I always say it's like you have the ability either to shape your future or you can sit back and let the future happen to you. And I think the plan like the Denver Mobility Project is the first step in trying to shape the future in into a way that that you want. I'm John Torrick. And I'm Danny Sullivan. And you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you the stories of the engineers and architects who are transforming the world one project at
a time. Growing population and rapidly changing transportation technologies are affecting our everyday lives. Today, we'll learn how public transportation agencies are partnering with private sector technology companies to tackle that change head on in Denver, Colorado. That community's mobility blueprint may suggest a new approach for other metropolitan cities wrestling with the same issues in their communities. I don't own a car, so I either
ride my bike or take the bus. About a half hour bike ride, goes around the lake through a couple neighborhoods, along the river, and through downtown. It's a pretty nice ride, pretty easy. Or I can take the bus. There are a couple different buses I can take and that's about forty minutes or something. That's Kiernan Miletsky, a transportation planner in his early thirties. He and his wife, Sarah, and their one year old daughter, Evangeline, live just a few miles west of Denver.
In Lakewood, close to a famous wacky Mexican restaurant named Casa Bonita that you may have heard of. Denver's a sprawling city. And even though rail options have expanded, it's still largely a city built around the automobile. Certainly, Denver is not a city where very many people choose to not own a car. It's not that easy to get around. It works pretty well if you work in downtown, and the transit system here is pretty effective for that, but it can be kind of challenging to get around.
Like many young professionals in the region, Kiernan loves what Denver has to offer in terms of recreation, hiking, camping, skiing, backpacking. And he also represents the changing point of view that many in his generation have when it comes to the concept of car ownership and mobility. Jason McGlashan, a transportation planner and colleague of Kiernan's, said a lot of the perks attracting an influx of residents to Denver have led to one inescapable
drawback. Just in the last decade, there's just been an exponential change in traffic and traffic congestion. Some of that is owed to a a really strong job market here, and I think it appeals to a lot of people from just the life style and access to a lot of the opportunities in the Denver area. So a lot of that has driven population growth, at a really accelerated pace, one where transportation
has a hard time keeping up. In fact, by the year 2030, Denver's population is projected to increase 26% to nearly 4,000,000 people. Local government officials expect that to bring a 50% increase in travel delays for motorists who already spend plenty of time stuck in gridlock. In spite of that dire projection for drivers, Jason said Denver actually does offer other mobility
options. The Denver area has a great transportation system beyond the network of highways and arterials and local streets, but just a really strong
network of bikeways and multimodal options. On top of that, they have a light rail system, which is a radial system really tying different parts of the region to the downtown, and then local bus systems, which really fill in a lot of those gaps as well as providing connections to park and rides throughout the region and a connection now with their commuter rail system from Downtown Denver
to Denver International Airport. Which sounds like a robust transportation system with a lot of different options to meet people's needs. But even with all that, the first mile and last mile challenge is getting people from a station to their workplace or from their home to a station is a challenge. The feeder services really have a more difficult time, you know, serving lower density areas. All of the bus transportation is really in the same traffic congestion with the roadways.
I think that makes the light rail system maybe less able to do what it could do for the region in terms of connecting those places. Transportation agencies in big cities have been staring down these kind of problems for years, and in some cases, decades. But more recently, new factors entered the equation, factors that commanded the attention of policymakers across the region. Working together, across a region of about 3,200,000 people, that doesn't happen every day. That's Rick Pilgrim,
transportation development director at HDR. He also served for a decade as mayor of Beaumont, Colorado, a town of less than 1,010 miles Southwest of Denver. Rick said Don Hunt, former executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation, recognized new mobility challenges mounting as he retired in 02/2014. Don learned that technology was coming at us and coming at us
quick, especially from the private sector. Private sector was willing to put together self driving cars to look at ways that technology would transform transportation. And then he realized that people were connected with cell phone tech or smartphone technology, really. And using those choices was going to impact transportation in a great
way. So Don said it was time to mobilize the transportation agencies in the region and pull them together with the private sector represented by the Denver Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and take action. Self driving or autonomous vehicles usually grab the spotlight, but that's just one change on the horizon. Connected and electric vehicles, ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft, electric scooters and bikes available on the sidewalks, new transportation apps, and tolling technologies.
