N. David Milder at DANTH, Inc.

Downtown Revitalization Specialist

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More on Central Social Districts, a Webinar on Downtown Retail, and an Article on Downtown Retail and Restaurants

Posted on August 27, 2021 by DANTH

More about CSDs from CNU’s Public Square

Rob Steuteville, the editor of CNU’s journal Public Square, recently interviewed David Milder about his article in The ADRR, Strong Central Social Districts: The Keys to Vibrant Downtowns. The interview was published on the Public Square website in two parts, on August 17th and 23rd. David thanks Rob for his great questions that helped him explain more fully CSDs and their importance.

Here’s Part 1: The power of Central Social Districts

Here’s Part 2: Supporting evolving Central Social Districts


Save the date for:
Bringing Back Downtown Retail After COVID-19

Across the nation in downtowns large and small, leaders and stakeholders are beginning to ask questions such as:

  • Where will retail be in downtowns like ours as we recover from this very stressful crisis?
  • What are the best opportunities for regaining, and possibly increasing, the strength of our downtown’s retailing?
  • What strategies, projects, and programs can help us achieve those potentials?

To address these critical questions, the American Downtown Revitalization Review- The ADRR – is partnering with the University of Wisconsin Madison – Extension to present an online panel discussion on Bringing Back Downtown Retail After Covid19 on:

Wednesday.

October 6, 2021,

at 12:30 pm CST.

The focus will be on downtowns and Main Street districts in communities under 75,000 in population. The webinar is part of Extension’s Learning from the Experts series. The panel will include three nationally known experts: Michael J. Berne of MJB Consulting, Kristen Fish-Peterson of Redevelopment Resources, and N. David Milder of DANTH, Inc. Bill Ryan of UW Madison-Extension will moderate the session. Stay tuned for details about signing up for the Zoom link needed to attend.


No, We Are Not Facing a Restaurant or Retail Industry Apocalypse

By N. David Milder

An Introductory Overview.

While the economic impacts of Covid19 are culling the weaker firms in the industries that frequently occupy downtown storefronts, and permanent closure rates are probably higher than those during the Great Recession, they are not anywhere near reaching the apocalyptic levels that would involve the effective decimation of these industries and impair their recoveries. Claims of industry apocalypses seem to be the rage in recent years starting with retail before the crisis. Since Covid19’s appearance the restaurant, personal services, and arts industries have also been seen in that light – often by industry leaders who are desperate to gain public attention and win strong government financial support for their member firms.

Many of the reported closures did not reflect economic failure, but legal necessity, and these operations reopen quickly when allowed by local regulations.  A more accurate view of the situation should be based on the fact, as established by a research team from the Federal Reserve, that business deaths are a normal occurrence with about 7.5 percent of firms and 8.5 percent of establishments exiting annually in recent years.[1] They also noted that small firms account for most of these closures. The team also found that “temporary business closure is common, affecting about 2 percent of establishments per quarter.” Covid19, as many crises do, has accelerated the processes of creative destruction that were already taking root in these industries prior to this crisis. Even if the permanent closure rates prove to be relatively higher than those produced by the Great Recession, there is no evidence that they will be so strong that they will prevent vibrant recoveries.


[1] Crane, Leland D., Ryan A. Decker, Aaron Flaaen, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, and Christopher Kurz (2021). “Business Exit During the COVID-19 Pandemic: NonTraditional Measures in Historical Context,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2020-089r1. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2020.089r1.

To read more click here

Posted in Central Social Districts, Downtown Niches, Downtown Redevelopment, Economic Development, Entertainment niche, Formal entertainment venues, Housing, Informal entertainment venues, Innovations, New Normal, Pamper Niche, Parksmand public spaces, Pedestrian traffic, Planning and Strategies, The Arts | Tagged Cebtral Social Districts, downtown CSDs, downtown restaurants, downtown retail |

Will Urbanized Suburban Downtowns Attain New Levels of Comparative Strength as the Economy Recovers?

Posted on December 5, 2020 by DANTH

By N. David Milder

Going Out on a Limb

Over recent months I’ve been getting a sense that some suburban downtowns may well make  relatively strong recoveries from our current virus induced economic crisis, and relatively speaking, stronger even than those of our superstar downtowns. This also prompted me to think that the current and potential strengths of some of these suburban downtowns are too often underestimated and overlooked. I’m venturing to presume that others may also find these thoughts of interest and they are presented below. Please, let me know what you think about them.

Suburban Downtowns Are Different and Often Surprisingly Strong

Last year Bill Ryan and I did some research on dataset covering all of the 259 downtowns in cities in the 25,000 to 75,000 population range in seven Midwestern states. Our findings will appear in an article in the Winter 2020 issue of the Economic Development Journal,  titled Living and Working Downtown: Is It a Population Growth Engine for Small Cities?  Included in the dataset were 167 suburbs that usually are parts of relatively large metropolitan areas in which much larger cities are the cores,  and 92 independent cities that are themselves the cores of a smaller metropolitan or micropolitan area. We were struck by how different these two types of downtowns are in many important respects. For instance:

  • Though less multi-functional, the suburban downtowns averaged about the same number of residents 3,089, as the independent downtowns, 3,294.
  • However, suburban downtowns had a higher population growth rate, 5% to 0.23%, and a lot fewer had declining populations, 31% versus 46%
  • Moreover, the suburban downtowns scored much lower on our two measures of live-workers in their downtowns, between 3.1% and 8.7%, than the independents, 12% to 29%. Additionally, such low levels even were present in the suburbs that had attracted relatively large numbers of office workers to other parts of their city, such as Dublin, OH, with 42,200+ in 2017

One factor that helps explain the greater strength of the suburban downtowns is that they are very probably located in metro areas with significantly stronger economies than the smaller metros the independent cities are anchoring.

A trend that helps to explain the low live-work numbers in suburban downtowns is that most suburban residents are not drawn to the type of dense housing units their downtowns tend to offer. National surveys for many years now have continued to show that about half of the adult population prefers living in the suburbs and that the vast majority of people who live in the suburbs want to be there. (See the table above.)  That strongly implies that they prefer the urban lifestyle that includes single family homes, lower population densities, a slower pace of life, significant car use, and an environment that is predominantly “green” rather than concrete and asphalt.

Moreover, when these suburbs do attract offices they tend to be located in office park-like  developments, within about a 5-minute drive of, but not in their downtowns.

The Importance of CSD Functions in Suburban Downtowns

Our findings also had some strong potential implications for a far broader range of downtowns:

  • Suburban downtown residential populations are not driven by the presence of downtown jobs, as some experts believe is the case with our large and superstar downtowns.
  • Consequently, they must be driven by other factors. Since the downtown populations of the suburbs and independents are so close, these other factors are probably as strong or stronger than downtown employment is in non-suburban downtowns. These other factors certainly are not weak, and they also could be present in non-suburban downtowns, too.
  • A very probable strong factor are the suburban downtowns’ Central Social District (CSD) assets: its housing, restaurants, bars, parks, athletic fields, public spaces, cinemas and theaters, libraries, art galleries, maker spaces, farmers markets, community centers, houses of worship, childcare and senior centers. Indeed, it can be reasonably argued that the suburban downtowns that have been successful in terms of popularity, use and investment have done so largely because of the strength of their CSD functions.
  • Housing is a very important CSD function. Two advantages suburban downtown housing may have are the likely greater comparative affordability of its costs and the convenience of it locations. In struggling downtowns units may be affordable because they are in poor condition and can only command cheap rents. In more successful downtowns, it may be that apartment rents/costs are cheaper than renting/owning an apartment in the region’s core city, or living in a suburban single family house (e.g., empty nesters), and/or because the apartment is occupied by several people who share the rent payments (young adults).
  • Units close to mass transit will probably be convenient for those who commute by rail or bus  to large employment centers elsewhere in the region. Indeed, in these  suburban districts, the commuters who live  in TOD residential developments may be the equivalents, in terms of economic impacts, of the live-workers found in and near the cores of our largest downtowns. However, according to one report, NJ Transit has found that only 12.5% to 25% of the residents in the TOD projects developed around its stations are NJT commuters.1
  • These downtown residents can bring in substantial purchasing power. For example, it was estimated that, around 2010, the roughly 1,500 new occupied residential units in downtown Morristown, NJ, would bring in about $72 million in potential retail spending power. 2 
  • Undeniably, when the CSD assets of a suburban downtown are strong, the district is highly urban in character, and more analogous to a strong big city neighborhood commercial district, such as Williamsburg in Brooklyn, or Forest Hills in Queens, than to a sizeable rural town. We might characterize these districts as “urbanized suburban downtowns.”
  • Typically, suburban downtowns have a Greater Downtown area that includes the downtown and nearby areas from which people can conveniently get to and from the downtown core , some on foot, but most by car. Sorry, folks, but we are talking about the suburbs here. That may be changing in the near future as AV vans and greater use of e-scooters and bikes come more into play.
  • The non-district portion of the Greater Downtown area can have relatively significant population and workforce densities and be the source of a lot of the customer traffic of downtown merchants. These users also can strongly influence  the image of the downtown.
  • Unfortunately, there is no study of urbanized suburban downtowns. Some districts that I would include in that category are in Wellesley, MA; Englewood, NJ; Morristown, NJ; Cranford, NJ; Westfield, NJ;  and Cranford, NJ.
  • Some have had strong GAFO retail, though that has weakened substantially with the upheavals in the retail industry over the past decade and the Covid crisis. Some have a lot of office workers located nearby in their town who are important lunchtime customers. Some have PACs, theaters and/or cinemas. All are walkable and have lots of eateries, coffee shops, and drinking places. All are surrounded by residential populations with high percentages of creatives – some also have large numbers of creatives working within or very near the town.
  • This suggests that non-suburban downtowns can also flourish by strengthening their CSD assets.

Suburban Creatives

For many creatives, these urbanized suburban downtowns may be extremely attractive, especially if they either: 1) prefer the suburban lifestyle when it comes to single family housing and green spaces, yet still enjoy urban type entertainment venues such as good restaurants and cultural events, or 2) they are nesting and need affordable and relatively spacious residential units, while also appreciating many aspects of urban entertainment and leisure time activities. The fact that these suburbs often have excellent public school systems also makes them attractive to core city nesting creatives who are looking for a more affordable place to live. In NYC, for example, the private elementary school average cost per student is $13,000 per year and for  private high schools the average is $25,267 per year. With taxes, parents will probably need double that amount of their  income to cover those costs.

My prior research on 14 counties in Northern NJ that are suburbs of NYC or Philadelphia – see the above table — certainly suggests that in 2010 very substantial numbers of creatives lived, worked or even possibly live-worked in these communities. Interestingly, the median of the percentage of their workforces that were creatives was 31%, but the median of the residential adult population in the labor force who were creatives was 40.3%. See above table. In Somerset and Hunterdon Counties over 50% of the residents in the labor force were creatives. So these suburban counties of superstar cities/downtowns probably have been recruiting lots of creative residents for decades. The size and economic power of these suburban creatives often seems to be overlooked because so much attention is focused on the young creatives being attracted to hip urban neighborhoods of the superstar cities.

Some downtowns in these high creatives counties have tried to attract more creatives to spark economic growth, while what they probably needed to do was to better leverage the numerous creatives they already had! Far too little attention has been paid to these suburban creatives. 

The downtowns in these counties did not have anywhere near the number of apartments or condo units needed to house all of these creatives, so it seems reasonable to deduce that most were living in the single family type homes the suburbs are famous for.  It also seems reasonable to deduce that the vast majority of these creatives probably were living there because they liked the lifestyles these suburbs support. In turn, this seems to counter the blindered visions of where creatives want to live that only focus on hip urban neighborhoods. Furthermore, it also counters visions that just focus on the young creatives who may indeed have a significant tendency to live in the hip urban neighborhoods, by showing lots of probably older creatives, who have probably nested, prefer suburban or rural residential areas.

Some Downtowns Will Be Better Positioned to Recover Economically Than Others 

There already is plenty of evidence that points to the imputation that suburban downtowns, especially those that are urbanized,  will be much better positioned to have a successful economic recovery than others. There are also a number of steps their leaders can take that will further solidify their strong recovery positions.

Tourists. Most suburban downtowns, especially those that have been urbanized, are unlikely to be heavily dependent on tourist customer traffic/expenditures as are the downtowns in our large cities  such NYC, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, etc., or in rural towns where tourism is the main economic engine. In those areas the collapse of their tourist markets have had large negative impacts.

Moreover, the resurgence of tourism will be hampered by other factors besides the pandemic’s impacts. International politics is one. For example, It probably will be very hard for our major downtowns to regain the strong flows of big spending Chinese tourists they once had. Even under an optimistic scenario, it very probably will take a few years for tourism to return to prior levels in these downtowns.

