Mobility Town

Out of Our Cars and Into the World

About the Project ABOUT THE ARTISTS RESOURCES “PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IS FREEDOM” Essay CONTACT US

"Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance – not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.” 

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961).

This project started as a book proposal. Here is an excerpt from that writing that explains the idea of Mobility Town:

GROWING UP FREE: WHAT GREAT TRANSPORTATION FEELS LIKE

Orchard Beach, New York, June 1975. Another Sunday. I was seven years old and soaking in that stick-sweet feeling of calm mixed with bleary-eyed exhaustion that comes from having spent a great day at the beach. The tops of my cheeks were just the slightest bit red, and my skin was salty from sweat and sea water. I wiggled my toes in my sandals to shift the sand around and breathed the smell of Coppertone that was all around me. With every tired sigh I sunk my head deeper into my dad’s chest, fighting the urge to doze off until finally just succumbing to it, waking up now and then to smile at the little girl sitting across from me. It was the end of the weekend, and we were on the Number 12 bus once again, being transported home to Pelham Parkway.

I grew up in the Bronx. It was a broken down, graffiti-ridden, downtrodden place at the time. Though the city was smarting from the tough events that led to the infamous “Ford to NYC Drop Dead” headline, it was still an urban wonderland, and the fact that public transportation was everywhere meant that a new adventure would always await. As a kid, every Sunday was a fun day and my dad knew just where to take me, whisking me away to a different magical location every time. Sometimes it was an old favorite, like the amusement park at Coney Island or the carousel in Central Park, but sometimes it was a wild card, like a puppet show at Nathan’s or an afternoon of ceramic bowl throwing at Greenwich pottery. Like most other city families, we never worried about who had the car, getting gas, or keeping up with repairs. We just walked out of the door and went. Even with all the challenges the New York City subway had, it was awesome, and I had absolutely no idea how lucky we were.

When I turned 17, unlike teenagers almost everywhere else in the country, having a car of my own was the last thing I wanted. Instead, the freedom to move around the city was inspiring. I dreamed of jobs, apartments and boyfriends. The burden of car ownership and maintenance was nowhere on my list of desires, and just stepping out the door with some tokens jiggling in my pocket was a thrill so intoxicating that it still makes my heart skip a beat to remember the feeling. Later in life, every time I visited another US city, I grappled with adjusted expectations based on the reality that public transportation was rarely available. “Oh, wait, I can’t get to the museum from here? What’s that? I’ll need to call a cab, but they are few and far between? Good luck?” I knew firsthand much effort it took for visitors from other cities to get from place to place. Though I am sure that summer Sundays in other places had a magic all their own, I still couldn’t help but think about how much families were forced to invest in keeping and maintaining a car just to go about daily life. Americans were trapped in a concrete-based environment of cars, highways and parking lots that seemed to only be spiraling deeper into a growing collection of congested roads, suburban isolation, and a widening disparity between the haves and the have nots.

When I moved to the Detroit area in 2018 to create and launch the 4D Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, my thoughts about Americans’ unfortunate lack of transportation choices reached a crescendo. I knew that car ownership was the norm, both here and in most places in the country, and that few people questioned the idea that this wasn’t the way it had to be. This being the heart of Motown, people even reveled in it. But to me, it never stopped feeling like a set of broken and disheartening circumstances that were fundamentally wrong. As exciting as it was to move to a place going through an urban renaissance, I still found myself struggling with the feeling that what this city needed more than new restaurants, boutiques and job opportunities was public transportation. As a designer collaborating with some of academia’s leading experts in robotics and autonomy, I thought that surely there must be a way for change to happen.

HIGHWAY CULTURE IN THE US: ROLLING OVER

I’d lived in other cities in the US before and always tried to avoid car ownership. In San Francisco, when I didn’t bike, I got around with trains and busses; in Philly, I did the same; and in Atlanta, I joined a car sharing service and used a friend’s car when I needed. But here in Michigan, I couldn’t work out another way. Not only was there no public transportation within miles of where I lived on campus, but the local board had actually voted down a proposal to bring a bus stop to a location that offered some of the most celebrated cultural institutions in the area. The transportation situation was not ideal, but I was back at my alma mater with a thrilling new project and a chance to learn about the excitement that is new Detroit.

So I did it. I bought a car.

