I'm John Torek. 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. Today, we'll talk to Justin Robbins, a transportation technology planner and true student of cities. Justin talks about how transportation has historically shaped the
design of cities as we know them. He'll also share his passion for autonomous vehicles, how they're changing the way we design urban spaces, and some of the challenges they present to urban planners. We live in a world right now where we build transportation infrastructure in a certain way. We build houses. We build commercial businesses. We build our regions. We build our cities in a very certain way. That's Justin Robbins, an urban planner at HDR who specializes in autonomous
and connected vehicle transportation planning. And it's difficult for us us to remove ourselves from that world. Right? It's difficult to see to what extent all that is based off of a transportation. Justin has a degree in architecture and master's in urban and regional planning, both from the Ohio State University, where he still teaches a graduate course in urban design. Understanding things, I think, from a larger scale and a broader perspective that that
really drew me to planning. The interesting part to me is the connection between all these these different components of civilizations and societies. There's things like, if we're going to talk about today, transportation and land use and development, but also things like population, demographics and how those affect everything from the nature of our society, how it's structured and all the things that really combine to give
us the result that we see today. Transportation is so embedded in the landscape of modern cities that it can be easy to take its impact on design for granted. The two are interconnected to the point that you really can't separate them. The only reason you'd have transportation is to move around, and you have to have a place to go. So when you look at the structure of cities and you look at it from the standpoint of history, two are very, very well related, and you have the ability to move
between cities, between places. Right? Then you have the transportation that actually serves within cities, so moving you around the place. And that's been the paradigm for a very long time, and you can look at cities going back into antiquity. The location of ancient cities often was based on proximity to water, and the density of those cities related to the
difficulty of travel by land. And the introduction of railroads began to change maps in the nineteenth century, but even bigger changes were in store for the early twentieth century. The last seventy years for us have been a huge experiment that really hasn't been done before. If you were to show the way our cities are laid out to somebody from a hundred
years ago, they wouldn't recognize it. But if I looked at a city from the nineteen hundreds, '18 hundreds, '2 thousand BC, it still looks like a city. And what we do now is a diversion from from the way we as humans have normally built our city and our our civilizations. And it's it's a direct result of transportation. Specifically, a direct result of the most common form of modern transportation. We created the automobile. It gave us this unparalleled
connectivity between places. We can go from point a to point b directly, and we can go really long distances at a very fast speed. And that had these massive consequences for how cities are developed and built. That's largely why cities are designed as we know them today. It expanded them a lot. So people try and maximize the amount of space that they get. And to do that, they tend
to drive further out. You can buy more land at a cheaper price and you can develop houses at a cheaper price as well and within the past seventy years you see the size of American cities and cities that are heavily relying on vehicles and cars expand at an ever increasing rate to the point where these areas are huge. They have an enormous amount of land, but they might not necessarily have the amount of people or economic activity to support the infrastructure in order for
that to function. Building cities out rather than up makes it easier to acquire land at a lower cost, but it also stretches resources thin. A lot of the times when you have auto oriented development, you have a large amount of infrastructure, but you don't have a large amount of development paying good taxes in order to support that infrastructure.
That's where density really comes in. It's because you you get more taxable area, you get more income, you get more sales, you get everything more out of land, and you use less infrastructure to get it. Because so many American cities have experienced dramatic growth during the auto boom, it has created greater challenges to build infrastructure to make those cities less vehicle centric today. Take New York City, for example. Manhattan. City like that really couldn't exist without mass
transit. The fact that there is a subway in place that can move an incredible amount of people pretty long distances in a short amount of time, you can't have that kind of density unless you have that type of transportation infrastructure. And that's really what we struggle to do now is having a system like that that is not based on a vehicle and creating the density in order to build
cities of that scale and that density. For urban planners, that creates somewhat of a chicken versus the egg scenario. Transit and population density both need each other to make the other one possible. It's difficult for areas, in my opinion, that have been designed exclusively around the automobile to be anything but that. Transit is a lot less effective in places like that just because you don't have density. And density is really something that you need in order to have
effective transit. And you have to have effective transit in order to have density. So it's one of those things that's not one or the other. So again, the plan for both simultaneously. Today, city planners find themselves in the middle of another step in the evolution of transportation with the introduction of new technologies. Some experts have coined the term aces to refer to autonomous, connected, electric, and shared vehicle technologies. 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. It's 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.