Office Workers. Merchants in our big city downtowns have also been clobbered by the disappearance of their office workers. In many of them only abut 20% to 30% are now showing up. Moreover the growing adoption of remote work probably means that the number of office workers employed in our largest downtowns probably will decrease by 16% to 22% after the crisis. 3  In contrast, in the suburbs – e.g., Morristown, NJ, Dublin OH, Garden City, NY – that have attracted large numbers of jobs, office worker presence has remained substantially higher through the crisis than in central cities, and they are also more likely to fully recover more quickly. The suburban office workers  do not have to use public transportation to commute to work. Consequently, these suburban towns are unlikely to be hurt as much by remote working or to experience their office jobs being decanted to less populated, and less public transit dependent areas as may happen in our large cities. To the contrary, some suburbs may be substantial recipients of such workforce decanting and the growth in remote working. Their downtowns will benefit from this.

Foot Traffic. It should not be surprising then to find that while in many large downtowns foot traffic has fallen by roughly 60% – 70% since 2019, it has been substantially less in their suburbs. See chart nearby.4  Foot traffic is critical to the health of any downtown. The suburbs may not need to recover as much as the center cities on this key variable.

Downtown Small Merchants. Truth be told, small merchants have been a disappearing breed in big city downtowns well before Covid19 appeared.  At best they have retreated from the major commercial corridors to sidestreets. A number of factors were involved such as: unaffordable rents; associated real estate bubbles and consequent landlord needs for high paying tenants;  new landlords who knew nothing about managing retail properties, and redevelopment that forced closures and relocations. In contrast,  small merchants remain the primary occupants of the storefronts in most suburban downtowns, though vacancy rates have continued to creep up for many years now, and non-retail uses continue to increase.

While there has not been any rigorous systematic study, a review of many reports on the internet suggests that merchants who are more dependent on residential markets and less on tourists and office workers were doing significantly better than those who were focused on tourists. Many of our largest downtowns have relatively few residential units within their boundaries, but a whole lot within a Greater Downtown area that includes nearby neighborhoods from which residents can easily and quickly get to the downtown core.  That would suggest that merchants in suburban downtowns, especially those with substantial new market rate housing, will not be among those hardest hit. Of course, that does not mean that they are not being hurt or stressed, but it may indicate that it will be relatively easier for them to survive and recover.

Downtown Retail Chains.

Superstar Downtowns, In these districts retailers have long paid extremely high rents for premier retail locations. However, in recent years, real estate bubbles and high rents have resulted in high “availability rates, ” with 20% or more not being unusual. The above table details such a situation in Manhattan in Q2 of 2019. Most of those locations have been very dependent on tapping office worker and tourist shoppers and their ability to again earn meaningful profits probably awaits the return of those shoppers at some still unknown time in the future. The prior high availability rate suggests problems that the Covid19 crisis can only have exacerbated.

Many of these retailers are in the luxury market and BCG recently estimated strong declines in luxury retail sales for 2020 and 2021,  with a recovery appearing in 2022, BCG also found that many more shoppers are now trading down than trading up.5 Moreover, online sales of luxury merchandise has been growing significantly.

Many observers expect a new equilibrium  between retailer and landlord needs will be reached in the coming years. However, until then retail in these big downtowns may be somewhat unstable. While the landlords of the luxury retailers may continue to claim that all is well, 20% availability rates and the disappearance of key market segments are strong visible evidence that those assertions are not true.     

Retail Chains Resurging Post Crisis in Suburban Downtowns. The claim has been made that the closure of many malls and chains will set free so much market share that retail chains and small independent retailers located in suburban downtowns will grow and prosper as the current crisis ebbs. There is probably some merit to this claim – but not much.

Most suburban downtowns have not attracted large numbers of GAFO retail chains, though they often do quite well with those selling necessities such as groceries, convenience goods, and medicines. That is not likely to change in the future because these districts lacked and will continue to lack the required locational assets. Few have the auto traffic that passed near the malls. If retail chains do return to the suburbs, standalone locations abutting high traffic roads on the periphery of these towns may very likely be preferred to those in their downtowns. However, some in wealthier market areas – e.g., Westfield and Englewood in NJ, Wellesley in MA —  have in the past attracted lots of GAFO chains, and they often were like open air lifestyle mall downtowns. Even then, though,  while the number of retail chains present in these districts was often impressive, according to information confidentially provided by one well known national brokerage firm, their profits per store usually ranked relatively low within their chains. They were thus among the most prone to be closed if their chain got into financial trouble. So unsurprisingly their  strength and numbers were eroded by the Great Recession, new competitors appearing both online and from strengthened malls, the retail chains’ corporate weaknesses being magnified by the process of creative destruction occurring in the retail industry, and the negative economic impacts of Covid19. For example since 2009, one of these retail chain rich suburban downtowns has lost the following chains:  Esprit, Coach, Chico’s, Ann Taylor, Lucky Brand, White House-Black Market, Janis & Jack, Papyrus, Aerosoles, Victoria’s Secret, Eileen Fisher, Coldwater Creek, Kiels, Omaha Steaks, and Game Stop.

For many years the trophy retailers downtown leaders wanted to attract were largely in the apparel sector, e.g., The Gap, Chico’s, Talbert’s, Ann Taylor, Victoria’s Secret. Today, that sector is in disarray – even some off-pricers, like Stein Mart,  that had been seen as well positioned, have fallen.

The argument for the supposed market share being yielded by closing malls and retail chains being captured by retailers in suburban downtowns has a number of problems analytically:

  • The demand for some kinds of merchandise has been in long decline, e.g., for apparel. This has been influenced by the trend toward informal workplace attire that has been strongly reinforced by the current crisis, and the growth in remote working. It also has been impacted by consumers wanting to spend more for interesting and rewarding experiences than for things.
  • More than ever, retail chains are looking for low risk locations. These locations tend to be in areas where there are significant numbers of fairly affluent shoppers or very large numbers of easily accessible shoppers with more modest incomes. About 20% of our malls were doing well prior to the crisis, and they tend to capture these affluent shoppers. Walmart, Target, Costco, Best Buy, et al are prospering even during the crisis from their growing proficiency with omnichannel marketing strategies. They are attracting the mid-market shoppers. These malls and big boxes are formidable competitors and probably are sopping up lots of any market share the folded malls and retail chains yielded.
  • E-retail was growing impressively before the Covid19 economic crisis, but its growth has accelerated substantially during the crisis, and strong evidence suggests these high e-sales levels will not diminish all that much as the economy improves. E-commerce definitely has and will capture substantial portions of any market share that folding malls and chains might yield.  
  • There seems to be fundamental weaknesses with the business model used by retail chains, especially when they are taken over by hedge funds and the like. Bean counters seldom are good merchants, much less great ones!
  • Internet born retailers may look for spaces in suburban downtowns, but their behavior to date indicates they will look for locations in higher income market areas with strong customer flows. For example, Warby Parker now is located in downtown Hoboken and downtown Westfield in NJ. They are unlikely to flood our suburban downtowns.
  • The failed malls and chains probably will  yield a relatively small amount of market share that downtown retailers might capture. Small downtown merchants are much more likely to benefit from that yielded market share simply because they need much lower sales revenues to survive. That said, these small merchants still better have other market segments to tap.

There is little reason to believe that our recovery from this crisis will somehow coincide with the resurging strength of our specialty retail chains. Because of their high rents, landlords in our large downtowns will probability continue to seek retail chain tenants, or shift to other users who can pay those rents. Consequently, the large downtowns will continue to feel the impacts of the process of creative destruction that the retail industry still is in. On the other hand, relatively few suburban downtowns had many GAFO retail chains, and their numbers were substantially reduced even before the Covid19 crisis. Consequently, they neither benefit a lot from the presence of these retail chains, nor are they very vulnerable to the substantial vicissitudes that these chains may  continue to face.

The Costs and Availability of Space. The ability of small merchants to recover and for startups to succeed will be significantly influenced by the availability and costs of their storefront spaces. While deflated rents and increased availability can be expected in both suburban and center city districts, the suburban rents long have been significantly lower and probably will remain so in a relative fashion well into the future. This fact, combined with the greater stability of their potential consumer market segments, probably will give the suburban merchants a greater chance of achieving a sound recovery, or a startup succeeding, than their center city peers might have.  

Rent costs are particularly important for restaurant operations.

Remote Working.

The suburbs are also likely to benefit significantly from the shift to remote working:

  • Their numerous creative residents are likely to be in occupations prone to remote working.
  • Remote workers are likely to favor downtowns with strong CSD assets as they seek relief from the social isolation of their home offices, and they often also require business services and supplies.
  • Suburban communities  are likely to have more relatively affordable housing, with more space per rental dollar than their regions’ center cities. This may attract many remote workers who are residents of the regions core cities. However, the affordability  advantage might be blunted by rent deflation in the core city. For example, reports indicate that rents in Manhattan below 96th Street have already fallen by 20% to 30%.
  • Also recent research has shown that significant economic growth based on quality of life assets and the attraction of remote workers can lead to rising housing costs even in rural areas.
  • What will not be blunted, however, are the large numbers of people who prefer living in the suburbs, and they often include commensurately significant numbers of creatives, the group most prone to becoming remote workers. 
  • It is fairly probable jobs will be decanted by a significant number of corporations from their prime big city locations to less expensive, auto accessible suburban satellite locations. Such office facilities will have cheaper rents than those in the core city downtowns, and provide corporate tenants places where their remote workers can come to get the social interactions they need to help their productivity, creativity and career advancement.

Recovering CSD Functions.

Many CSD venues have been hit very hard by the pandemic’s economic adversities. Almost all performance and exhibition venues have been closed or their public access severely limited. Many pamper niche operations closed permanently or shifted to operating online. Yet many of these operations, when allowed by local governments, have reopened on a limited basis, and the characteristics of some suggest that they will recover along with the local economy.

Two characteristics will determine those that will recover quicker and stronger and those that will not: if they are for profit operations and if they are large.

Small Arts Organizations. About 40% of the arts nonprofits are usually in the red financially, and mortally threatened by strong economic recessions and economic crises such as the present one. 6 Their business model is so dependent on contributions from numerous sources that their financial recoveries are seldom easy. So downtowns of all sizes are likely to have to wait quite a while for these smaller arts organizations to recover and contribute to their vitality.

Pamper Niches.  In contrast, many of the pamper niche operations are for profits and relatively small – hair and nail salons, Pilates and yoga studios, dance schools, martial arts, studios, spas and gyms. They have relatively very low start up and operating costs, and little need to keep large inventories of goods on hand. While many were quick to close during an economic crisis, they are also relatively easy to restart or start anew as the economy improves. They are also the types of operations that often occupy large numbers of downtown storefronts, especially in the suburbs. Indeed, in many of our suburban downtowns there have long been complaints that these pamper niche operations were crowding out retail tenants because they could pay the higher rents landlords were looking for that small retailers found unaffordable.

 Restaurants. Some of the most important CSD venues for all downtowns are their restaurants and bars. From early on in the crisis, there have been dire predictions of calamitous levels of  restaurant failures – one foresaw the prospect of 85% of our eateries failing.7 These claims seemed to be supported by prior research showing that the average small restaurant only had enough cash on hand to cover their expenses for so few day, 16,  that they were unlikely to stay open if they faced a major economic crisis – see table below. Months later, well into the current crisis, the Census Bureau’s Pulse surveys of small businesses have had consistently similar findings.8 One might have thought that by then their numbers would have declined as many went out of business. National survey data seems to indicate that about 20% of our restaurants may have closed do far.

The Center City district in Philadelphia recently published very interesting and well researched counter findings about restaurant closures.9 Well into the crisis, their survey found that only about 5% of their 1,078 restaurants had closed permanently, with another 19% closed temporarily.  Just 19% were deemed fully opened and have indoor dining. Perhaps most interesting are  the 600 restaurants (about 55%) that are classified as partially opened because they have outdoor dining, or only do take outs and deliveries.

My observations in the solidly middle income neighborhoods close to my home here in Queens, NY, also found a surprisingly low number of permanent restaurant closures. My communications with some suburban downtown managers yielded similar observations. The only reports of numerous closures I’ve found were about the eateries in the Midtown Manhattan CBD that are so dependent on tourist and office worker customers.  The City’s Comptroller just issued a report that “found that more than 2,800 small businesses had permanently closed between March 1 and July 10, including at least 1,289 restaurants.” That would mean that about 5% of NYC’s restaurants closed, on par with the Center City findings.10

The fascinating question is: How are so many restaurants surviving so long when they never seem to have enough cash on hand to do so? CARES or other government  program dollars? Owners not taking any salary? Dipping into their 401ks?  Tapping extended family resources? Landlord forbearance? Public donations via gift cards, crowdfunding, etc.? The Center City research findings suggest a possible viable explanation: many are in some stage of operational hibernation – e.g., the 19% that are temporally closed and the 55% who are partially opened. Their reduced operational metabolism rates translate into a reduced need for cash.  In turn, that means that the cash they have on hand can cover more days of operation. It also may mean that financial tools that are well within the restaurant owners control – such as dipping into 401ks, using credit cards, tapping family resources, etc. – can get many through the survival phase of this crisis if they hibernate. That also would mean that they are making substantial personal and family sacrifices in the hope that they again will earn meaningful annual incomes as they emerge from hibernation during the economy recovery.