And I hated it. Why was managing the stress of driving, taking a constant risk with lives on the road, the only choice? Why was paying a significant chunk of my salary for a car, maintaining it, buying insurance, keeping up with registration the default? Why were days that involved hours of driving through seemingly endless stretches of anonymous highways to spend just a few moments interacting with other people in between stops in sprawling parking lots the norm? That’s just the way it is, my colleagues told me, with a shrug. “You definitely need to have a car,” they would insist, albeit with an air of resignation. What felt normal to most people felt to me like a constant drag, and an isolating disappointment. As a newcomer, I’ve had to work hard to shed the disorienting sense of “where am I?” and condition myself to looking past the tedious eyesore of never-ending concrete that feels like it’s situated where people and inhabitable places should be.

I reflected on the work of urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs who famously fought a plan to build a highway through the middle of Washington Square Park in New York City. “The streets are where life happens”, she wrote. So where, in my new location, was the life happening? Where were the streets? Where was Detroit?

In its heyday in the 20s and 30s, Detroit, like many American cities, had a robust network of streetcars that served the bulk of the population in their everyday needs to get to work, shopping, cultural events and social engagements. While there were cars for hire, and some private car ownership, the expectation that every adult have a car in order to fully participate in society was a concept that had not yet been sold to the American public. 

In the 50’s in the face of planning challenges, corruption and the complexity of adding a glut of automobiles to the roads that were shared with streetcar tracks, planners put a priority on building out urban highways and automobiles.

Through my designer’s eyes, I can see how we might have gotten here. At my first design job in architect Edward V. Giannasca’s office I learned to draft plans on mylar and got a taste of the powerful magic of laying lines onto a page to define new spaces. In researching the history of American cities for this book, I’ve watched films that describe the plans that architects like LeCorbusier had in the heyday of the automobile and can understand how amazing it must have been to work on designs for the city from overhead, with sweeping lines and perfect curves broadening streets and connecting everything, everywhere. Meanwhile, from the ground, the car companies vividly illustrated visions of driving on open roads anywhere you pleased in one of any myriad of marvelous new car models that promised excitement and independence, with a chance to both explore the countryside and wind up in your own private home at the end of the day.

Since then, the automobile has become a part of everyday life in a way that is so insidious we don’t even think about it. While private car ownership serves people in many ways, it has created a dependency that profoundly changed the way we live, work and play. We take for granted how many streets, town squares, shopping centers, cultural institutions and parks are designed around private automobile access at the expense of more public pedestrian access. We may think that we drive because we want to, but the reality is more often that we drive because we have to, with no other option in sight. And we forget how many in-person, serendipitous neighborhood interactions have disappeared into overly-efficient, anonymous, parking-dominated experiences. Instead of the automobile serving us, we’ve wound up serving it through the creation of urban design that perpetuates isolation, increases road congestion and diverts resources away from public services that could serve a wider swath of the population. 

BACK IN DETROIT: IT COULD BE DIFFERENT THIS TIME

This was not my first time in the Detroit area. In the late 90’s I moved here to attend graduate school at Cranbrook, so I knew what Motor City was like and was prepared to return to car culture. But this time, something was fundamentally different. There was a spark, an idea, a light bulb, and not just over my head, but over the heads of so many creative urban planners and technologists. Perhaps more importantly, I knew it was and idea happening in conversations behind closed doors–maybe even the very same closed doors that helped mastermind the concrete constructions in the first place– at companies such as GM, Ford, and Stellantis. Though it is tempting to throw our hands up at the inevitability of the circumstances created by car-centric culture, we are at a watershed moment in history when all of this has the potential to change. Sure, when I bring up transportation in casual conversation I hear the same responses I’ve always heard: Detroit has no infrastructure, there would be no subway, the busses don’t reach the places where people need them, and there could be no good public transportation here. But what is different this time is that I come to this conversation from the robotics world, in collaboration with colleagues deeply steeped in the creation of autonomous vehicles. And while all this might just mean just an automated version of what I already saw before me– mind-numbing traffic, private car ownership, isolation– it could also be an inflection point marking a dramatic shift in the history of transportation. Having connected, publicly shared, autonomous vehicles could change everything, offering a freedom from the burdens of private car ownership while also enabling a broad range of new transportation services in areas where they were never before possible, bolstering communities while being efficient and ecologically responsible. Instead of the current reality where individuals each purchase, drive and maintain their vehicles, we will soon be able to take advantage of systems of connected, shared and flexible networks of vehicles at a variety of scales, from cars to skateboards, vans, trains and countless combinations and variations of these in between.

The technology to make this vision a reality is already upon us. at the time of this writing, for example, automated vehicles like the Zoox e-shuttle for Amazon employees are operating on public roads in Foster City, California. Though some of the technical hurdles are still being tackled, the bigger challenge may be changing our minds around how transportation serves us in everyday life. City planners and urban architects have been working on new, system-level redesigns for decades, but the current momentum of thinking that reaches the general public opposes these plans in favor of vehicles as consumer products that serve the status quo, that is, more private cars. 