This list of new technologies goes on and on, in most cases being driven by the private sector. So understanding how to manage those different kinds of disruptors that are coming at us, agencies are slow to take action because there's a lot that they need to consider before they take that action. Private sector companies are pretty quick because they're interested in getting their product out to the public. That tension is is what we need to deal with in the future.
As Rick explained, Don recognized that all the transportation agencies in the region could benefit from joining forces to create what they called a mobility blueprint for the Denver Metropolitan Area. We looked around the country to see what other regions were working on these kinds of plans.
There were a number of regions where one or more agencies were doing their own plans, but we didn't find any that were collectively getting their resources together and then working in a collaborative fashion to develop a single plan. Rick's colleague, Chris Primus, would become the deputy project manager responsible for carrying out the
plan Don was envisioning. He realized that there was a need for the agencies, those agencies that provide our transportation, in our everyday lives, to transform their ways and think about how to invest their money differently than they had been for decades. And so he started talking to his friends involved in transportation. And he went to each of those respective agencies, which are the Colorado Department of Transportation.
He went to the Denver Regional Council of Governments, and he went to the Regional Transportation District, which is our transit agency, and made a case that they should commission a study to investigate these new mobility technologies to see what benefits they could bring to the Denver region. Chris said there was one other major partner or group of partners needed at the table. We struggle with congestion here on an everyday basis, and we all
realize that that hinders economic activity. And the private sector wants a workforce that is very adaptable and flexible and mobile to get to their respective jobs, but also a technology focused workforce that is at the forefront and the cutting edge of possibilities to to transform the world. Jason Longsdorf, the transportation policy lead on the blueprint, explained the different challenges each transportation agency faced.
For example, the regional transportation district operates more than 170 bus routes in nine rail lines across eight counties and more than 2,300 square miles. Well, there was a real concern from our local transit agency, RTB, that they were beginning to see a dip in their ridership, and we're assuming that it was coming from a couple of different forces in terms of emerging technologies. There was the presence of Uber and Lyft services, and they thought that they were losing
some of their choice riders. And then there were also some new micro mobility solutions like electric scooters and bicycle sharing programs that they thought were also kind of pulling from some of their shorter trip ride. Meanwhile, services like Uber and Lyft are having a different impact on the Colorado Department of Transportation. That's the agency responsible for maintaining the state's 9,144 mile highway system, including 3,429 bridges.
At the same time, the Department of Transportation was looking a little further into the future and thinking Uber and Lyft have some kind of an impact, but the bet that Uber and Lyft have made on the presence of autonomous vehicles was another thing that CDOT really felt like they had not studied and could have well, they just really didn't understand what that impact could be, but anticipated that if we have a fleet of vehicles that can drive themselves, then this challenge we've had in terms
of trying to solve congestion may become compounded by the fact that now we might have empty vehicles driving themselves around from place to place. The third partner, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, uses the memorable acronym Doctor COG. Doctor COG is a regional planning organization with representatives from more than 50 cities and counties in the Denver area. Each one is represented by a mayor or
senior elected official. There were a lot of folks that were interested in what was happening. A lot of the local municipalities were working on their own kind of technology programs, everything from smart street lights to more advanced pedestrian detection at intersections. Curbside management was particularly important in how precious on street parking and bicycle lanes might be impacted by Uber and Lyft services or other micro mobility services.