If recovery means that these restauranteurs have to come out of hibernation and compete to again win adequate annual incomes, then it may prove to be a time period as, or even more, arduous than was the survival phase of the crisis. More restaurants may close because  they will need to earn a lot more money to thrive than they did to survive, while they may have depleted the financial resources that helped them to survive thus far.  Local market conditions will  probably play a very important role in determining those eateries that will survive and those that will fail.

Households in the top income quintile (above $109,743 in 2017) accounted for about 38% of all the consumer spending for food away from home; those in the top two quintiles (above $66,898 in 2017) accounted about 61% of those expenditures. See table above. Moreover, so far into the crisis, employment in households with incomes above $60,000 has been far more secure than for those with lower incomes. Downtown restaurants able to easily tap affluent residential customers are more likely to survive the recovery than those that are not. The urbanized suburban downtowns tend  to be in rather affluent market areas: in 2016, I estimated the annual household income at $188,000 for downtown Wellesley, MA; $131,000 for downtown Englewood, NJ; $152,000 for downtown Westfield, NJ, and $165,000 for downtown, Morristown, NJ. That will help their restaurants recover relatively quickly and substantially.

Let’s compare the prospects during the recovery phase of this crisis for restaurants in our superstar downtowns with those in our urbanized suburban downtowns:

  • Markets: The superstars must wait for the return of two very large market segments, office workers and tourists. Their residential markets may not be all that strong. Financially, that means many may have to wait quite a bit of time for their revenues and  profits to return to the levels their owners were sacrificing to stay in business for. Their potential  residential customers live mostly in nearby neighborhoods that are likely to have their own restaurants that are much closer to them. In contrast, the suburban downtown eateries rely mainly on the residential market segment that has never gone away and that savvy operators have been serving with takeouts, deliveries, and curbside deliveries during the crisis. These suburban eateries may also have office workers who are still present in the town in significant numbers, and others returning at a rapid rate as the virus’s impacts subside because of their reliance on autos to commute. New remote workers and newly decanted office installations may add significantly to their numbers. The suburbs’ consumer markets will start strong and may get even stronger. The superstars’ markets will start off very uncertain and require an unclear length of time to reach an iffy level of recovery. For example, though their office workerforces eventually may return, they’re very likely to be, at best, about 16% smaller in number.
  • Most arts tourists (tourists who attend arts events) visiting our large cities are not big spenders. A study of 21 study regions with populations over one million by Americans for the Arts that included the cities of San Jose, Dallas, San Diego, San Antonio, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Miami—Dade and Chicago found that, in 2016,  the average arts tourist spent about $51.41 a day. See the table above. About 31% of that went for meals and drinks, averaging $16.05. Another $6.57 went for refreshments and snacks. While there certainly are significant numbers of wealthy arts tourists and they are likely to be among those who resume visiting our superstar downtowns fairly early, they will tend to go to the higher priced eateries. The less expensive eateries in these downtowns are less likely to see their tourist patrons return as quickly or as robustly. Their recovery is likely to be weaker and slower
  • Rents. During normal times, the lower commercial rents in suburban downtowns  may have been equivalent to those in the superstar districts when the number of potential diners and their spending power are considered. Today, with the superstars’ disappeared market segments, increased risk, and uncertain rent deflation, suburban commercial rents look like a much better buy for all businesses, especially restaurants that are so rent sensitive.

Performing Arts Venues, Museums and Galleries. One might assume that the superstars are far richer in major arts, cultural and entertainment venues than the suburban downtowns, and that will help them to be better at attracting people back to their districts. In turn, that would enable them to better support local merchants. A closer look, however, reveals that their advantages may not be as strong as many might assume.

For example, superstar CBDs often have surprisingly few of these venues. In Midtown Manhattan, there are only two important museums, MoMA and the Morgan Library & Museum.  The Metropolitan Museum, Whitney, Frick, Guggenheim, Neue Galerie, New Museum, Folk Art Museum, and many others  are not. The major area for art galleries was in Soho, but is now in Chelsea and other parts of Manhattan. In Cleveland, the prestigious Cleveland Museum and Severance Hall, home to the Cleveland Symphony, are located about five miles from the heart of the downtown. It’s theater district, Playhouse Square, is about one mile away. Similarly, in Philadelphia, the Museum of Art, the Barnes and the Rodin Museum are outside the downtown district. MOCA and The Broad are In downtown LA, but LACMA. Hammer,  Norton Simon, Annenberg, Huntington Library and Getty Center are not. Still, many of these superstar downtown museums are themselves superstars and that means that they are very dependent on tourists for visitation. For example, about 75% of MoMA’s visitors are tourists. See table above. Their full recovery and ability to activate the downtown will probably await the return of the tourists.

Strong art museums are seldom found in suburban downtowns,  so how strongly these districts are activated is not dependent upon them, or their recoveries, or the return of lots of tourists.

Theater clusters are certainly to be found In some of these large downtowns such as Manhattan and Houston, as are performing arts venues such as Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Center City Philadelphia, and the Music Center in downtown LA. However, in Manhattan, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is located close to, but beyond the Midtown CBD. These venues are often considered world class, and that usually means that they, too, are heavily dependent on tourist ticket buyers. About 66% of the attendance of Broadway’s theaters are tourists, as is about 46% of Lincoln Center’s. Some observers claim that tourists will return once these venues open. However, getting Broadway shows ready to open will take time as will the scheduling and staging of other performing arts events. The Broadway League, for example,  is now talking about reopenings starting around June 2021, but how long it will take to achieve a full recovery is still unknown.

These performing arts venues have another characteristic that poses serious problems for the downtowns and neighborhoods in which they are located. For very substantial parts of many days they are dead and inert, only coming alive outside for relatively brief moments before and after performances that occur usually during the evenings and a few afternoons. When inert, they diminish from, instead of contributing to, the sense of activation and pedestrian friendliness of the sidewalks they abut.

A number of these urbanized suburban downtowns do have sizeable performing arts venues, though most do not. In NJ, for example, The Count Basie Theater in Red Bank was the attendance leader among the state’s theaters in 2016 and 2017 selling 235,000 tickets. It has a budget of around $17,000,000.11  The Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, NJ, has an annual attendance of about 200,000 and an annual budget of about $8, 000,000. It is a major component of the downtown’s strong and broadly defined entertainment niche that also includes a six-screen movie theater and eateries and bars that have annual sales above $100 million. The Bergen County PAC also has attendance in excess of 200,000 and an annual budget of about $10,000,000. These performing arts organizations have significant budget, and their audiences are not heavily dependent on tourists. Similar performing arts venues located in less affluent suburban markets have budgets well under $2,000,000 and lower attendance. The larger the budget, the more likely these performing arts organizations will survive through this crisis and recover. Once social distancing precautions are lifted, their primarily regional audiences, often from affluent households with members in creative occupations, can be expected to quickly return as their productions are presented. However, many of the weaker suburban performing arts organizations may struggle to recover or fall to the wayside—as will be the case pretty much everywhere.

Some Challenges and Opportunities Suburban Downtowns Will Likely Face

Downtown Cinemas Are Again In Danger. DANTH, Inc has been following the plight of downtown movie theaters for about 15 years. During that time streaming via cable or online was a persistent and slow growing threat to our traditional brick and mortar movie theaters. By releasing movies electronically either before or simultaneously with the theater releases the potential audiences of the theaters are substantially diminished. The Covid19 crisis has shut down movie theaters either completely or substantially. Streaming has grown enormously in utility, attraction and supporters among producers, and there is general agreement in the trades that it will be much more important in the future, and there is no going back. It’s a very cheap and efficient distribution channel that is unconstrained by the need for social isolation. Warner Bros. just announced that it will release all of its 2021 films on HBO Max at the same time that they open in theaters. Other studios are expected to soon follow.12

This Problem Is Especially Dire for Many Suburban Downtowns.  How many movie theaters and theater chains will survive the crisis is a question of considerable interest to all types of downtowns, but much more important for those in the suburbs. For many, their movie theaters are their strongest arts/entertainment draw, especially after dark. Moreover, they invariably occupy strategically important locations in buildings that often are difficult to convert to other uses. Also, movie houses are among the most reasonably priced of all entertainment venues, and they have rather few user frictions compared to going to a sports event, concert or stage play.

Streaming may mean that it will be much more difficult for operators to make sufficient profits to recover from the crisis and stay in business long term. However, during the digital projection conversion crisis of a few years ago, many towns used community owned businesses to step in and save their cinemas. Suburban downtown leaders soon may find that tool can be used to save theirs’s, too. Moreover, a whole toolbox of tools to capture community value is emerging that also can be used. The leaders of these suburban downtowns should prepare for such a contingency since quick action is often needed to save these cinemas.

Unrealized Potential to Develop Strong and Well – Activated Public Spaces. By and large suburban downtowns lack popular, well-used downtown public spaces. Within their communities, the parks are generally located elsewhere. Additionally, even when they do have a physical public space downtown they are usually badly under-utilized, mainly purposed as adornments, ceremonial venues, and weakly scheduled event spaces. Where the missing vibrant public spaces are most surprising is in the urbanized suburban downtowns that have so many potential eager users and operations such as loads of strong eateries that mesh well with them.

In the past, this was just a missed opportunity, but with the need of these downtowns to have strong attractions that can again draw lots of people downtown, they well may be a savvy strategic move, or even a necessity. This need will also be reinforced if the local cinema weakens or closes.

The crisis induced closed streets and parklets can also provide these suburban downtowns a way of creating quickly and cheaply some  needed spaces. Given that the sidewalks in many of these districts are fairly narrow, such projects can have a variety of immediate benefits. Still, the formula behind strong public spaces such Bryant Park can be distilled to scale to the smaller sizes and different characteristics of the urbanized suburban downtowns. A good place to start doing this is Andy Manshel’s new book Learning From Bryant Park.13 Here are a few things that interested downtown leaders might consider:

  • Location really matters. A public space on the periphery will have far fewer users and far weaker positive impacts on its surrounding properties and their uses.
  • How the space is programmed will have a far greater impact than how it is physically designed or how pretty it was meant to be. This is a major point that Andy strongly argues for.
  • Simple things really matter: as Holly White pointed out, if you want people to stay, they will need places to sit. Shade also counts. Andy stresses in his book that you don’t have to spend big bucks to succeed.
  • With programming, test things out and if they don’t work well, learn what went wrong, then either fix them, or do something better. Also, iterate, keep refreshing an improving the programming you have.
  • Just don’t think about events. Think also about how people-watching can be facilitated and enhanced. Public spaces can proved opportunities for people to do things, to let them become the space’s performers such as chess tables, boules courts, ping pong tables, reading rooms, ice skating rinks, carousels, swings, climbing rocks, etc.

Bottomlines

Urbanized suburban downtowns, with strong CSD functions, that are  able to draw upon large numbers of  creative class households, have growing numbers of remote workers, and maintain steady consumer market segments are well positioned to experience relatively strong economic recoveries from the Covid19 induced economic crisis. They can do even better if they take steps to protect their movie theaters and develop vibrant public spaces.

It’s about time that academics and economic development professionals realize that suburban downtowns do not grow or function in the same ways that our urban districts do. The suburban districts depend far, far less on being employment centers and more on being the central place for people to meet, enjoy themselves, help each other,  buy necessities, and sometimes to buy non-necessities.  Daytime workforces may be very important customers for district merchants, but their workplaces are far more often than not located beyond the district’s borders, and sometimes even in other towns. Their downtown housing is not driven strongly by live-workers, yet it can provide a very important in-close user/shopper base. Most of their shoppers also get to the downtown by car, and will continue to do so until AV shuttles and micro mobility vehicles provide viable alternatives.

ENDNOTES

1) Source:  John Shapiro, formerly of Phillips Preiss Shapiro Associates, based on interviews with New Jersey Transit officials while working on multiple TOD projects in northern NJ, including for NJT.

2) DANTH, Inc. Morristown Retail Revitalization Strategy and Action Plan, September 2010  https://www.ndavidmilder.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Morristown.pdf

3) N. David Milder. Remote work: An example of how to identify a downtown-related trend breeze that probably will outlast the COVID-19 crisis.  Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal Vol. 14, 2, 1–20. Forthcoming.

