston,
and that's a huge advantage for us.
It plays out in a couple of ways.
I mean, you think about
autonomous vehicles,
this area has been permitted for
autonomous pilots, that's super cool,
it's the city getting ahead of what
we know is gonna be a big
part of the future here.
You look at in the transit agency NMBTA
has been really forward thinking,
first agency in the
country to partner with
Lyft or a TNC or paired transit,
which is a segment of transportation
that could use a lot of work.
Service levels are notoriously bad,
it's very expensive.
There's a million different pilots
like that going on, really interesting
things happening at every level
of local government, so that's very cool.
- I'm gonna have a totally biased answer
because I think Boston is probably
the best city in the country,
but I'm also paid to say that.
(audience laughs)
You know, we're incredibly lucky
to have a great ecosystem.
We have a partnership with Utonomy,
we have some stuff with Lyft,
we've partnership with Zip Car.
Having those entrepreneurship,
and innovative companies in Boston,
it helps us actually deliver better
service to people and deliver
against the goals that we're being
held accountable to by the public.
We also have great advocacy partners,
so Walk Boston and Livable Streets
do a great job of sort of
voicing concerns from constituencies
to the city, so that we make sure that
we sort of hold true to what makes Boston
a really unique sort of environment
to live in and get around in.
When I think about how we stack up
against other cities sort of nationally,
I think we do pretty well.
If you ever travel somewhere that doesn't
have a rail system or
a good transit system,
whereas a 20 minute headways on buses,
it's pretty frustrating,
and you realize how good you have it.
And if you go to a city
that excels in this
in Europe or if you're
taking buses in Cortiba,
or if you're on a train in Tokyo,
all these places, you're like,
we have a really long way to go
before we can do that.
But when I look domestically,
at Boston, more than half
the people in this city
get to work every day, in something
other than a single occupancy vehicle.
Which is pretty impressive when
USDOT gave away 50 million
dollars to Columbus
and you look at their road splits,
you can understand that
they needed some help there.
It's like 80% of the
people are driving to work.
So we didn't have the
same scale of challenge.
I think what was articulated
in the Go Boston plan,
and what we've seen in Imagine Boston
is walking, transit and biking
are huge priorities for
livability in the city.
So I think we're wrestling with
what Tyler referenced
earlier around parking,
there's, we've gotta paired on ship,
cargo ship, and how we
utilize the curb space,
but we're maybe five years into
battling 100 years of planning in cities
that were around an automobile.
- I think I'll echo
some of what Tyler said
about Boston being a friendly city,
and it's really I think
that a big support of Zipcar
with Go Boston and some
of those initiatives
that really helped us grow this city,
and I think having personally lived in
New York, London and Boston,
I think I agree with Chris that
depending on how you rank,
Boston probably still
has a long ways to go
when you think about, when
I was living in London,
the congestion charge was introduced
which made a reasonable
impact on traffic in
central London and that was
I think over 10 years ago when that
was introduced, and then people (mumbles)
on Oslo, that is banning
vehicle traffic in the downtown core,
and that's also, by 2019,
which is right around the corner,
so I think some of the European cities
are nice benchmark in terms of how
progressive they are
on really making a dent
on our congestion, and sustainability.