Although some of the emerging technologies coming from the private sector present policy challenges for public officials, Jason said everyone also recognized that they present opportunity. Good side is that all of these technologies bring with them massive amounts of data that the companies that own the vehicles or the services can harness, but that could be really beneficial for a safety and planning perspective for the
agency. Including that fourth partner, representatives from the Denver Chamber of Commerce gave the study an entirely different dimension. Here's Chris Primus again. But what was unique was having the Denver Metro Chamber at the same table. That was the first time that had occurred for the private sector and their interest in furthering the economy of the Denver area and the businesses and firms that they represent to sit at the same table with the
chance transportation agencies. And it's kind of two worlds coming together, learning each other's languages and perspective and needs. With all the right people on board, a study known as the Denver Mobility Choice Blueprint began. This was an umbrella study to consider all types and all kinds of new mobility technologies and to investigate them and to, one, state the problems the metropolitan region is facing due to growing population, more congestion, inequitable
provision of mobility to its residents. Face with the and then pair that with the opportunities afforded by these potential new technologies and how those two aspects can be brought together to improve the quality of life in the region. So the team called in some national experts to help sort through all the new technology flying at communities like Denver. This wasn't about just making Denver the best just to be the most technological
city. This was really about trying to roll up our sleeves, and they really got to the root of it. How can these three agencies work together and really make Denver a better place to live? That's Ben Pierce, the transportation technology program lead at HDR. Ben has a background in statistics. He loves to be an early adopter of technology, and he's a big Star Trek fan, as he says, a nerd at heart. His career became focused on transportation as the rapid growth of new technologies
began to impact how we move. I mean, the relationship between cities and transportation has definitely come a long way. You know, at first, cities are all about growth, expansion, and then they get congestion, and then they're, oh my gosh. We got a congestion problem. What are we going to do about it? And then we're going to build this roadway or that roadway and they tend to want to build
themselves out of it. And as the city matures and the population grows, you just can't continue to build your way out of the problem. And that's where typically we start looking for alternative solutions, and that's where technology starts to come up. Whether you're into science fiction or not, driverless vehicles sit atop the list of disruptive technologies that are coming whether we're ready or not. Well, we paid a lot of attention to
automated vehicles. I think that's obviously has the potential to be a significant disruptor, much like we've seen transportation network companies kind of disrupt the public transit. The ability for a car to pick you up and drop you off at the door and then have the cargo on its way has all kinds of serious repercussions, not just to the cities, but to the traveling public and how we plan and build buildings. I mean, we don't build buildings to drop everyone off at the door at 08:00
in the morning. Examples like that, the tangential effects of a new technology have a ripple effect beyond the obvious legal and safety considerations. Right now, we have a parking lot system where some people get dropped off at the door, some people get dropped off at a parking lot and walk, other people, take a bus. If we have automated vehicles and everyone wants to get dropped off with the door to door service, we may have to redesign the buildings to accommodate that and their curb
space. The design of curb space and the amount of land needed for parking lots also comes up when you talk about ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft. They've already forced property owners and municipalities to reconsider Another consideration, if people can read a book or play games on their phone while taking an automated vehicle to their destination, how does that affect their decisions about taking public transit?
Ben said that's an example where the way we choose to use autonomous vehicle technology will determine its impact on society. In Denver, they've just launched a first mile, last mile connectivity with an automated shovel out at Pena Station. So that's taking an automated micro transit shuttle and connecting it to a fixed route mass transit system. And that extends the reach of transit out into the community and that would be a
good thing. On the other hand, if you have people that are not taking public transit because they want to take an automated vehicle instead of a public transit trip, then that could be a bad thing because that would create more congestion and delays on our roadways. For autonomous vehicle technology to work, roadway design becomes part of the conversation too. And when it becomes commonplace, it will also change traffic forecasting and roadway
capacity. You know, making sure that the vehicle can position itself in the lane and whether that's from triangulation off of fixed objects, which require high definition mapping or LIDAR mapping or good clear lanes demarcations. Other things to consider would be how do you handle zero vehicle trips. Right now we have a preponderance of single occupant vehicle trips and now we could have zero occupant vehicle trips. And what does that