4) The chart is from: Michael Sasso and Andre Tartar. U.S. Downtowns Yearn for Vaccines as Merchant Traffic Off 79%. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-03/u-s-downtowns-yearn-for-vaccine-as-merchant-traffic-falls-70?sref=mHw3n8zP

5) Christine Barton. BCG LUXURY PERSPECTIVE. Luxury First Look 2021| Where are we headed? September 2020. Presented at the Future of Luxury Conference, September 23-24, 2020,  convened by Luxury Daily.

6) Roland Kushner and Randy Cohen. National Arts Index 2016, Americans for the Art, p.2.  https://www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/2016%20NAI%20%20Final%20Report%20%202-23-16.pdf

7) Irene Jiang. “85% of independent restaurants may go out of business by the end of 2020, according to the Independent Restaurant Coalition”. Jun 14, 2020, Business Insider.   https://www.businessinsider.com/85-of-independent-restaurants-could-permanently-close-in-2020-report-2020-6). Matthew Haag. One-Third of New York’s Small Businesses May Be Gone Forever. New York Times. August 3, 2020 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/nyregion/nyc-small-businesses-closing-coronavirus.html). 

8) Source: Small Business Pulse Survey Updated Oct 15th, 2020  https://portal.census.gov/pulse/data/

9) Center City Reports. Monitoring Philadelphia’s Economic Recovery November 2020 https://centercityphila.org/uploads/attachments/ckh6j2igf5o52lxqdijdqeye6-monitoring-philadelphias-economic-recovery-nov-2020.pdf

10) Comptroller Stringer Proposes Plan to Support and Promote Small Businesses This Holiday Season Amid COVID-19 Resurgence. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-stringer-proposes-plan-to-support-and-promote-small-businesses-this-holiday-season-amid-covid-19-resurgence/?mc_cid=b3ea7a4601&mc_eid=5f0ebc4c65

11) Budget data are from theaters’ IRS1099 Forms’ attendance from annual reports, and interviews.

12) Sara Fischer. Warner Bros. to release all 2021 movies on HBO Max and in theaters at same time. Axios. December 3, 2020. https://www.axios.com/warner-bros-hbo-max-2021-c45cc542-b509-4d04-9041-9c463e49f512.html

13) Andrew M. Manshel. Learning from Bryant Park: Revitalizing Cities, Towns, and Public Spaces. Rutgers University Press, April 2020.

Posted in Central Social Districts, Creative Class, Downtown Merchants, Downtown Niches, Downtown Redevelopment, downtown retailing, Economci Development, Entertainment, Entertainment niche, Formal entertainment venues, Informal entertainment venues, Live-Work, Luxury retail, Office Development, Pamper Niche, Parksmand public spaces, Pedestrian traffic, Planning and Strategies, Remote working, retail chains, Small Merchants, Suburban Downtowns, Superstar downtown, The Arts, Tourism, Uncategorized |

THE AMERICAN DOWNTOWN REVITALIZATION REVIEW (THE ADRR)

Posted on April 7, 2020 by DANTH

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Online version available at: www.theadrr.com

Contact:
N. David Milder, Editor
The ADRR — The American Downtown Revitalization Review
718-805-9507  [email protected]

 THE CREATION OF THE AMERICAN DOWNTOWN REVITALIZATION REVIEW  (THE ADRR)
 
There currently is no real professional journal for the downtown revitalization field. For many years, that has been strongly lamented by many of the field’s best thinkers. To remedy that situation, a band of accomplished downtown revitalization professionals are creating The ADRR.  It will be a free online publication, appearing four times each year. The target date for the debut issue is now set for the June 1-15, 2020 timeframe, with the second issue aimed for the Sept 7-14, 2020 timeframe.
 
This ADRR is intended to be a lean and mean operation, based totally on the availability of free online resources and the time, energy and elan contributed by its authors, advisory and editorial board members, and its editor.
 
How to Subscribe to The ADRR


Those interested can now visit The ADRR’s website, www.theadrr.com , where, on the home page, they can sign up to become subscribers. This enrollment places the subscriber on a MailChimp mailing list so that they can receive New Issue Alerts (see below).
 
How Issues of The ADRR Will Be Distributed.

New Issue Alerts, containing the Tables of Contents of issues and links to their downloadable pdfs of articles are sent to subscribers via a MailChimp email blast and posted to the ADRR’s website. Each issue’s pdf files initially will be stored in a folder in ND Milder’s Dropbox account from which they can be downloaded. Subscribers can download only those articles they want to read and whenever they want to read them. The ADRR also can be found via Google searches.
 
The Content We Are Aiming For.
Only manuscripts about major downtown needs, issues and trends will be considered for publication. They will be thought pieces and not just reports about a downtown’s programs and policies that its leaders want to brag about. Articles must have broad salience and their recommendations broad applicability within the field. The “voice” of The ADRR will be anti-puff, and very factual, evidence driven, though not dully academic. Discussions of problems and failures will be considered as relevant as success stories if, as so often is the case, something substantial can be learned from them. The ADRR will not avoid controversial issues.
 
Also, the focus of The ADRR will not be overwhelmingly on our largest most urban downtowns, but also provide a lot of content and relevant assistance to those in our small and medium sized communities, be they in suburban or rural areas.
 
Who Will Write the Articles?  

Hopefully, they will be from people in a broad range of occupations – downtown managers and leaders, municipal officials, academics, developers, landlords, businesspeople, consultants, etc. —  who have significant downtown related knowledge and experience.
 
Curated Articles and Wildflowers. Initially, the ADRR will solicit articles to prime the content pump. Once The ADRR is up and running some articles will continue to be solicited on topics deemed a high priority by the editorial board members. Each board member can select a topic to curate an article on and seek the author(s) to write them.  However,  there still will be a continual traditional general call for submissions (wildflowers) focused on subjects selected by their authors. All submissions, curated or wildflower, must demonstrate sufficient merit to warrant publication in The ADRR. All submitted articles will be reviewed by board members. We hope to see many submissions!
 
Article Length and Author Responsibilities.  

There will be short reads and long reads. Articles of 1,500 to 5,000 words will be considered. Multi-part articles of exceptional merit and salience will also be considered. What counts is their quality, not their length. Authors must have their articles thoroughly proofread prior to submission. Poorly proofed manuscripts will be rejected. Guidelines for submissions may be found on The ADRR website.
 
Publication Schedule:

Published four times per year, with a minimum of 5 articles in each issue. Given that this is an online publication, from a production perspective, the number and length of the articles is not a particular problem. However, from an editorial and content management perspective, the number of articles and their lengths can quickly become burdensome.
 
How It Will Be Organized.

The ADRR will be published by an informal group for its first year, with no person or group having ownership.

 Editor. During the ADRR’s first year, N. David Milder has volunteered to serve as its editor.

 The Advisory/Editorial Board :

  • Jerome Barth, Fifth Avenue Association
  • Michael J Berne, MJB Consulting
  • Laurel Brown,  UpIncoming Ventures
  • Katherine Correll, Downtown Colorado, Inc. 
  • Dave Feehan, Civitas Consulting 
  • Bob Goldsmith, Downtown NJ, and  Greenbaum Rowe 
  • Stephen Goldsmith, Center for the Living City 
  • Nicholas Kalogeresis, The Lakota Group 
  • Kris Larson,  Hollywood Property Owners Alliance.
  • Paul R. Levy, Center City District, Philadelphia
  • Beth Anne Macdonald, Commercial District Services 
  • Andrew M. Manshel, author 
  • N. David Milder, DANTH, Inc 
  • John Shapiro, Pratt Institute 
  • Norman Walzer, Northern Illinois University 

 Articles in our first issue that will be published in June 2020

  • Michael Berne, MJB Consulting, Working Title, ” Bringing Downtown Retail Back After COVID-19”
  • Roberta Brandes Gratz, “Malls of Culture.”
  • Andrew M. Manshel, “Is ED Really a Problem?”
  • N. David Milder, DANTH, Inc., “Developing a New Approach to Downtown Market Research Projects – Part 1.”
  • Aaron M. Renn, Heartland Intelligence, “Bus vs. Light Rail.”
  • Michael Stumpf, Place Dynamics, “Using Cellphone Data to Identify Downtown User Sheds”.
  • The Spotlight: “Keeping Our Small Merchants Open Through the COVID-19 Crisis”
    • Katherine Correll, Downtown Colorado, Inc.
    • David Feehan, Civitas Consulting
    • Isaac Kremer, Metuchen Downtown Alliance
    • Errin Welty, Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation.
Posted in automated cars, backdoor retailing, BIDs, Business Recruitment, Captive Markets, Central Social Districts, Change Agents, clean sidewalks, clean streets, commercial nodes, Contingent workers, convenience, Creative Class, Crime, DANTH, Deliberate Consumer, Downtown Garages, Downtown Merchants, Downtown Niches, Downtown Redevelopment, downtown retailing, driverless cars, E commerce, Economci Development, EDOs, Entertainment, Entertainment niche, Entrepreneurship, fear of crime, Financial tools, Formal entertainment venues, Formats Facades Signs, Housing, Informal entertainment venues, Innovations, Jamaica Center, Jobs, Leakages/gaps, Living donor, Luxury retail, Market research, movie theaters, Moving People, multichannel retailing, New Normal, Office Development, Pamper Niche, Parking, Parksmand public spaces, Pedestrian traffic, Planning and Strategies, Public Spaces, retail chains, self-driving cars, Small Merchants, Small Town Entrepreneurial Environments, Small Towns, Social Media, Sprawl, Suburban Downtowns, technology, teenagers, The Arts, time pressure, Tourism, Trends, Up for Grabs shoppers |

About the Dynamics Within the New Normal for Our Downtowns — in about 1,525 words

Posted on August 5, 2018 by DANTH

By N. David Milder

Introduction

I have been working in the field of downtown and urban revitalization since 1974. Back then, the riots of 1968 had brought considerable attention to our urban distress. Many civic and business leaders became much more aware of the cascading erosion their downtowns were facing. The white flight of shoppers and residents living in the downtown and close-in neighborhoods, disinvestment by landlords and businesses, spreading physical decay, soaring fear  of crime, badly tarnished public images, and widespread frustration about not knowing how to reverse this situation were common problems in downtowns across the nation.  Today,  many of our downtowns have been thoroughly revitalized and become very popular places for people to live, play and work. Scads of other downtowns  are in the process of doing so. These days, the expectation that downtowns can and will be revitalized has replaced the fears of the 60s, 70s, 80s and early 90s that downtowns were doomed to be places of failure, despair and decay. Downtown leaders now can tap a large and growing  knowledge base that includes an array of tools and techniques they can use to solve the problems that had previously plagued our downtowns. Among them are: place-making, improving walkability, transit-oriented development, mixed-use residential development, niche marketing, BIDs, TIF, PILOTs, community policing, etc. This success — both actual and expected — and the knowledge base and leadership pool that support it, are some of the defining characteristics of the New Normal for Our Downtowns.

The Downtown Residents – CSD Connection

Successful downtowns, however, are not stagnant socio/economic/geographic organisms. Indeed, some of the factors that explain their success have also both changed the way they operate and generated a new set of problems that now need attention and solutions. For example, though it is generally agreed among downtown revitalization experts that the significant growth of housing in and near our downtowns has been a primary engine for their recent rejuvenations, questions recently have emerged about downtowns being turned into ghettos for the affluent. Still, the significant presence of these residential units are themselves an important and new phenomenon. Moreover, these new residents have created a significant new demand for services, amenities and merchandise that are not typically associated with the Central Business District (CBD) functions and venues that dominated our downtowns in decades past. These CBD functions and venues also have long dominated our understanding of how successful downtowns should operate and been the focus of most downtown revitalization strategies (e.g., retail growth, office development, job creation, transportation improvements). While many of these new downtown residents may also work in the district, their demand for and consumption of opportunities to socialize, relax and be entertained has driven the development and/or use of strong restaurant and bar niches, public spaces and parks, libraries and community centers, movie theaters, museums, PACs, churches, senior centers, etc. These venues are associated with a downtown’s Central Social District (CSD) functions.

Another defining characteristic of the New Normal is that successful downtowns have very strong CSD venues and, with increasing frequency, they are as important or even outshine those associated with its CBD functions. Some types of CSD venues have long been present in some downtowns, but the appearance of a bolus of downtown residents has generally sparked their significant growth while broadening the kinds of venues present. In turn, by strengthening these venues, the downtown residents have helped them be stronger magnets for people working in the district as well as daytime visitors from the district’s largest trade areas and for tourists from even more distant places.

The presence of these residents and the strength of these CSD venues also has changed the way a downtown operates. Most importantly, they widen the range of a downtown’s multi-functionality, increasing the reasons why people will use the downtown. By doing so, they also provide a steady and significant flow of pedestrians and customers that helps assure the district does not close down on weekends or weekdays after  6:00 pm. Strong CSD venues also make the downtown “stickier,” keeping visitors in the district for longer periods of time.