For example, the introduction of autonomous vehicles and services like Uber and Lyft could significantly change how we plan space. Because when you're not driving to your destination, you no longer need a parking space. And if owners of commercial developments don't need to provide as much parking, it changes the cost of their initial investment. Justin broke down the numbers in detail. Really, parking is one of the biggest detriment to
development that's out there. So for example, if you have 300 square feet of retail, then you would have to provide a parking space. Typically, this is all governed by local laws and ordinances wherever the building is being built. So parking space itself is about 200 square feet, but that doesn't account for things like all the circulation that's required and all of the water retention and roadways
and things like that and green space. So, really, if you're gonna, efficiently park something, you're gonna give it about a hundred spaces per acre. Acres 43,560 square feet. You divide that by a hundred and you give out 430 square feet. As a comparison, for every 300 square feet of building area that you're gonna have to provide, you have to provide another 430 square feet of land area outside of that building. So there's a kind of maximum density
that you can get. And, really, what this means is you can imagine all the commercial areas and pretty much every city across The United States that are auto oriented and auto dependent. And what you have is objects in the landscape. You have buildings that are surrounded by these seas of asphalt and
parking. And what it's done is required us to build an enormous amount of infrastructure to support a less and less amount of building and development because we're just getting less out of each acre of land because we're kind of bound by the amount of parking that we have to put on-site. Which makes it difficult and costly to build new developments in dense urban areas. And this is the point now where it's actually quite expensive and quite difficult to build anything different than that just
because you have to provide for parking. And when you go vertical with parking, when you go structure parking, there's a significant cost cost with that. So it depends on where you're in the country, but and the type of parking you're providing, how far it goes. It can be anywhere from $20,000 of parking space up to 50 to 60 to $70,000 of parking space. As you can imagine, the developments that do get built, that cost gets passed
along to you. So we look at even dense areas like Seattle or the Bay Area or New York. If you require parking, you're basically adding the cost of that parking space per apartment. So you could have an additional thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars added to the cost of the apartment just to provide access in the form of of a vehicle.
With the introduction of autonomous technologies, some cities are exploring how driverless vehicles might expand transit options without heavy upfront infrastructure costs. For example, Justin's hometown of Columbus, Ohio. There, a smart cities grant from the US Department of Transportation, along with a lot of private investment, helped to introduce several emerging transportation technologies,
including autonomous vehicles. So right now, we have two autonomous vehicles that run a small route downtown that's open and accessible to the public. We have just announced another route that will serve an underserved community that's not too far from downtown with autonomous shuttles. So I think the city itself is probably getting a lot more exposure to the tech technology than other cities. In cities like Columbus, it adds another transit option without the investment or commitment needed
for rail. I think that Columbus definitely is making some good strides with understanding how to use it. It's the biggest city without fixed asset transit. We don't have rail in the city, so it's not like we have the ability to move mass amounts of people in any way except for buses or for privately owned vehicles. It might make a really interesting test bed just because there's not a rail
line to compete with autonomous vehicles. In another medium sized college town, Justin worked with a team to pilot test a proposal for one of the largest US deployments of autonomous micro transit vehicles in a mixed use traffic environment. Lincoln, Nebraska, the state capital and home for Cornhusker football. It's a growing community that also has become a hub for entrepreneurship
and tech startups. The city received a 100,000 grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies two thousand eighteen mayor's challenge to pilot test an autonomous shuttle. Justin contributed to the guiding document known as the Lincoln Multimodal Technology Vision Report. So the Lincoln project was really something that the city had in mind for a while, and the idea was that they wanted to use kind of the the cutting edge in autonomous technology
to move people down to downtown. In addition to exploring a new mobility option to move people between major entertainment destinations downtown, the city sought to embrace and showcase the latest transportation technology. And the question was, how do you integrate autonomous technology into an existing transit system, and and how do you make it something that people are willing to take? So understanding where the vehicles need to go, how they operate because they do operate in a different way
than a typical transit vehicle will. And then what are the things we have to do to even make a system like that work? What are the safety concerns? What are the considerations for things like data? How do you actually hail a vehicle? How does it operate in traffic? So all these things are explored in the vision document, and we're working with the city right now to help them get
funding to launch the project. There were a lot of details to consider, like working with the state legislature to allow testing, getting a vehicle shipped from France to Nebraska for the demonstration, and considering routes for the shuttle. But perhaps the biggest challenge was the public demonstration phase to give residents, business owners, legislators, college students, and media representatives a chance to ride on a shuttle with
no driver. Everyone who participated then completed surveys to answer questions about their comfort level, if and how they'd use a driverless shuttle, what they'd pay to ride it, and what their biggest concerns would be. The community loved it. Lincoln is not a huge city, but to have cutting edge technology, literally a driverless car taking people around. Even though it was a kind of a closed loop, it was still something that was exciting for a huge amount
of the community. You know, it's my job, and I'm still like, wow. That's that's incredible. Older residents, skeptics of new technology, and even the most safety conscious participants were in for a surprise when they rode in the vehicle. But I think that's the fun part. You get you get into the vehicle, and it's actually really boring. It's the
most conservative driver you'll ever meet. Lincoln officials considered the pilot test a success, and the city is currently evaluating funding options to implement the first phase of an autonomous shuttle deployment. If you're itching to ride in an autonomous vehicle, there's actually a place anyone can go to try out the new technology in live traffic. You know what's cool is the average person who can now go to a place like
Las Vegas. And if you download the Lyft app and if you register as an autonomous vehicle tester, you can go anywhere pretty much on the strip and you can take an autonomous BMW five Series from any place on the strip to any other place on the strip through a Lyft app. I would say that this is kind of the Motorola, StarTech phone of autonomous vehicles, right? I mean this is the very beginning of what we're starting to see, and it's only gonna improve.