All of which brings us to the other possible future, the one that many car companies are trying to sell you right now. It involves the image of a gleaming new car, just a bit sexier and newer than the last, that has the added feature of being autonomous. It sits in your driveway until you are ready to use it, and then whisks you away to your office or your event, allowing you to work on a document, watch a movie, or post to social media in the safe bubble of your private space, the rest of the time sitting idle, taking up space and adding up costs. Current marketing trends are already sparking the public imagination around a near future that mimics sci-fi visions of replacing our current vehicles with self-driving cars that pick us up, drop us off, park themselves and entertain us along the way. Instead of modular, shared public transportation, we are being upsold the prospect of luxury cars with autonomy as just one more feature. Instead of open green spaces and widespread bike paths, we are presented with advertisements for cars sitting idle in parking spaces at home, furthering our isolation and time spent away from simply walking outside. As seductive as that future may seem at first glance, it presents a short-term novelty at the expense of a potential longer term vision that can bolster communities through a system of flexible transportation modes in a variety of configurations.

DESIGNING A PLACE, NOT A THING

Okay, I can imagine what you’re thinking now. “Oh for heaven’s sake, I think this author asking me to give up my car!” 

Well, um… sort of.

Though the enabler behind the ideas in this book is connected and autonomous transportation, it is really not about that. Rather than a loss of a possession, this book is about gaining new modes of travel.

While talking to friends about this moment as an inflection point, this Big Handoff, if you will, I have had people respond with skepticism, “Ha! That will never happen in Detroit, this is Motor City!” My response has been, “then this is exactly the place where it needs to happen.” Given the city’s history with great public transportation, perhaps it could aspire to return to its former glory in that regard. What if Detroit could become a role model for public transportation in cities throughout the US and beyond?

My mind’s eye saw this place, and so many other cities where I have lived or visited– Atlanta, L.A., and Philadelphia for example–in a completely different light, and since then I have not been able to look away from the possibility. It’s beyond thrilling, and provides a vision that summons the unthinkable idea of reversing a large part of the mess we’re in. The road that it seemed we were too far down onto to make any difference, to even conceive of doing it a different way, seemed to offer a U-Turn for a large part of the problem. Whatever it was that we had somehow agreed to in the last century that brought us to this point might actually be able to be negotiated. We have a way out of the isolation, the concrete prison, the expensive, dangerous, and inconvenient burden that came with the once utopian vision of car-based cities and suburbs, and it could happen way faster and more affordably than building new railroads or subways. We’d fallen into a decades-long hole of designing cities around car isolation and parking and now we have the opportunity to rethink it all. But it is not going to happen overnight, and it may not happen at all. It will require collectivism, awareness, and a willingness to believe in the potential of a shared system to offer the best of everything to many, rather than the system that we have today that offers benefit to some but ultimately furthers the divide between the haves and the have nots. 

For the change to happen, we need to want it. We need to support it. And we may need to fight for it. Hard.

But first of all, we need to see it. The power of future vision is everything, and that is what this book is about. In the pages that follow I’ll take us on a journey to the design visions that are being crafted right now to fundamentally re-invent the way we travel. As a response to the damage that has been done to cities and communities across the globe, like Detroit, this book offers alternative visions that illustrate the power of the symbiotic relationship between public spaces and transportation services.

This book is about a feeling. It’s about the connection between transportation and community. It’s about the desire to be outside, the thrill of serendipitous encounters with old friends, about the spring in your step that comes from unexpectedly making new friends, the intoxicating hit of inspiration that comes from stumbling upon new clothing store, or a new piece of artwork at a gallery. It’s about the kinds of things that happen best when we are in thriving neighborhoods, with streets and sidewalks, small boutiques and casual cafes, where instead of traveling alone in a two ton metal box to drive across the street to an anonymous strip mall, you’re venturing on foot, perhaps even well past what the original destination was for your errand or meeting to discover something new. Instead of paying vast parts of our salaries to maintain an expensive asset that sits idle 70 percent of the time, we pay for a system that efficiently serves your community, all the time.

This book is also about a leap of faith, and a big one. It will challenge you to trade in a feeling, one based on a way of living you may have had for your whole life thats wrapped up in enchantment, excitement, comfort and identity that car ownership brings, and instead imagine giving that up for something completely different.