Strong CSD venues also make working in a downtown more appealing. In a labor market where many job offers now find no takers, firms located in strong CSDs are likely to find it easier to recruit quality employees. Moreover, many of the quality of life needs of creatives/knowledge workers are met by strong CSD assets. In smaller towns, strong CSDs can help attract quality independent retailers and Lone Eagle business operators.

But CSD Development Can Be Very Bumpy

Nevertheless, CSD development and growth does not always have clear sailing. Many communities may opt for CSD development projects that are ill-suited for their demographics,  geographic locations, or industry trends, while they could have instead undertaken projects that were cheaper to build and operate and capable of attracting many more users. For example, advocates for new arts events venues such as PACs, theaters, and museums as well as for arenas and stadiums often badly over-estimate their potential economic impacts on the downtown, while underestimating construction and operating costs. In larger cities, major organizations in the opera, ballet, symphony orchestra and nonprofit theater fields are badly stressed having to cope with significant declines in paid attendance and financial contributions. In smaller communities, the impacts of new arts events venues on their downtowns are too often grossly exaggerated, and operating costs badly underestimated. Consistently, between 40% and 50% of arts nonprofits are financially in the red.

The most effective strategic path is to first focus on the strengthening and/or development of well-activated parks and public spaces, restaurants and watering holes, and movie theaters. They are usually the easiest to create and operate and have the fewest user frictions or are asset treasures that need to be improved and saved.

Though a lot of strategic planning is done for CBD functions and venues, strategic plans for CSDs are rare, but equally needed. While attention may be given to individual CSD projects, too many of such studies are marred  by advocacy induced puffery. Very unfortunately, little attention is being paid to the CSD as whole entity.

Technology Is Creating a New Set of Problems

The impacts of technology are also strongly defining the New Normal. This is most apparent in the way the Internet is forcing the whole retail industry to search for a new operating paradigm and electronic consumption has reduced the brick and mortar consumption of the arts. How and when people shop is consequently changing in significant ways. They first research online and then shop the store for the targeted item(s). Strolling and browsing shoppers subsequently are on the decline. Many Americans are time-stressed, so many shoppers want quick, convenient retail transactions. Yet, many others want more interesting, more meaningful and more socially appealing shopping experiences. Shoppers have also become much more careful and deliberate when making purchases. While this is most strongly apparent among middle-income consumers, affluent shoppers are also showing signs of greater caution.

Changed consumer behavior, combined with growing online sales, have reduced the demand for downtown store locations and the amount of space retailers want for their new stores.

While downtown retail shops will not disappear, they almost certainly will change in the way they operate, the amounts of space they each need, as well as the types of locations they will want.

Yet, as my discussions with potential clients demonstrate, many downtown organizations still see retail as a key element in their downtown’s future, while largely disregarding improvements to their CSDs.

The appearance of app-driven car services such as Uber and Lyft have already impacted on traffic congestion and the use of public transportation in several large downtowns. The imminent use of automated vehicles – e.g., by Waymo soon in Phoenix – will likely have important impacts on traffic congestion in a host of additional downtowns. What these impacts will be remains uncertain- as do the possible remedies to those that are harmful. The transition to automated vehicles will probably take 20 to 40 years, with different issues dominating downtowners’ concerns at each stage of its progression.

Success Can Create Problems

The very success of our downtowns also has created its own set of problems. For example:

  • High housing demand has created a very serious affordability problem for many downtowns and their nearby neighborhoods.
  • Downtown success usually means more pedestrian traffic. For example, from 2009 to 2015, pedestrian growth in Manhattan’s economically healthy central business district grew by about 18 to 24 percent. At what point does the density of downtown pedestrian traffic become uncomfortable and unappealing for pedestrians and detrimental to an area’s image and popularity? The uncomfortable density of users is already occasionally being felt in such famed public spaces in NYC as Times Square, Bryant Park and Central Park. Will those instances of pedestrian congestion increase? Some of the managers of these public spaces seem unconcerned about pedestrian congestion. Indeed, they seem to be committed to having the largest number of visitors possible.
  • As a recent study of Center City in Philadelphia has shown, greater downtown development density increases traffic congestion.

Postscript.

This is part of book proposal I am writing. I’d appreciate hearing if you would be interested in a book  that expanded upon the above content. Please let me know at [email protected] .

Posted in automated cars, BIDs, Central Social Districts, Deliberate Consumer, Downtown Merchants, Downtown Niches, Downtown Redevelopment, downtown retailing, driverless cars, E commerce, Economci Development, Entertainment, Entertainment niche, fear of crime, Informal entertainment venues, movie theaters, New Normal, Parksmand public spaces, Pedestrian traffic, Planning and Strategies, Public Spaces, self-driving cars, Small Merchants, Small Towns, Suburban Downtowns, technology, The Arts, Uncategorized |

A Critical Question Under the New Normal for Our Downtowns: Can Autonomous Cars Cure Growing Traffic and Pedestrian Congestion?

Posted on April 29, 2018 by DANTH

By N. David Milder

Introduction

A key facet of the New Normal for Our Downtowns is that many of the most important challenges they now face result from their successful growth and increased popularity — not from their failures. Nowhere is that more evident than with the issues of traffic and pedestrian congestion. Meeting those challenges probably means that many of our downtowns will have to develop and operate in new ways. Many observers believe the changeover to autonomous vehicles will have enormous positive impacts on how many of our downtowns operate, most notably in the ways vehicles structure the uses of downtown spaces. Yet, the transition to automated cars probably will be slow, with completion requiring 30 to 50 years.  The objective of this article is to explore this transition and some useful actions downtowns might take during this crucial and lengthy period of time.

First, it’s important to be clear about the problems that many experts believe automated cars hopefully will successfully address.

Traffic Congestion Is an Old Problem That Is Now Growing Exponentially in Importance.

By 1908, the term “traffic jam” was already in popular use, so traffic congestion is a problem that has long been with us (1).

It also can be found in towns of all sizes. I remember in the late 1960s sitting in our car for over an hour in a traffic jam just outside the small town of Waynesville, OH, (population under 3,000) because the town’s streets and parking lots could not easily accommodate all the people that wanted to visit its large niche of attractive antique shops. Similarly, in the 1990s, I sat in stalled traffic for what seemed like an eternity in the small town of Manchester, VT, (population around 4,400) because so many shoppers were visiting its many outlet shops. These examples illustrate how successful small towns with strong attractions have long experienced significant traffic congestion problems.

Larger communities, especially in their downtown areas, also have long experienced traffic congestion simply because of their compactness and density – characteristics that give them a competitive advantage. However, under the new normal, their downtowns are now so successful that they are experiencing even higher levels of traffic congestion that threaten their future well-being. As a terrific report on traffic congestion in Center City Philadelphia noted:

“The revival in Center City in the last 30 years has contributed to the problem (traffic congestion), bringing a greater density of development: taller office towers, more hotels, expanding health care and educational institutions, conversion of parking lots, older industrial and office buildings to residential use and the addition of new retail, restaurant, entertainment, cultural and tourist destinations. Greater density means more people at more time times of day animating the (downtown’s) 2.2 square miles….”

“Parking and traffic regulations remain essentially unchanged in the central business district from the era when Center City was a 9-to-5 downtown with two rush-hour peaks. But today Center City is filled with office workers freed from their desks by digital technology, eating lunch and holding meetings in restaurants and cafes. It’s a destination for tourists and shoppers, animated by tens of thousands more residents, students and visitors to medical and cultural institutions. It’s become a place pulsing with vehicular and pedestrian volumes continuously throughout the day and evening hours.”  (2).

The tie between a downtown’s economic success and traffic congestion also is demonstrated by this finding about traffic in Manhattan: “Since 2013, as the city’s economy and population increased, daytime speeds in the Manhattan Central Business District (from 60 Street to the Battery) declined by 11 percent” (3).

In 2017, average traffic speed in the Midtown core of that CBD was 4.7 MPH, not all that much above the 2.91 MPH average walking speed in NYC found in 2006 (4).

Traffic congestion has reached such levels in NYC that city and state leaders have tried (and failed so far) to introduce “congestion pricing” to keep vehicles from entering  Manhattan. It has been implemented in London, Stockholm, and Singapore and on a few toll highways in the US such as I-66 in the Washington D.C. area and I-15 in San Diego. In other communities, altering regulations and strengthening enforcement are the major tools to cope with increased traffic congestion.

The table above shows the 25 cities with the worst traffic congestion in the USA, according to INRIX Research. They are located all over the nation. Our most populated cities certainly rank high, but it is also notable that five of these cities only had populations in the 58,000 to 212,000 range – Stamford, Tacoma, Santa Cruz, San Rafael and Santa Barbara – and that three were in the 58,000 to 91,900 range – San Rafael, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara.

It’s Not Just the Downtowns, It’s Also the Roads/Highways That Connect to Them.  The economic health and well-being of most downtowns depend not only on the ease and costs of moving around within them, but also on how difficult and costly it is to get to and from them. The frequent traffic congestion found on the major roads leading into them can be very off-putting to those that have to work or do business in a downtown, not to mention those who want to visit for pleasure and entertainment reasons.

It’s Not Just Cars on the Roads – It’s Parking Them, Too. Many of the cars that enter a downtown stay dormant, i.e., parked, for substantial parts of the day. These parked vehicles occupy a significant proportion of a downtown’s land. As one recent report noted: “Parking consumes a significant amount of land, especially in suburban areas where auto use is highest and surface lots are more common than multi-story garages” (5). Shopping malls notoriously dedicate most of their land – about 80% — to the parking and movement of vehicles.

The extent to which downtown spaces are dedicated to auto-related uses depends a lot on how many people use cars to get to and from them. There can be considerable variation. For example, back in 2003 Michael Manville and Donald Shoup noted:

“If you took all of the parking spaces in the Los Angeles CBD and spread them horizontally in a surface lot, they would cover 81 percent of the CBD’s land area. We call this ratio—of parking area to total land area—the “parking coverage rate,” and it is higher in downtown LA than in any other downtown on earth. In San Francisco, for instance, the coverage rate is 31 percent, and in New York it is only 18 percent” (6).

Other observers have noted that: “streets and parking take up 45% of land in downtown Washington, D.C. and up to 65% in downtown Houston” (7). This variation in parking coverage rates means there will be variation in the ability of reduced parking demand to translate into freeing up land that can be put to more pedestrian friendly uses.

Downtown parking structures are also very expensive to build – about $50,000 per parking space – and add significantly to downtown development project costs, while using a lot of scarce and valuable land.

The Obvious Thing That Any Solution Must Achieve. Traffic congestion essentially means that there are too many vehicles in a defined geographic place. The obvious thing that any solution to traffic congestion must achieve is to reduce the number of vehicles in the place of interest, e.g., a downtown. Fewer vehicles means less land need for the vehicles’ movement and parking. That is precisely what many advocates (e.g., Uber, Lyft) claim that a system of automated ride-sharing vehicles can accomplish. However, as will be detailed below, there are substantial reasons to question those claims, especially for the early decades of the transition period. In turn, that can have important implications for the actions municipalities may want to take during those crucial years.

Yogi Berra: “No One Goes There Anymore – It’s Too Crowded!” 

Pedestrian congestion is more of an emerging problem. Pedestrian activity can have two faces. On one hand, over the past 15 to 20 years, significant levels of pedestrian activity have become an essential element in our understanding of how successful downtowns and Main Street districts work. The well-deserved and growing attention that downtown “walkability” has garnered reflects the concerns of those active in downtown revitalization about the physical and social conditions that encourage strong pedestrian activity. It is also a de facto acknowledgment of the importance of such activity.

On the other hand, there is ample evidence that pedestrian activities can reach levels that are too dense, induce avoidance behaviors and tarnish the image of a downtown in the eyes of the public. The above statement, by the oft astute Yogi Berra, depicts a growing threat that is present daily in many of our larger downtowns and to lesser extents in some of our smaller cities. The situation here in NYC has become fairly obvious. For example, a headline in a 2016 article in the New York Times blared: “New York’s Sidewalks Are So Packed, Pedestrians Are Taking to the Streets” (8).

While this congestion may happen unsurprisingly in Manhattan on 5th Avenue in and near Rockefeller Center, in the Times Square Bowtie, along Broadway and elsewhere in Lower Manhattan, around Macy’s and near Penn Station, I have been in similar pedestrian traffic jams, though less frequently, on the sidewalks of Austin Street in Forest Hills, NY; Main Street in Flushing, NY, Jamaica Avenue in Queens, and on Fordham Road in The Bronx. Indeed, pedestrian activity has been increasing throughout the city as the table below demonstrates.  NYCDOT has been counting pedestrians at 100+ locations throughout the city since 2007 annually in the spring and in the fall. It creates a Pedestrian Volume Index based on the counts at 50 of those locations. Between the Spring of 2007 and the Spring of 2016, there has been an 18.3% increase in pedestrian activity in NYC. 

