Todd Litman - New Mobilities: Smart Planning for Emerging Transportation Technologies

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2021 Todd Litman

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947610

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Keywords: active travel, air taxis, automobile dependency, autonomous vehicles, aviation innovation, bicycling, cargo bike, drone, electric bicycle, electric scooter, integrated navigation and transport payment apps, logistics management, micromobility, microtransit, Mobility as a Service (MaaS), mobility prioritization, multimodal, network connectivity, pneumatic tube transport, public transportation innovations, resource-efficient travel, ridehailing, Smart Growth, telework, supersonic jet, transportation demand management (TDM), tunnel roads, vehicle sharing

To build houses, carpenters require nails, and to produce bread, bakers require flour. To help produce a better future world, planners require diverse and reliable data. The analysis in this book is built on many data sources, including, for example, a 1901 US Department of Commerce survey of 2,567 workingmens families annual expenditures, divided into eighteen categories. Discovering such obscure information is exciting and humbling. I marvel at the dedication of the government researchers who visited hundreds of households, inquiring about their incomes and shopping patterns, and carefully compiling the results into tidy rows and columns, to help researchers better understand our complex world. More than a century later, this musty information provided key insights concerning how past planning decisions affected lower-income households transportation cost burdens.

I therefore dedicate this book to the countless workers who diligently collect and organize the data used for planning research. Thank you for your important but often underappreciated efforts!

I also dedicate this book to my wife, Shoshana, whose support for my work is beyond measure.

We are embarking on a journey, a quest, to find our best transportation future. We are in this together. I will try to be good company.

Like any good quest, our journey involves both practical challenges and deeper issues. At a practical level, we will critically evaluate how emerging transportation technologies and services will affect our lives and communities, with a healthy dose of skepticism toward some optimistic claims. To do this we will examine the impacts of previous transportation technologies and investigate concepts such as efficiency, equity, and freedom.

I am a policy analyst, which means that my research integrates physical design and economics plus political and legal analysis. My work tends to expand the scope of impacts and options considered in planning to include a broader range of modes and solutions than normally considered in transportation planning.

I love research. My research is sometimes criticized as anti-car, but that is unfair. It is true that my analysis tends to consider often-overlooked costs of automobile travel and often overlooked benefits of multimodal transportation; however, I certainly recognize that motorized transportation provides many benefits, and automobiles are the most appropriate mode for many trips. Put briefly, I advocate a balanced transportation diet, so each mode can be used for what it does best. We will see how this philosophy applies to the New Mobilities.

This book could have been written as a gee whiz! celebration of emerging transportation technologies, or conversely, it could have been an expos of the problems they will create and the exaggerations of their proponents. It is neither. Instead, I try to provide comprehensive and objective analysis of the New Mobilities benefits and costs and the roles they should play in our future lives.

I am a recovering car enthusiast. Like most baby boom generation guys, I grew up loving cars, particularly sporty imports. I savored their look, sound, and smell. I obtained my drivers license at age sixteen, and during the next two years went through a 1960 Fiat (I burned out the engine), a 1958 Saab (I burned out the engine), and a 1957 Volkswagen (I sold it to a friend). I used beautiful chrome tools to adjust tappets and replace leaky oil seals. Of course, I had to work after school every day to afford them, leaving little time for sports or socializing, and I cringe at my irresponsible and sometimes dangerous driving behavior. Thank goodness I survived!

The truth is, I was a slave to these vehicles: I worked to pay for cars so I could drive to work. I attained freedom when I sold the Volkswagen to finance a half-year backpacking trip around Latin America, where I traveled by foot, truck, bus, train, boat, and airplane through a dozen countries. Once back in North America, I relied on walking, bicycling, and public transit. We owned cars when our children were young but have been without a vehicle for the last decade, and the resulting savings financed their university educations. Car-free living made our family healthy, wealthy, and wise.

These experiences help me appreciate diverse mobility options, including New Mobilities. During the last decade Ive enjoyed using an increasing variety of travel modes including e-bikes and e-scooters, carshare services, high-speed trains, and teleconferencing programs, plus various navigation and fare payment apps. These are all part of an efficient and equitable mobility system.