do for capacity and congestion? These are all kinds of things you have to start thinking about and start planning up. Ben's colleague, Justin Robbins, said the scenario of a single occupancy autonomous vehicle takeover is exactly why cities need to be proactive so they can plan for, rather than react to, technology. So in a sense, you can all imagine a future in which autonomous vehicles overtake our roadway networks. Everybody has a single autonomous vehicle. They just drive around looking for
passengers by themselves. It wouldn't be a great future, but if they are shared, if it's something that's managed, then all of a sudden, it makes a lot of sense. So that framework really informed how those technologies should be used. Justin's a transportation planner who specializes in automated and connected vehicles. But at heart, he's a student of cities. Those passions connect by looking at how new technologies
will change urban landscapes across the world. Quite honestly, I mean, this is my interest in autonomous vehicles. The transportation part, the technology part, it's fun. It's interesting. But really what catches my attention is what it means for our cities. All the secondary effects that I think we're still trying to grapple with. To the extent that cars change the way we develop cities and the way that we look at land use, autonomous vehicles are going to have,
I think, the same amount of effect. Justin sees the mobility blueprint as a way to help steer the community toward more favorable scenarios as new technologies arrive. Part of the reason to have a document like this is to make sure that as things happen, even things that we can't predict, we at least understand where we want to go and what we
want the Denver region to be. And I think that's one of the critical pieces of that is we are living in this age of uncertainty right now where we can see on the horizon all these changes that are gonna happen. And I think cities and communities and regions are struggling to understand how we react to something where we don't necessarily know for certain how it's going to turn out. Of course, driverless cars aren't the only transportation technology
challenging city planners. Things like the electrification of the roadway, the electrification of the transportation fleet, this is a trend that we all know is coming. The vehicles are anticipated to reach cost parity with internal combustion engines by about 2023. So, understanding what that means, what types of amenities or charging infrastructure need to be in place to support that type of transportation system, understanding communications. So, with the rollout of five gs, what
that means for our transportation system. You know, everybody has a handheld device in their pocket now that can communicate instantly. Now, cars will be able to communicate, transportation will be able to communicate. How you actually manage a system that facilitates that type of communication. As new models of transportation arrive, such as electric bicycles and scooters, planners are also finding they have to rethink something as seemingly commonplace
as streetscape design. The way that we divide our streets right now, the way that we divide up our right of way is typically exclusive of mode or or mode exclusive, I should say. So you have vehicle lanes that are specifically for privately owned vehicles or bus transit. And then you might have a transit lane where it's only transit vehicles can move and then you have bike lanes and then you have sidewalks.
So the way we do it now is we have a limited amount of right of way and we divide it up by mode. And one of the things that I think is concerning is that in the world where transportation innovation is happening really, really quickly, how do we start to redefine our right of way to be accommodating for all the modes that even we don't know exist yet? Technology experts like Ben and Justin brought national perspective to emerging technologies
and how other communities are facing them. Meanwhile, colleague Jason Maglachen led a team responsible for modeling and analysis of the potential impacts. There's not a lot of literature and research on this yet, which is why we had to present these as scenarios of what if, if you will. And so it was challenging. I wouldn't say it makes my job more difficult. I think it makes
it that much more exciting. Transportation planners like Jason use travel demand models to forecast how population increases, new development projects, and different types of travelers will impact traffic. This helps communities determine which projects will bring the greatest benefit to the most residents and which ones get funding. The forecasting goes well beyond counting cars. The models are all data based, and so the model for the Denver region is what's considered an activity based
model. And within it, it represents every household in the region with data and information about households more on aggregate sense by zones or by neighborhoods. So things like auto ownership, income levels, the types of work trips that individuals would make, and those are also matched to travel opportunities, whether it's for jobs, education, for recreation, or whether it's travel even outside of the
region. So the model starts with this data framework, and this has been the tool that's informed transportation decision making for a number of years. But Jason described it as a new frontier to account for factors like autonomous vehicles, ride hailing apps, and new microtransit
options. When you introduce new concepts like ride hailing apps and with a more saturated network of those, how does that affect affect travel for what was previously a zero car household that may have been dependent purely on transit or may have not had access to rides at all for work
opportunities or for education. And then making adjustments in the model to identify where are these zero car households If we can provide an accessible and affordable service that allows them to get access to transportation, how would that change their travel behavior? While new ways to travel by car enhance mobility for certain people, they also can result in more cars on the road. At the same time, you have to also look at what are the potential negative consequences.