New York is not alone in experiencing pedestrian congestion. I have also observed it in such diverse places as Main Street in East Hampton, NY, Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Newberry Street in Boston and Ocean Drive in Miami Beach.

N.Michigan Ave in Chicago. Too many or too few pedestrians?

How many downtowns are inducing avoidance behaviors and having their images tarnished by too much pedestrian traffic congestion? My suspicion is that it is happening far more often than their leaders and stakeholders either realize or would want. Perhaps this is due to their focus on building up pedestrian activity, so the downtown can be well-activated and have ample users when that focus is no longer needed. Whatever the reason for this disregard, once again, it is the success of our revitalization efforts that creates a new challenge – too much pedestrian activity.

In turn, this situation raises the question of: at what point does the density of pedestrians begin to significantly make walking an irritating, joyless labor and an inducement for avoidance behavior? How much pedestrian traffic is too much? One suggestion is that a pedestrian needs a space envelope of about 1m2 (9). My bet is that number has no empirical data about individual behaviors, preferences and attitudes to support it! My stride alone could take up most or all of that space and I am of average height. The most important issue is how much space allows a pedestrian to feel comfortable and safe – not how many of them can be crammed onto a length of paved sidewalk.

Research also suggests that walking speeds are influenced by a community’s population size and level of economic development (10).  Consequently, they may be expected to increase as a downtown revitalizes. However, increased walking speed once it crosses an unknown threshold, may deter pedestrians from strolling and window-shopping – activities critical to a downtown’s retail and entertainment operations. Moreover, as anyone visiting Times Square these days probably will attest, high volumes of pedestrian traffic can bring walking speeds down to a crawl.

High pedestrian volumes also can impede strolling and window-shopping. Retailers definitely want significant levels of pedestrian traffic, but if the volume gets too large it can become superfluous or provide too much friction for comfortable strolling and window-shopping or entering/leaving shops. This is reflected in two of my findings about the 34th Street district in Manhattan:

  • The highest retail rents were not on the blockfaces with the highest pedestrian counts.
  • Major retailers seem to appreciate high pedestrian counts close to Macy’s and clusters of other major retailers more than the very high pedestrian counts close to Penn Station (11).

 

What, then, is an optimal pedestrian flow for retailers? The Traffic Engineering Handbook 2015 (TEH) – citing data that has been in the Handbook at least since the mid-1960s – suggests that pedestrian flows larger than 1,100 to 1,600 people per hour per 22” lane are not conducive to retail activities. On a sidewalk along a downtown commercial street that has an 8’ to 12’ pedestrian zone – as recommend in Boston — that would mean between four and six 22” wide pedestrian lanes (see above table).  The TEH’s recommended pedestrian volumes for retail would mean between 4,400 and 6,400 pedestrians/hr in a four-lane zone and between 6,600 and 9,600 pedestrians/hr in a six-lane zone.

However, if we look at the NYCDOT p.m. counts for the 50 locations used to construct its Pedestrian Volume Index, we find that:

  • 9, or 18%, had counts above 4,400/hr
  • Only 5, or 10%, had counts above 6,400/hr
  • Only 2, or 4%, had counts above 9,600/hr. (One location is by Macy’s, the other is across from Penn Station.)

The 1,600 people/hr/lane rate seems to result in a very high pedestrian flow even by NYC standards, one that makes me doubt it is conducive to strolling and window- shopping. The 1,100 people/hr/la rate is still relatively high, but probably closer to what is conducive to having successful retailing. More research on this question is needed.

Under the new normal, as more and more downtowns succeed, as more of them have significant levels of pedestrian traffic, more of them probably will have pedestrian congestion problems.

The Auto-Pedestrian Congestion Interaction. Of course, there also are basic relationships between pedestrian and auto congestion. They each can reinforce the other. For instance, dense auto traffic makes it harder for pedestrians to cross streets, while dense pedestrian flows at corners makes it more difficult for autos to make turns. To help cope with this situation in NYC “a new tool has emerged to help increase pedestrian safety: The Pedestrian/Traffic Manager—an individual trained and certified exclusively in the movement and safety of pedestrians in high density areas (12).

Spaces for vehicles turned into spaces for people. Broadway near 36th Street in Manhattan

Historically, auto traffic and pedestrian congestion also have fought each other. For example, early in the transition to automobiles, wide city sidewalks were reduced in size to provide more room for vehicle traffic. Of late, cities such as NYC, have been doing the opposite, emptying road bed spaces of vehicles to provide more room for pedestrians – see the above photo. Many urbanists believe that autonomous vehicles will enable much more of the street spaces used by vehicles to be converted into vibrant public spaces for pedestrians.

The Promises of the Automated Car Revolution

These are the major positive impacts that the changeover to automated vehicles promises to achieve:

  • Much safer vehicles due to automation/computerization of driving functions and new safety features.
  • Reduced CO2 emissions created by the switch to automated vehicles powered by electric engines.
  • Reduced need for parking spaces created by:
    • Reduced private ownership of vehicles means less need for residential parking.
    • Increased use of ride for hire automated vehicles for work and pleasure trips means reduced need of parking spaces for visitors to office buildings, manufacturing plants, shopping malls, sports stadiums and arenas, government offices, etc.
  • Reduced need for land used for highways, roads, and streets because:
    • There will be significantly fewer vehicles because there will be vastly increased ride-sharing.
    • More, importantly, there will be fewer vehicle miles driven since there will be vastly increased ride-sharing.
    • Vehicles will need narrower road spaces because vehicles will be more accurately guided by GPS or road beacon systems.

In 2017, these promises stimulated the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) to issue its future-peering and optimistic Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism (13). In this vision of our urban future, the adverse impacts of automobiles are substantially diminished, and the needs, comforts, and pleasures of people are the engines for urban design. For example, under the Blueprint, people would have more spaces for walking and leisure and vehicle speeds would be so slowed pedestrians could even cross streets midblock! There is much to admire in this vision, but there also are many questions about when and how it might be realized.

Some of the claimed benefits of the automated car revolution, especially when made by people with strong vested interests in it, strain credulity and seem more like marketing puff. Often this puffery also is full of politically tenuous positions. The leaders of Lyft are good examples. As reported in a 2018 article on Verge:

“Lyft’s… co-founders, John Zimmer and Logan Green, have released policy papers predicting the end of personal car ownership in major cities by 2025, and calling for more people to carpool by charging a fee to those who don’t” (14).

With about 263 million passenger cars, motorcycles, lorries, buses and other vehicles now registered in the US, it is certainly dubious that personal car ownership will end in our major cities by 2027. Also, only political naïfs would believe that fining people who do not carpool would not create huge political problems.

More generally, Lyft stresses that ride-hailing could reduce the number of personally owned cars on the roads (15). According to its spokesman: ”Lyft is focused on making personal car ownership optional by getting more people to share a ride, helping to reduce car ownership, and partnering with public transportation”(16). Uber, according to its spokesman has a similar goal: “Uber’s long-term goal is to end the reliance on personal vehicles and allow a mix of public transportation and services like Uber” (17).

Of course, there is another possibility: ride-hailing services will increase the number of vehicles on the road and significantly worsen urban traffic congestion.

The Predictions

The Importance of the Long Transition Period. There is a real need for downtown and municipal leaders to recognize that the transition to autonomous vehicles will take decades to complete (18). Until then, there will be very long periods when roadways will be shared by autonomous vehicles, those that are legacies, and those that are driven, but have lots of hi-tech safety features to protect their drivers and passengers. Even the transition away from gasoline powered vehicles will likely take decades to complete. One of the most important issues for downtown and municipal leaders is when, if ever, will the number of automated vehicles reach the point where they will reduce the need for parking spaces, roads and highways?

Autonomous vehicles will have a relatively small presence in the near future. In its 2016 report, McKinsey concluded that worldwide: “Once technological and regulatory issues have been resolved, up to 15 percent of new sold cars sold in 2030 could be fully autonomous” (19). McKinsey also concluded that by 2050, about 33% of new cars sold worldwide could potentially be a shared vehicle (20). That suggests that the vast majority of vehicles sold 30 years from now will still be of the unshared variety!

IHS Markit looked at autonomous vehicle sales in the 2020 to 2040 period in the Americas (see above chart). It predicted that autonomous vehicle sales in the U.S. would reach 7.9 million units/yr by 2040 (21). Given that annual vehicle sales in the US in recent years have been in the 15 million to 17 million range, it appears probable that most vehicles sold in the US for the coming 20+ years will be legacy type vehicles, though many of their operations and safety features may become automated.

Municipalities and downtowns that forget to take into account the very large number of legacy and unshared vehicles do so at their own economic peril! Yet, the growth of autonomous and shared vehicles will mean that they, too, cannot be ignored.

BP, the big oil company, in its Energy Outlook 2018, sees only 25% of the car sales worldwide in 2040 being electric powered. Even if we allow a 100% or even a 200% error factor to offset any possible BP bias, that still leaves a whole lot of non-electric vehicles being sold – and many more will still be on the road. These data suggest that the ability of autonomous electric-engined cars to reduce CO2 emissions probably will take many decades to reach significant levels!

The BP data are also interesting because they show that the number of passenger vehicle kilometers (vkm) powered by electricity will grow significantly faster than the sales of electric powered vehicles in 2040. This also points out that the numbers of miles/kilometers traveled by vehicles, with and without passengers, probably are far more important variables for analyzing traffic congestion than auto ownership statistics.

The following quote from the Driverless Future report is extremely important. It notes that:” The possibility that millions of car owners could shift to ridesourcing and give up car ownership offers an opportunity to alleviate congestion, provide equitable access to jobs and services, and create development that is more inclusive and sustainable. However, it is also expected that vehicle miles traveled will rise as consumers are exposed to new mobility services. This would lead to more congestion” (22). This illustrates the importance of the vehicle miles traveled variable and its associated data.

The Speed of The Transition Will Probably Vary by the Type of City or Town. The McKinsey study also concluded that: “City type will replace country or region as the most relevant segmentation dimension that determines mobility behavior and, thus, the speed and scope of the automotive revolution” (23). In McKinsey’s view, in the US, regions automated vehicles will have marginal penetration in small towns and rural areas, where private cars will continue to be the preferred means of transportation. However, in the larger, most congested cities car ownership and use is more burdensome and shared mobility has significant competitive advantages and consequent higher probabilities of adoption (24).

Another relevant study, “Driverless Future: A Policy Roadmap for City Leaders”, by Arcadis, HR&A, and Sam Schwartz, argues that the shift from car ownership to using shared automated vehicles will vary according to the strengths of the following variables:

  • Population density.
  • Level of car ownership.
  • Strength of public transit.
  • Residential density (units/acre).

 The above table is constructed from data on page 9 of the Driverless Future report. The analysis of shifts from personal car use for commuting to the use of shared automated vehicles is cost driven. This analysis then ties the shifts with residential unit density. Areas with 0-3 units per acre are deemed now likely to prefer autos for commuting; places with 10-20 units prefer bus transit and places with 30-150+ units per acre prefer rail. The analysis projects that car ownership will probably shift into the use of shared automated vehicles (AVs) to a much greater extent in the NY-NJ MSA, 46% to 60%, than in either the L.A. MSA, 36% to 46% or the Dallas-Ft Worth MSA, 21% to 31%.

The conclusions that the shift from the use of personal cars to shared automated vehicles will be greater in the NYC Metro than in the L.A. and Dallas-Ft Worth Metros, and that it will be lowest in the Dallas-Ft Worth Metro appear to me to be correct. The overall differences on the estimates for the NY and Dallas Metros are 25% for the low estimates and 36.4% for the high estimates. However, to me, there appears to be a number of questionable things about this analysis. For example, the ranges between the lowest and highest estimates of the reductions in personal vehicle ownership in all instances are quite high. That strongly suggests these should be treated as ballpark estimates – valuable if used carefully, but far from definitive. In all fairness, the study’s authors do state conditionally that the MSA in question “could experience a shift of….”

Also, the residential density variable really does not seem to make all that much difference:

  • For the NY Metro the range for the low estimate across the five residential unit density categories is 37% to 45.7%, a delta of 8.7%. The range for the high estimate is 66.7% to 70.0%, a delta of 3.3%
  • For the L.A. Metro the range for the low estimate across the five categories is 35.5% to 38.6%, a delta of 3.1%. The range for the high estimate is 44.2% to 46.8%, a delta of 2.1%
  • For the Dallas -Ft Worth Metro the range for the low estimate across the five categories is 18.3% to 20%, a delta of 1.7%. The range for the high estimate is 25.0% to 33.6%, a delta of 8.6%.