And what's neat is I mean, you can close your eyes on that vehicle, and you have no idea it's machine driving. But it is, and it does so, I think, pretty effectively. Although driverless vehicles on city streets are exciting, Justin said certain controlled environments are proving to be the perfect real life laboratories for testing autonomous vehicles. It's a whole different paradigm shift for how things look like college campuses or airports or
hospitals can really function. These are places that have large amounts of parking. There's concentrations of people moving in and out and then around campuses like that. And I think the technologies that are coming online, you know, these places almost become perfect test beds for how this type of technology can start to reduce the overall parking count, can start to move people around those campuses in, I think, efficient ways and, ways that are different than we understand
today. Places with defined boundaries, existing shuttle routes, and private roadways make the implementation less complicated and naturally beneficial. And it really is a chance for us to start to come to grips with how this changes the way in which we develop and the way in which
we plan. So those are the types of projects that I'm excited to work on just because they're not quite as large as a city, and it gives us, I think, a a bit of a laboratory to start to explore these problems and and what we can do with the technologies. Justin's working on a project like that for the University of Miami Florida. They have a hospital. NHGR was hired by Arcotitanica to take a look at the parking and what it is at the master plan for the campus. And the client basically said, we're
in the midst of these transportation challenges. What does this mean? And so we're hoping that we can continue to work a little bit to say, in a campus setting, these are the types of things that you're moving people in and out of campus, and you're also moving people around campus. Planners of large campuses like that are finding that new technologies are changing how they use their space. So how
do you rethink how that happens? In the world, autonomous vehicles might not need quite as much parking as you did before. Parking might take a different form. You can move it around campus in a way that you hadn't before because right now you're kind of limited, right? I mean, it has to be at least a quarter mile from whatever land use that you're driving to. Airports are another setting where Justin has explored the implementation of autonomous vehicles.
In addition to exploring other technologies that can improve the check-in, security, and boarding experience for passengers, he's worked on projects in The US and abroad to look at how to modernize the ground transportation experience at airports. We explored the idea of using autonomous shuttles to bring people to and from the parking area. And the airport project is something that what they're doing is they're moving the terminal away from
parking. So all of a sudden, you can't walk from your parking space to the terminal anymore, and we explored different ways in which shuttles can be used to move people in and out. Similarly, Justin said he envisions communities that already have transit using autonomous vehicle technology to help stretch the reach of existing rail and bus systems to more members of the
community. So for things like first mile and last mile mobility, I mean, to talk about mobility hubs and trying to pair up transit stop. You have an asset like transit that can move a large amount of people, and you really wanna make sure that the land value and the development that happens around that transit stop is benefited. The whole point is to support private development with public infrastructure, things
like transit. And by providing first mile and last mile mobility linked up to a transit hub that then has access to a high capacity transit line, all of a sudden you're opening up the ability to ride transit for a lot more people. While it's fun to talk about the possibilities autonomous vehicles offer, it's also interesting to think about the new challenges they present to urban planners.
So if you have a vehicle that is always going to be the most conservative and it's always gonna stop if it sees you, what's to stop pedestrians from just walking out into traffic? So if you have a close of traffic, that's obviously a huge issue just because it's not gonna be great for maintaining that flow. But redesigning streets to prevent what's known as vehicle bullying
could create drawbacks too. On the flip side of that, if we go to the extent that we're building fences all along our streets to separate people from the curb, that presents some huge issues as well. Not just in terms of the people using the curb, but also that's a built environment that is not comfortable for pedestrians. Other new technologies may also force planners to rethink how we design our streets.
You know, things like delivery robots. Delivery and freight is not something that's often talked about, but it's something that has the potential, I think, to overwhelm our transportation system. I always use my wife as an example. I mean, we get a delivery pretty much every day waiting on our doorstep, and all the companies that are doing those deliveries are very interested
in automating that process. While private companies figure out the technology, cities will have to figure out how that technology operates within the existing transportation system. So things like small little delivery robots even delivering takeout to your house, what part of the roadway does something like that operate on? I don't have an answer. I mean, it it's going to operate on the sidewalk for now, but it's probably not the most appropriate spot because
it's meant for pedestrians. While drastic advances aren't new to the world of transportation, the speed of change has eclipsed anything we've seen before. Change happens quick now. It took us forty years from the right flyer in the early nineteen hundreds to to breaking the sound barrier using things like slide rules and paper calculations. That was a a fair amount of time, but, this is a problem for automation that we have in front of us to make work. It's not there yet, but it's going
to be. And these types of things happen on an exponential scale and the quickness that that happens in one sense you might see it as fifty years in the future, but in actuality, it might be might be ten. It might be five. For more information on this podcast, visit hdrinc.com/speakingofdesign. You'll find links to pictures, articles, and more information. If you like what you heard, be sure to rate us or leave feedback on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.