[M II A II R II K]

The city is the first in the nation to reveal how it will make shared, self-driving vehicles a key part of our public transit future

Read More: http://la.curbed.com/2016/9/9/128242...an-los-angeles

Report: http://www.urbanmobilityla.com/strategy/

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A new report that provides a roadmap for the city’s transportation future. The report, which was shared with Curbed LA and has been posted online, addresses the city’s plan to combine self-driving vehicles (buses included) with on-demand sharing services to create a suite of smarter, more efficient transit options.

- Simply being smarter about how Angelenos move from one place to another brings additional benefits: alleviating vehicular congestion, potentially eliminating traffic deaths, and tackling climate change—where transportation is now the fastest-growing contributor to greenhouse gases. And it will also impact the way the city looks, namely by reclaiming the streets and parking lots devoted to the driving and storing of cars that sit motionless 95 percent of the time. The report is groundbreaking because it makes LA the first U.S. city to specifically address policies around self-driving cars.

- To prove to you that LA is thinking about autonomous vehicles in a different way, consider that this plan was authored by an architect. Ashley Z. Hand was brought on as part of a year-long LADOT fellowship which ended last month (she is currently the co-founder of CityFi, a smart city advisory practice). She says she believes space is the key to solving a lot of LA’s transportation problems. --- "Transportation and land-use are inextricably linked," she says. "How far things are in your life, like work, home, school, healthcare, shopping, can determine how much time is spent traveling during any given week. With no room to grow, we need to think of cultivating an ecosystem of choices to give more flexibility to Angelenos."

- One underlying goal is clear across the board: To use emerging technology to make our transportation system so robust and responsive, Angelenos won’t need privately owned, single-occupancy cars—and we won’t need to devote 14 percent of all land in Los Angeles County to parking them. Even that one small element of the plan—the slightest reduction in the need, and therefore the number and location of parking spaces—could dramatically change the city, much to the delight of urban planners. --- "This plan sets a visionary path to using the latest technology, data, and approaches to solve LA's urban mobility challenges, particularly with parking," says Juan Matute, associate director for research and administration for UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies.

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