The focus on car ownership is questionable. As the BP and Driverless Future reports discussed above indicate, vehicle miles traveled is probably the really crucial variable. Certainly, it is more probative when analyzing the issues of CO2 emissions, road safety, traffic congestion, and the land needed for roads and highways. However, data on the use of personal cars to commute to work may be far easier and cheaper to obtain.

Most importantly, the assumption that the shift away from personal car use will be based solely on economic factors should be strongly questioned. The reasons why only 25% of NYC’s residents use their personal cars to get to work and 52.9% use public transit, while 75.6% of Dallas’s residents drive their cars to work and only 9.5% use public transit are probably far more historical and cultural than economic. These cultural factors are also present in L.A., as well as in such cities as Charlotte, NC, and Columbus, OH. They are why these communities do not have stronger and better utilized public transit systems – it isn’t that these cities lacked the wealth or economic strength.

In such communities, it will not be easy for even cheaply priced rides in shared automated vehicle to overcome the feelings of power, control, freedom, comfort, and even joy, that riding in their own vehicles provides to a whole lot of Americans. For these car owners, the benefits may be worth spending a good deal of money to retain them. Just consider that the average cost of an off-street parking space in NYC is about $400/mo and in Manhattan, as shown in the illustration below, the prices can be a whole lot higher, $600 to $1,000. These car owners have a proven ability to accept an awful lot of financial pain in order to drive to work. Forecasts of their abandoning their own vehicles for cheaper shared rides to my mind lacks similar levels of evidentiary support!

Of course, the implementation of a steep congestion pricing program could make the economic factors much more salient. But, but, but….

 

Already, in many of our largest cities, less than half of their residents commute to work alone in their private cars: 22% in NYC; 35% in San Francisco, 38.9% in Boston; 49.2% in Seattle and 49.5% in Chicago. The introduction of shared autonomous vehicles into their congested areas seems unlikely to capture customers from those driving their cars. More likely are those already using other transportation modes. Because of that their introduction might actually increase congestion. Some evidence for this contention is provided by a very solid study of the impacts of “TNCs”, a.k.a. Uber and Lyft, on congestion in NYC by Schaller Consulting. While the vast majority of the TNCs’ trips are neither shared nor automated, Schaller’s major findings are still salient because they strongly indicate the types of riders who are prone to be attracted by automated ridesharing services:

  • “TNCs accounted for the addition of 600 million miles of vehicular travel to the city’s roadway network over the past three years, after accounting for declines in yellow cab mileage and mileage in personal vehicles. The additional 600 million miles exceeds the total mileage driven by yellow cabs in Manhattan.”
  • “Growth in trips, passengers and mileage is seen throughout the city as TNCs attracted yellow cab riders, those who would otherwise use the bus, subway or their personal vehicle, and people who would not otherwise have made the trip.”
  • “TNC mileage nonetheless continues to grow rapidly because exclusive-ride trips still predominate, and because most TNC customers are coming from transit, walking and biking. Migration from public transit translates to increased mileage even if the trips are shared.”
  • “Trip growth in Manhattan has been concentrated during the morning and evening peak periods, when yellow cab shift changes produced a shortage of cab availability, and late evenings and weekends when passengers may prefer the comfort and convenience of TNCs over yellow cabs or transit services”.
  • “A continuation of TNC-led growth in travel is not a sustainable way to grow the city” (25).

Models, such as the one employed by Driverless Future, predict that the highest conversion from commuting by car to the use of shared automated vehicles will be in many dense urban residential areas where that often will mean relatively few people actually make the change because so few are now using their cars On the other hand, the introduction of many shared automated vehicles into such urban environments may worsen traffic congestion. It may well be, that congestion in Manhattan will only be reduced if shared automated vehicles are only used to transport out-of-town commuters.

Finally, the modeling of, and discussions about automated vehicles have almost exclusively focused on those carrying passengers, but auto makers, such as Ford and even Tesla, see huge market opportunities for those that will deliver freight to companies and purchases to consumers. A major feature of the current retail revolution is the quest to provide at least same day, if not same hour delivery of online purchases. The numbers of these vehicles could rival those used for conveying passengers.

One solution may be limiting freight deliveries to slow, after dark hours, though some businesses definitely will strongly resist. The real challenge is the final 100 yards problem of getting the package from the automated delivery vehicle into the hands of the customer, where after dark deliveries probably will pose a problem. Amazon currently is experimenting with using drones for package deliveries, which may pose still other problems. One way or another automated package delivery may pose major problems for downtowns and cities sooner than the automated passenger vehicles because it may be relatively easy for companies like Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, Best Buy, Macy’s or even Uber and Lyft to field fleets of them to meet already proven demand. Downtown and municipal leaders need to keep the regulation of automated freight and package deliveries high on their agendas – and finding the right ones probably will not be easy.

 The Sine Qua Non for Solving the Traffic Congestion Problem

It’s been said that our dense urban areas, such as downtowns, have a geometry problem: there is a finite amount of land and a growing number of automobiles that want to use it. Passenger vehicles can vary both in how many passengers they have the capacity to transport and how many they actually do carry. The photo montage below assembled by Jon Orcutt demonstrates that if each only carries one passenger, then the same number of vehicles, occupying the same amount of road space, regardless of whether they are private cars, Uber vehicles or autonomous cars. If all the seats in these vehicles were occupied, then about four times as many people could be transported without increasing the number of vehicles or the amounts of needed road and parking spaces to accommodate them. Those are the basic advantages for the community of ride-sharing/carpooling efforts.

Recent simulations, however, have indicated that for ride-sharing to have meaningful positive impacts, they will have to carry more than the four or five passengers that is the capacity of our average passenger cars. The ride-sharing vehicles will need to carry between 12 to 18 passengers. As one very astute observer has noted: “… governments will need to support the growth and development of fleets of 12- or 18-seat minibuses, to supplement (rather than replace) public transit systems, which they will also need to support” (26).

Riding in shared minibuses may not have as much allure for the riding public as the image of riding alone in a well-appointed automated vehicle. One may also wonder what the images of Uber and Lyft may be once they become fleets of minibuses or what the value of their shares of stock will be.

One also might wonder about the appeal of riding in close quarters with a group of strangers. To many, it may sound like being in the rush-hour in the NYC subway. A 2018 study in Greenwich, England found that survey respondents associated a good deal of potential social discomfort with ridesharing. They felt that a “key emotional benefit to travelling by car or taxi is the sense of control and personal space.” While public transport does not have such spaces, it does have informal ‘social rules’ that are applied. Respondents were “unsure on how such ‘unwritten rules’ would apply to ride-sharing.”  (27).

Uber and Lyft are the current major pretenders to the shared automated vehicle service throne, though they are basically still app-initiated ride- hailing operations. So far, the public’s disposition to using them is not favorable. A 2016 survey for Vox found that 53% of its respondents said it was unlikely they would ride in an Uber or Lyft vehicle in the next ten years and 61% reported they were unlikely to use an Uber-style self-driving car service if it becomes available in their area. That is a lot of people who do not want to use the largest wannabe automated rideshare services (28).

A rigorous study by researchers at UC-Davis of their current actual users in seven major metro areas — 4,000 users in the metro areas of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. — produced many interesting findings:

  • “In major cities, 21% of adults personally use ride-hailing services; an additional 9% use ride- hailing with friends….”
  • “Parking represents the top reason that urban ride-hailing users substitute a ride-hailing service in place of driving themselves (37%).
  • “Avoiding driving when drinking is another top reason that those who own vehicles opt to use ride-hailing versus drive themselves (33%).”
  •  “The majority of ride-hailing users (91%) have not made any changes with regards to whether or not they own a vehicle.”
  • “Directionally, based on mode substitution and ride-hailing frequency of use data, we conclude that ride-hailing is currently likely to contribute to growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the major cities represented in this study” (29). In other words, the ride-hailing services right now appear likely to make traffic in our cities more congested.

If people are afraid to ride in self-driving vehicles, then they surely will not be ride-sharing in them. A survey done for the AAA in 2017 found that: ‘Three-quarters of U.S. drivers would be afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle, while 19 percent would trust the vehicle and 4 percent are unsure’. Baby Boomers were more afraid (85 per cent) than Millennials (73 per cent), but the latter’s percentage is still very high (30). A year later AAA’s annual survey found that fear levels had dropped to 63 percent (31). However, that survey was completed before the well-publicized death caused by an Uber automated vehicle in AZ.

If ridesharing is indeed the key to reducing traffic congestion, then the strategic imperative for downtown and municipal leaders concerned about this problem must be to devise and implement policies and programs that will sufficiently incentivize the public’s use of fleets of 12- or 18-seat minibuses. Simply getting them out on the road will not be enough. They probably will need to be very appealing in terms of safety, convenience, comfort, and enjoyment as well as price.

The Probable Persistence of the Multi-Modal Regional Traveler

The essence of suburban communities is that their residents are relatively dispersed and, perhaps outside of their downtown or Main Street areas, walking to destinations is rather difficult, while they lack public transportation, so residents are very car-dependent. To a lesser, but still significant extent, the same can be said of some the suburban-like neighborhoods found in some of our larger cities. In fact, many of them actually started out as suburbs.

A study of Lyft and Uber in Austin TX found that when these two ride-hailing services were briefly kicked out of town, their riders returned to using their own cars. According to Robert Hampshire, lead author of the study: “The takeaway isn’t so much that Uber and Lyft reduce the need to own a car, but rather they limit how often people use a car they already own…. A large fraction of these people already had a car and just weren’t using it as much” (32).

These Uber/Lyft riders and car owners in Austin are “multi-modal” travelers within their region. My impression is that too many of the studies about autonomous car impacts neglect looking at the significant numbers of residents in neighborhoods and towns in metropolitan areas who have long been “multi-modal” travelers. I previously have written about the situation here in the outer boroughs of NYC:

“44 percent of the households in both the Bronx and Brooklyn have cars, while 64 percent do in Queens. Even in Manhattan, where garage spaces can cost ($1,000+ per month) and in several of its zip codes over 40 percent of the residents walk to work, 23 percent of the households own cars. The car-owning residents in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens tend to be tri-modal from a transportation perspective. They walk a lot to local destinations — perhaps longer and more frequently than anywhere else in the US — and use subways, buses, and even commuter rail to get to work. But they are extremely likely to use their cars to travel to any other types of destinations “ (33).

Residents in many of the suburbs in the NY-NJ- NYC- Newark MSA also are multi-modal travelers. Take Maplewood, NJ, for example, a town with roughly 24,4000 residents, among whom about 57% are in core creative class occupations. The town has a direct commuter rail connection to Manhattan and Newark. Among its residents who are in the labor force about 56% commute to work alone in their personal cars, but:

  • 30.9% commute to work via public transit (mostly by rail).
  • 8.0% worked at home.
  • 1.2% walked to work.

I would bet the family farm – if we had one – that almost all of these employed Maplewood residents who do not use a vehicle to commute to work also are in households that have one or more automobiles. If they didn’t, they would find it very difficult to get around town, much less do comparison shopping or visit major entertainment venues in other communities (see table below).

While commutation trips may offer the best opportunities for people to give up the use of one of their cars, strong arguments can be made that:

  • The degree to which that might occur will vary and certainly be less than 100% (see the discussion of the Driverless Future study above).
  • Residents in the suburbs and in neighborhoods outside of large city cores make many trips to non-work-related destinations. The use of vehicles shared with other people going to these non-work-related destinations may often not be comfortable or desirable while being the sole occupant of automated vehicle operated by a ride-hailing service might not be very affordable. Personal cars will remain for them the best transportation mode, even among those who stopped using them to commute to work.

Can you really imagine taking a shared vehicle with 10 to 18 passengers to transport you and your shopping bags home after a weekly shopping trip to a large supermarket or a shopping trip to COSTCO?  And what about traveling home after shopping trips to a large mall or big box store? Think also about going to a play or concert at a venue that is within a 30-minute drive in a shared automated vehicle that has numerous stops to pick up and discharge passengers? That scenario brings to mind the “airport shuttles” I’ve used to get to my hotels on a few business trips. They were cheaper than taxis, but much more time-consuming and aggravating because of their extra stops. They also were not all that comfortable, but then that holds for taxis, too.

Now some would say that the shopping bags could be delivered by another automated vehicle. Indeed, one of the quickest and largest adoptions of automated vehicles probably will be the fleets of them used to deliver packages. Their numbers initially may well grow faster than their use by passengers because many fewer decision-makers will be involved and they will have a clarity of purpose and benefits. Nevertheless, using AVs as an adjunct to shopping trips to brick and mortar stores to transport the purchases would mean two vehicles would be used on a person’s shopping trip instead of just one.