WHAT CONNECTED TRANSPORTATION COULD BE

As I come to this topic as a robotics enthusiast, some of this book will dive into the ins and outs of autonomous vehicles, hopefully acting as a translation of nuts and bolts into layperson’s terms. Some of it will also reflect a nascent interest in networked vehicles, taking you on the journey with me as I wrap my head around the complexity of traffic as a physical representation of complex software solutions. Primarily, however, this book aims to  explore the basic human need to continuously explore, travel, visit and move around our towns, cities and countries, pulling that need apart from the challenging solution we live in today–with its congested roads, expensive private cars, isolating lifestyle and community crushing need for more and more highways–and supplanting it with an alternative that seemed like it would never be possible.

First of all, if you are a car owner, think for a moment about all the things you do to keep that car. First there is your lease or car payment, a constant burden that not only increases periodically, but represents an investment that you risk losing in an instant given an accident or theft. Then there are all the other costs: registration, insurance, maintenance like oil changes, tire replacement and repairs. Then there is the time spent behind the wheel, which by AAA survey estimates is an average of 59 minutes a day in 2019-2020. Imagine trading all that time and money for a much lower shared transportation cost, partially through taxes you are already paying, and partially through a pay-per-ride fare.

Let’s say you want to head to a performance at a small theater on a Saturday afternoon. You summon a ride through an app-based service. You are given your choice of sharing with other passengers, or having a private car. You choose to save money this time and share with other passengers. Within 10 minutes, your ride arrives. It travels along the highway, where it connects with a series of other cars that share energy resources, essentially becoming a long train of vehicles, like a convoy, down major roads. In the case of Detroit, that would be Woodward Avenue, the main road connecting downtown to neighborhoods and suburbs further north. As the train gets closer to downtown, the individual cars break off again, taking you towards your destination until you have arrived. After having spent the last 20 minutes reading reviews and getting psyched about the show, you hear an announcement that you have arrived. Whereas in the past you’d spend this time queuing in front of a busy garage, then navigating an eight story concrete structure only to eventually pay for time when your car sat idle, you now simply get out in front of the theater, and walk in to find your seat.

Once the show is over, if the weather is nice, you’ll be much more inclined to walk around the city and explore. Chances are, you will have had an overall more relaxing experience. You’ll look back on the financial burden and time loss with the relief of what was replaced by a service. If some of the current models of autonomous shared transport, such as the study taking place in Ann Arbor at the time of this writing, are accurate, widespread adoption of a service like this would have taken 70 percent of the cars on the road out of circulation. Given the parking spaces that are freed up, there might be new widespread public green spaces. 

Finally, let’s zoom out and look at a version of this picture in terms of safety. Globally, there are about 1.2 million traffic fatalities annually, according to the World Health Organization. Extrapolating from this statistic, driverless cars could save 10 million lives per decade—and 50 million lives around the world in half a century.

THE FORK IN THE ROAD: HOW THE BIG HANDOFF CAN HAPPEN

When futurists talk about what may happen at some later time, they are pointing out probabilities, not putting forth predictions. My goal in writing this book is to bolster the chances for a future where shared, affordable public transportation can be everywhere, and that those cities, towns and suburbs where people have given up hope and resigned themselves to the burden of private car ownership can see a new future where what was once impossible now becomes probable.

For people who have never experienced public transportation before, I hope that this book will instill a desire to imagine what the freedom to go anywhere, anytime, without the personal burden of maintaining a vehicle. For those who know what life with ubiquitous public transportation is like but have given up hope of seeing anything like it in their own neighborhoods, I aim for this book to bring back lost hope and awaken a new ideal for a very real potential. And for those who have already seen and subscribe to visions of combinations of autonomous vehicle fleets as a hopeful and surefire path to a future where our transportation ills are reversed, I hope that this book can help to articulate your thoughts in the clearest way possible to those around you.

Unlike Jane Jacobs’ challenging situations, where there may have been a clear date set in stone for destruction to happen, the destruction has taken place at such a scale and in so commonplace a manner that we don’t even register that it’s happening at all. The Big Handoff transformation is not one cataclysmic event, but will happen slowly, with the potential for change emerging in many different towns at different times in the future. What’s key is that people have to ask for it to happen. They will need to let their local representatives know that they support a better transportation future, and that the status quo is highly flawed and undesirable.

My hope is that this book will give you the tools to explore the potential that technological advances will enable while providing insight into actions we can each take at the grass roots level to change what it means to build and move around in our communities. It serves as a rally cry for people in education, public planning, architecture, product design and general citizenship to instigate change, and ideally, provides tools for readers to inspire others around them to join in a collective quest to empower one another to seek better transportation systems in our own neighborhoods.