So for drivers who can afford an automated vehicle, completely self driving level four, level five, and if we couple that with transportation infrastructure that provided for places for those vehicles to operate and and potentially park, would that change people's trip making decisions now? Maybe they live further away from downtown and drive more miles because the journey itself is less onerous.
So his team considered multiple scenarios for the year 2030, which accounted for 800,000 new residents in Denver, emerging transportation choices, and whether transportation agencies maintain the status quo or act boldly to get ahead of change. And the scenarios were used just to inform our group of how these different changes might impact some of the the broader metrics of transportation, things like vehicle miles of travel, hours of congestion, or number of crashes on an annual basis.
But it also allows us to do some more personal insights into individual travel. And I think that was really a key feature of this study was using a traditional large network tools to try to understand at a more microscopic level how these different types of changes would impact the individual person. The people side of the Denver Mobility Blueprint added an entirely different dimension to the study.
So if you think about a triangle, there's one end that is about technology, one end about transportation. Those are two areas that our clients and our team, our consultant team were very comfortable
with. But what we also knew is that there was a very important third side of that triangle, which was about livability and that if we thought about those three things holistically, we might end up with a very different solution than if we had only focused on the technology and the transportation aspects of this problem. That's Kya Nesbitt, who led a community engagement team as part of the blueprint. Kaya began her career as a product development engineer at Nike.
Eventually, she wanted to expand her interest to design to see the impact it could have on the scale of a city. That led her into urban design and landscape architecture. Kaya's team conducted extensive community ethnography to gain deeper insights into the needs, the hopes, and the fears of the people who travel around Denver every day. Community ethnography is a method used often by anthropologists, and it's a research method essentially of understanding a population and its need.
We have borrowed the inspiration around that deep research process, and we utilize it as part of our community engagement. And essentially it's a way of having, small group in-depth conversations that try to reach, ask questions that aren't as direct as you might ask in a public survey, for example. And essentially, the intent is to try and uncover more needs and mindset and understanding of why people make the decisions that they
make and the choices that they choose. So Kya's team went into the community to listen to a wide variety of perspectives of how people travel every day. We had a series of one on one conversations with people in their living rooms or around kitchen tables, and we had those conversations, with a wide variety of people across the Denver Metropolitan Area. Those in-depth conversations didn't just ask about what kind of transportation do you use, but they asked about how
do you define quality of life. We had various little games and exercises that asked people to rank quality of life factors and those include everything from health and safety, work and productivity, heritage, as well as access to transportation. Hearing individual perspectives from about 25 pairs of people cast a new light on what transportation means to people from different walks of life. So what we learned from some of those early conversations is that transportation
is an enabler to quality of life. It's not only about how you get from point a to point b. It's a part of how you connect with your community, your ability to have choices for mobility. So whether you are able to feel like you can bike safely to work and that might make you feel like you've had some exercise and you are able to see your community
in a new way. You may arrive home after a long day in a better mood because you've had a positive transportation experience through biking or walking or carpooling. Transportation is about connecting to our community. It's not just about the movement and the details around vehicle miles traveled and congestion. Armed with the depth of those conversations, Kaya's team then sought to gather feedback on
a wider scale. So in order to test what we heard from that that small representative sample, we used social media, and we used technology to build essentially a small game almost like some of those games you see on Facebook like what kind of spirit animal are you and answer a number of questions and then in the end it tells you oh you're this type of spirit animal perhaps an eagle or a fox And so we took inspiration from that kind of fun way of engaging and applied it to transportation.
People answered simple, fun questions such as, would you rather be the driver or be the passenger? Or are you the type of person who buys new technology right when it comes out? Or are you the type who couldn't care less? Through that social media game, the team reached more than 1,000 additional residents. That gave them more data to support or enhance the findings from the initial interviews.
Then they added one more layer by hosting workshops with about 40 participants, which they called mobility ambassadors. In total, the team hosted more than 70 events to explain the blueprint and collect feedback.
