If you’ve only seen a few autonomous vehicles on streets in your city lately, that is about to change. According to a leading automotive research and analysis group, the number of self-driving cars on roadways around the globe will increase by 21 million over the next two decades. And, 4.5 million of those vehicles will be in the United States.
To help cities worldwide prepare for this influx of autonomous vehicles, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Aspen Institute this week announced that three cities in the United States are among the first five of 10 cities worldwide that will benefit from a new initiative to prepare cities for the increasingly growing advent of autonomous vehicles.
The Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles has chosen Austin, Texas, Los Angeles and Nashville, Tenn., along with global cities Paris, France, a
nd Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the first five cities with which the initiative will work to help accelerate planning and guidelines for the advent of autonomous vehicles in those cities. An additional five cities will be named as participants later this year. The program will bring together the mayors of those 10 cities for collaborative efforts to set a roadmap for introduction and incorporation of autonomous vehicles in cities around the world.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies, spoke to an international audience at this week’s CityLab conference in Miami. Bloomberg told the crowd that included nearly 40 mayors, many financial experts and public- and private-sector leaders from 35 countries about the plague of expenditures and lost productivity that traffic congestion has caused globally. He pointed to his hometown of New York City as an example, where the former mayor said congestion has cost the city $13 billion in higher prices and lost productivity.
Autonomous vehicles could play a vital role in reducing those types of numbers, and the Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles hopes to help cities prepare for the introduction of this huge number of self-driven vehicles internationally. The initiative urges not only collaboration among cities, but collaborative efforts with the private sector as well through public-private partnerships (P3s/PPPs).
There is more to the dawn of autonomous vehicles than mitigating congestion. There will be challenges along the way as well. Automotive-related industries in some cities will become obsolete and delivery and other “driving” jobs could go away. Some cities are likely to see revenue decreases caused by fewer traffic tickets and empty paid parking spaces in city-owned lots. These and other challenges must be addressed by cities now.
That is the goal of the current Bloomberg Aspen Initiative – helping prepare cities worldwide for this new automotive technology. The successful incorporation of autonomous vehicles in to daily life can not only lead to solving congestion problems, but also improving the quality of life for citizens of the world.
The planned collaborative efforts will help produce a set of principles, resources and tools from interaction with experts and through data and other resources that can be spread across cities around the globe.
Bloomberg called cities “natural sites for collaboration that leads to innovation.” The initiative seeks to develop that collaboration into solutions that result from the interaction of mayors, the technology industry, policy experts, urban planners, mobility experts and others to use autonomous vehicles to better connect cities.
This initiative is the latest of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ series of Government Innovation programs that seek to provide mayors and city leaders with the tools they need to solve challenges in their communities. This global initiative will have far-reaching effects as cities prepare for the emergence of self-driving vehicles and will require collaborative efforts of both the public and private sectors.
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