We engaged a number of agencies and regional transportation management associations and included them in our workshops as well as a number of stakeholders from doctor Cog, Cog, our regional councils of government, our client team from the Colorado Department of Transportation, RTD, and the Denver Metro Chamber. Perhaps not surprisingly, the findings of the community engagement activities often reminded decision makers of the human side of transportation.
There was a lot of concern around these new technologies and some fears around how they might disrupt people's connection to their neighbors and it became clear that even some simple things like connection of sidewalks and trails that connect people's communities to their jobs, Those simple infrastructure elements were as important if not more important to them than how they thought about the future of mobility technology.
So it was a good reminder for us that the human nature is such that we can often get ahead of ourselves in thinking about the future, but we need to remember that there are some simple things around transportation and connectivity of communities that we need to address. When it comes to new technology specifically, residents' biggest concerns revolved around safety and security in many forms. Both the fears around how transportation technologies might have less human connection and therefore
create more safety problems on our streets. But they also talked about security and sometimes that relates to data security as well as your own feeling of personal security. So as we have greater and greater connectivity of things through the Internet and as our online personalities become more connected with transportation, there was concern around wanting to share more and more of that information and have both our whereabouts as well as our personal data
be held in a secure way. As for the safety of technologies such as autonomous vehicles, how they're introduced to the community will go a long way toward building rider's comfort level. That's something that we learn through our community engagement. The idea of having almost like a concierge service the first time you try an
autonomous bus, for example. If there's actually a person on the bus that can help you understand where you're going, welcome you, and help you understand what the experience will be like, that can help people feel a lot more comfortable with trying a new technology such as an autonomous vehicle for the first time. However, even the demographic most uncertain of new technology recognized the benefits it can bring to their
lives. One thing that was very surprising when we talked to some of our older residents in the Denver Metro Area was many of them were very excited about technology such as autonomous and connected vehicles. Some of them really expressed how they expected those type of technologies would enable them to stay more mobile for longer in their lives and staying more connected to your community for longer is only a benefit.
With the three sides of the triangle in place, the technology, transportation, and livability, it was time for the team to put together a blueprint. This is really not about trying to come up with the precise answer. That's Jason McGlashan, the transportation planner we met earlier who was responsible for modeling and analysis. Because there's just so much uncertainty, what we really need to do is step back and try to paint the picture of what we want the future to be like and then
go backwards and say, alright. If that's the end result we desire, what are the steps or the tactical actions, in this case, we need to focus on to push us towards achieving that goal? And so it's somewhat of the reverse engineering approach, starting with your answer first and then going backwards to how do you get there, as opposed to putting in all the constraints and letting the problem unfold.
In doing so, the blueprint consisted of a long list of tactical actions to help achieve the transportation future the community and its leaders want. Kiernan Miletsky, the young professional who we met at the beginning of the episode, explained how the community outreach that Kaya described helped give a human face to that list. I think one of the more unique tools we used on this project, we built these personas based on some in-depth interviews with various
people from across the region. And then when we got to the end of the project, we used those personas to try to explain how the recommendations of the blueprint might change life for certain kind kinds of people across the region. The blueprint included five distinct personas of mile high travelers, then evaluated how different actions would impact each
person. We found that trying to articulate those changes at a macro regional level is really hard, and you kinda lost the meaning, the significance of some of the recommendations at that scale. But if you drill down and sort of explained how the life of, say, a single mother living in Aurora and working in Downtown Denver might change if we took this coordinated approach to adopting these new technologies, we're able to tell
a much more powerful story. Example, the persona of the single mother was named Maria. The blueprint showed a map of the places Maria travels in a typical day, from Aurora where she lives to her mother's house in Five Points to drop off her son, Gabriel, then to class at Metro State, followed by her part time job downtown, then back to her mother's house to pick
up Gabriel and return home to Aurora. The plan explained how long it takes now, how much it costs Maria, what her current transportation options are, and how that trip might look with new technologies, such as autonomous micro shuttle. I think it was the fact that it was rooted in these really in-depth, really thoughtful ethnographies that the team conducted early in the process that really surfaced people's frustrations and aspirations and fears and concerns.
And being able to use those in the development of the personas made them a lot more real. I think the personas struck people as authentic because they came from this earnest process that was really, truly rooted in what we heard from the community. Chris Primus, the deputy project manager, explained how the group arrived on the final list of tactical actions.
We identified over a 30 tactical actions, and we iteratively whittled those down through a variety of meetings and workshops with our client team and stakeholders down to what became a set of 34 tactical actions that the blueprint recommends the agencies to implement. The blueprint places the actions into seven main categories, regional collaboration, system optimization, shared mobility, data security and sharing, mobility electrification, driverless vehicle preparation,
and new transportation funding. The recommended actions are each tagged with initiator of primarily being one of the agencies who have assigned on to be responsible for making sure that recommended strategy is is initiated, not necessarily that the agency will do it themselves, but they're responsible for finding somebody or some agency to make it happen. Some actions are smaller, practical tactics that can enhance how new technologies integrate into the existing infrastructure.
So for example, implement curbside management standards, which focuses on how new technologies can help the activities occur along a curve, including Lyft or Uber, drop off and pickup, and flexible parking, and other smart technologies. Jason Longsdorf, the Blueprint's policy lead, provided examples of actions with a much greater scale. So there were a number of different kinds of policy recommendations that we landed on, things like a goal to more aggressively electrify
the fleets in the Denver region. And each of those agencies had different challenges with their fleets. Buses are one. It's a massive vehicle and takes quite a bit of infrastructure to generate the amount of electricity. So they were actually at the time contemplating creating their own mini utility that create their
own energy. But in working with the Department of Transportation and then through the MPO as the MPO was thinking about all of the fleets that all of the different cities and counties around the metro area had there, They were able to agree on kind of what a goal was and decide how to move forward on. Other tactics looked at how technology could help to improve traffic flow on roadways.
We were looking at things like synchronization of signal timing on certain corridors or essentially creating, like, a smart highway with some advanced ramp metering programs and algorithms to try to keep the highways flowing efficiently by not letting too many vehicles onto them and keeping kind of a maximum capacity and and controlling speeds. Jason also gave an example of how partnering with the private sector could benefit travelers.
The transit agency formed a partnership with both Uber and Lyft so that anytime you open any of the three entities' apps, both Uber and Lyft, once you open it, you can click on the transit option to compare the travel time and cost comparison of taking transit versus taking Uber or Lyft. And a transit agency has a similar option where you can go and see the other two services
as well. Having the transportation agencies in all the cities and counties in the area working together also makes a big impact on travelers. Whereas on one hand that might sound obvious, it also might not sound like a big deal. But during the course of the study, a perfect example appeared on sidewalks throughout the community in the form of shared electric scooters.
The policy around how electric scooters and electric bikes are to be used in the region and the fear with fifty fifty six different cities and counties in the metro area was that we might end up with 56 different policies that those companies had to figure out independently.
And so one of the policy goals we came up with was that there would be a single committee at the Regional Council of Governments that would help develop kind of boilerplate policies so that as those companies came in and wanted to introduce their services, every local municipality would have at least the same starting place. Do you ride them in the street? Do you ride them on the sidewalk? Do you need to wear a helmet? How old do you need to be to ride them? Do you need a driver's license?
What's the speed limit for them? Because all the partners were already at the table working on the blueprint, the scooters gave everyone a chance to develop a common policy, at least as a starting point for each city. Yeah. They are allowed in bike lanes wherever there are bike lanes as long as the speed limit is less than 30 miles an hour or less. Where there are no bike lanes that are allowed on sidewalks, but they can only go seven miles an hour.
So trying to communicate that to the tens of thousands of people that wanna use scooters all over the the metro area to have a common set of rules. And I'm not saying that everybody's gonna follow them. Clearly, they don't. But at least there's essentially a common set of rules for everyone. If each city developed its own policy, a rider traveling from one suburb to the next might not know when the scooter should be on the street versus when it should be on the sidewalk.
For that matter, neither would drivers or pedestrians trying to safely avoid those scooters. That's one example, and Kya Nesbitt said there will continue to be more decisions best made as a region. When you think about how, say, for example, an autonomous vehicle moves about a city, it's not like you can have different rules from municipality to municipality. That's just not how people move about their lives. We need to think about this in
a broader scale. So this project really addressed a regional scale, which I believe is very important as we think about technology in the future. In the end, Kya said she's proud of the unique perspective the blueprint provided by focusing on how mobility technology will affect quality of life. As technology becomes even more pervasive throughout our lives, as we are more and more connected digitally,
there are issues around safety and security. There are concerns, but there are also great opportunities for ways that mobility technology can help us become more connected. That point of view makes you rethink transportation beyond asking how long it will take or if you're going by car or by train. Help us get to our health care appointments faster. Help recognize when there's a safety issue on the road and have emergency response vehicles address that more quickly. It might help us
as we age. It might help us enable to stay more connected and mobile within our communities. Realizing the potential of technology to improve people's lives was one of the most exciting parts of the project for Chris Primus. There are some people who have limited means to travel, whether those means be physical means or financial means. And these new technologies offer opportunities to help solve some of those
problems that we've had so long. And if you keep the focus right, you can provide a better quality of life for your citizens, for your residents. Rick Pilgrim, the project manager and former mayor of Beaumont, said one of the key takeaways was the benefit of getting multiple agencies, cities, and private companies at the same table, looking at the same data and working together on solutions. The private sector needs to be a partner
here. And especially as the consumer, the transportation user, makes different decisions than they have over the last fifty years. So we have to change the way we think in terms of transportation planning because people are choosing, much different ways to travel. So working together is gonna be the solution, and partnering with the private sector is gonna be a key to the future success. Communities that go the extra mile to embrace changes and plan for them can help shape their mobility future.
But for those who don't, that technology is still coming whether they prepare or not. I think those cities are gonna find that they lose the ability to manage the outcomes, and they wind up with a community that's less robust. It's subject to the private sector doing the easy stuff and leaving the hard stuff for the public sector. Jason McGlashan said he believes the proactive approach taken in Denver can help other communities
take on similar issues. I think every metropolitan area in The US and, you know, and the world are all wrangling with this issue and trying to understand, you know, how do they need to adjust and address technology and new mobility and just societal changes
that are going to be occurring. And so the work that was done as part of Denver Mobility Choice Blueprint and mapping out a range of thoughtful tactical actions that address everything from policy framework, from intergovernmental coordination, to maintenance and funding, to safety, to operational controls. And there's really a lot of good thought that went into this, and that is all directly
applicable to just about anywhere. Being involved with the blueprint completely changed how Kiernan Miletsky thinks about transportation, and he has a pretty good analogy to illustrate his point. Transportation is something that you have to do to survive. You have to move around to get to work, to participate in society. You have to move around. You have to do it every day. And for most of my life, I felt like a lot of transportation is kind of a means to an end, point a to point b, that sort
of thing. But that's not actually how we think about most things in our lives that we have to do in order to survive. It's not how we think about eating, for example. If we all if all we cared about eating was getting the nutrients we needed to survive, and we're just eating whatever gelatinous protein block. But we don't do that. We go to restaurants. We cook. We think of food as a way to experience culture and community and the way to just enjoy life.
And the main thing that I've learned so far at HDR is that transportation can be the same. There's no reason that transportation can't also be a way to build community, a way to bring people together, a way to be healthy, a way to just have more fun in life. And Kiernan believes that through the blueprint, transportation can make that kind of impact on the residents of the Denver region. And I think mobility choice, as I said, was not really
in the end a technology project. It was about building that community, about thinking about how to make people's transportation experience more valuable to them in the future using these technologies. So So it's not just letting technology happen to us. It's it's taking a proactive stance and articulating what we as a region care about from a transportation perspective and making sure that technology helps us move towards that.
For more information on this podcast, visit hdrinc.com/speakingofdesign. You'll find links to pictures, articles, and more information about this project. If you like what you heard, be sure to rate us or leave feedback on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.