I live in Kew Gardens, NY, a community that the USPS, in its usual wisdom, divided across two zip code areas. The 11415 area contains only Kew Gardens residents, while the 11418 area has mostly non-Kew Gardens residents. The density of residential units in 11415 is 25.2 units/acre, in 11418 it’s 11.4 units/acre. In contrast, the posher and much more affluent 10021 zip code in Manhattan has a residential unit density of 114.7/acre. Kew Gardens was built as a suburb of Manhattan and even with its many apartment buildings it still retains many large single-family homes and many suburban characteristics. Those who know NYC well, know that many neighborhoods in the outer boroughs share these suburban characteristics. One of them being that many residents are multi-modal travelers within the region.

The above table lists three of destinations we go to with some regularity by car because reaching them via public transportation simply takes too long and involves transfers that are too often “iffy.” I used my Uber app on a Thursday mid-morning, to see what it would cost for them to then take us to these destinations. Uber’s shared ride services were not available for me, so I selected the Economy option. The prices for these trips, presented in the above table, are plainly unreasonable. $133.40 (plus tip?) to get and from Jones Beach?

I’ve read that prices for Uber rides can be expected to go down, especially in shared automated vehicles that probably have 8+ passengers. Do I really want to go on this automated mini-bus with my cooler, beach chairs, and umbrella? Or would I rather have my own vehicle? Moreover, how much cheaper would the ride be? Even 50% less would not be enticing. Furthermore, without a driver, how would sanitation and order be maintained within a shared vehicle?

Here in Kew Gardens and neighboring Forest Hills we can reach Manhattan via the Long Island Rail Road and several subway lines. Unless traffic congestion is severely reduced and automated shared vehicle ride costs are very affordable, I doubt that many residents will use the shared automated vehicles to commute to Manhattan. However, many residents live more than a half-mile from the subway and LIRR stations and use a bus or car service to get to and from them. Uber-type services may be able to capture some of these commuters. However, the fact that the city now charges just one fare to riders who use the bus and transfer to the subway probably severely limits that penetration. Before that program was instituted, fleets of private vans – shared but not automated vehicles — brought subway riders from southeastern and western Queens to Jamaica Center’s subway stations. The one-fare program significantly reduced van ridership. The poor frequency of many bus lines in outer borough neighborhoods, on the other hand, makes Uber and Lyft attractive. Interesting that the UC-Davis seven-city study discussed above found that the Uber-Lyft operations were complementary to rail transit, but hurt buses and taxis.

Back in the 1950s, our apartment complex had a car service that would take tenants to and from the subway. I can envision several condo buildings in our community that might in the future have their own automated “station car,” probably bought second hand, to perform this chore – if the city would give its permission.

Maplewood and many other towns and cities in the NYC Metro Area are in situations very similar to those described in Kew Gardens (see table above). They have commuter rail stations with parking lots filled to the gills with the cars of commuting train riders. Ridesharing automated vehicles may be a way to deflate the demand for these scarce station parking spaces and perhaps put the land to better uses. Summit, NJ, is already experimenting with using Uber to forestall the need to build additional parking capacity. Municipal leaders in such communities should definitely be exploring this possible use of shared automated vehicles to reduce station area parking.

In Chester, NJ, (population about 1,500) Alstede Farms runs a free shuttle between it and the NJT station in Gladstone, NJ, as well as to the Historic Main Street Chester area during the summer months. In the Denver Metro Area, the City of Englewood (population about 34,000) has a free trolley that transports riders to 19 stops connecting CityCenter Englewood, businesses in downtown Englewood, and the medical facilities in and near Craig Hospital and Swedish Medical Center. Note that the Englewood shuttle does not impact on how their riders come to Englewood, but helped them move around the tows more easily while there. Many other suburban towns may want to explore the potentials of similarly using shared automated vehicles as shuttles between major commercial nodes, though there are sure to be financial challenges and require strong corporate sponsorship.

Whether or not the shared automated vehicles can be used similarly as shuttles to make it easier for suburban residents and visitors to get to and from their downtowns is another issue.

Municipal leaders responsible for such suburban communities and suburban-like neighborhoods in our larger cities must realize that these places are not like Manhattan, Center City Philadelphia, downtown Chicago or downtown Boston where a lot of non-commuting destinations are within easy walking distances and car ownership is relatively low. Too many of their residents’ non-commuting trips are unlikely to be adequately served by shared automated vehicles for probably decades to come – if ever – and they will probably need to have a personal vehicle at their disposal. This strongly suggests that, for the foreseeable future, multi-unit residential buildings probably still will need parking capacity of about one space per unit.

As noted above, parking consumes a lot of land in suburban communities, especially when they have large workforces arriving weekdays and/or large shopping malls within their borders. The ability of shared automated vehicles to reduce the amount of suburban land used for parking is not clear. Yes, they probably can reduce the amount of land needed for rail station parking. While a lot of shopping mall land is changing use simply because some malls are closing, it is doubtful that high percentages of shoppers will rideshare to retail stores.

A number of suburban downtowns, e.g., Englewood, NJ, and Great Neck Plaza, NY, have found that parking structures are badly underutilized even before any significant appearance of Uber, Lyft or shared autonomous vehicles. Their potential patrons strongly prefer surface lots, and/or they deem the location of the garages to be too peripheral. Futureproofing these garages –- i.e., making it feasible to convert all or parts of them to other, non-auto related uses -– probably would have been a good idea, but not because of the impacts of shared automated vehicles.

if the suburban roads are not badly congested and the job site has ample parking, why would workers switch to shared automated vehicles on their commutes? The price differential with using personal cars would have to be awesome. Of course, a good number of suburban roads are badly congested – e.g., Rte 1 in NJ between Trenton and New Brunswick and Rte 9 through Boston’s western suburbs. However, overcoming the dispersion of rider residences may be a significant limiting factor. To get into your own car to travel to and park at a rideshare pick-up point may not seem either appealing or logical to many potential suburban users. The alternative of having the vehicle makes numerous pickups also does not seem likely to be attractive to riders. Ridesharing programs have been around for decades and the reasons they did not become far more popular probably still have significant applicability today when envisioning automated ridesharing systems.

But, We’re Driving Fewer Miles and Millennials Don’t Like Cars

One of the arguments frequently offered to support the contention that Americans will easily adapt to automated vehicles is that they are driving fewer miles. Although this was true during and briefly after the Great Recession, in recent years Americans are driving more than ever before – see the above chart on vehicle miles traveled (VMT). In 2016 Americans drove a record number of 3.22 trillion miles on the nation’s roads…, up 2.8 percent from 3.1 trillion miles in 2015” (34). It was the fifth straight year of increased vehicle miles driven.

Moreover, projections by the Federal Highway Administration suggest total VMT by all vehicle types will grow on average 1.07% annually through 2035. However, the growth will slow significantly between 2035-2045 to bring annual growth rate for the entire 30-year 2015-2045 forecast period to 0.78%. This would be quite a moderation in the annual VMT growth rate from the past 30 years when it grew at an average rate of 2% — but it still would be growth (35).

Closer to 2010, Millennials were seen as an urban loving, car and driving hating, experience wanting, under-employed, relatively poor and burdened with large student debts, non-nesting, non-home buying age cohort. Surveys also showed them to be the most likely to use app-summoned ride-hailing services such as Uber and the most willing to ride in driverless cars.

Today, our understanding of the Millennials is changing as their life situations have significantly altered. They are now the largest age cohort. With time and age, they have become better employed, are earning more money, and have started to nest. That means they are marrying, having children and buying homes and cars. The Millennials were deeply impacted by the Great Recession with it forcing them to defer nesting and buying homes and cars for many years.

Moreover, as a Zillow survey found: “Almost 50 percent of millennial homeowners live in the suburbs, while 33 percent live in an urban neighborhood and just 20 percent live in a rural area” (36). That means that about 70% of them will live in relatively low-density population areas where cars are an essential means of getting around for even everyday chores.  Even back in 2014, a survey found that 80% of Millennials surveyed said that they plan to purchase a vehicle in the next five years (37). According to a report in Forbes, Millennials are buying cars in significant numbers: “…(M)illennials, now the largest generation in the U.S., bought 4 million cars and trucks last year, second only to the baby boomers, according to J.D. Power’s Power Information Network” (38)

The rural Millennials are unlikely to have a strong propensity to use shared automated vehicles. The propensity of newly nested suburban Millennials to use such vehicles is unknown at this point in time. The key question is if their assumption of a more traditional lifestyle correlates with more conventional needs and attitudes relating to transportation modes. On one hand, my observations of Millennials now living in the suburbs suggests that they are strong advocates for well-activated downtowns and that suggests that they may make their own imprints on their suburban communities. Yet, they cannot avoid being effected by the significant dispersion most suburbs have,

Looking to the Future States of Traffic and Pedestrian Congestion

Shared automated vehicles provide no silver bullet solutions to these problems and if not properly implemented that can actually increase their severity.

The need to have a successful ridesharing system composed of minibuses capable of carrying 12 to 18 passengers means attracting sufficient users probably will be a huge challenge.

Too little attention is being paid now to the probable problems that will emerge during the long transition period when legacy, driven and automated passenger and freight/package carrying vehicles will share our roads.

A real challenge is that for the traffic congestion in our center cities to be reduced it is primarily the car use of their non-resident regular users that must be changed. That means huge jurisdictional and political problems.

There are real dangers that civic leaders will buy into the shared autonomous car dream too early and make premature moves on reducing parking space requirements or attempting major street and road redesigns. Small scale projects, such as using shared automated vehicles to take suburban commuters to their rail stations, will probably be most appropriate for several decades. Huge freeing of parking and road spaces for repurposing and improving a downtown’s walkability and public spaces are also unlikely for several decades, if ever.

Concern about the safety of a vehicle’s passengers, passengers in other vehicles and pedestrians should be a primary focus now and until automated systems are proven not just in test/experimental situations, but by years of actual full implementation. The Uber traffic accident in AZ showed a shameful lack of public sector concern. The appropriate regulation of the industry will be difficult to design and implement. The baby needs real care, though we don’t want to drown it in its bathwater.

ENDNOTES

1) See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/traffic

2) “CENTER CITY REPORTS: KEEP PHILADELPHIA MOVING” produced by the Center City District, the Central Philadelphia Development Corporation and the Central Philadelphia Transportation Management Association, pp1-2. https://centercityphila.org/research-reports/2018congestion

3) “Mayor’s Management Report,” City of New York, September 2016. Figures are for fiscal year 2013 and 2016. Cited in Bruce Shaller. ”UNSUSTAINABLE? The Growth of App-Based Ride Services and Traffic, Travel and the Future of New York City,” p.18.) http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/unsustainable.pdf

4) For auto speed see: Fix NYC Advisory Panel Report, January 2018, p.7. http://hntb.com/HNTB/media/HNTBMediaLibrary/Home/Fix-NYC-Panel-Report.pdf . For NYC pedestrian speed see:  Rachel Pincus. “Yes, Your Sidewalk Etiquette Could Be Better.” CITYLAB Aug 28, 2015.   https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/08/how-to-share-the-sidewalk/401660/

5) DRIVERLESS FUTURE: A POLICY ROADMAP FOR CITY LEADERS, by Arcadis, HR&A, and Sam Schwartz  http://driverlessfuture.webflow.io/

6) Michael Manville and Donald Shoup, People, Parking, and Cities, Access, Number 25, Fall 2004, p 7 http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/People,Parking,Cities.pdf

7) See endnote 5, p.12.

8) Winnie Hu, “New York’s Sidewalks Are So Packed, Pedestrians Are Taking to the Streets.” The New York Times. June 30, 2016. http://nyti.ms/29dy7m3

9) See endnote 2, p.4.

10)  Eric Jaffe. “Why People in Cities Walk Fast.” CITYLAB, Mar 21, 2012 https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/03/why-people-cities-walk-fast/1550/

11)  N. David Milder. ”34TH Street: A Fabled Shopping District and Window on the Future of Downtown Retailing.” Downtown Curmudgeon. April 15, 2017. https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2017/04/34th-street-a-fabled-shopping-district-and-window-on-the-future-of-downtown-retailing

12) Ileanna Pappas and Janet Campbell. “A New Breed of Pedestrian Advocate is Making City Streets Safer for Everyone.” Planetizen, Sept. 13, 2013. https://www.planetizen.com/node/65198

13) It can be downloaded at: https://nacto.org/publication/bau/blueprint-for-autonomous-urbanism/

14) Andrew J. Hawkins “Lyft thinks we can end traffic congestion and save $1 trillion by selling our second cars: Do we really need that second car?’ The Verge, Jan 10, 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/10/16870732/lyft-traffic-congestion-car-ownership-ces-2018

15) AP. “Studies are increasingly clear: Uber, Lyft congest cities.”    https://www.apnews.com/e47ebfaa1b184130984e2f3501bd125d

16) Ibid.

17) Ibid.

18) N. David Milder. “Let’s Get Real About: Self-Driving Cars. Social and Political Engineering Will Also Be Required.” Downtown Curmudgeon Blog. Sept 7, 2017.  https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2017/09/lets-get-real-about-the-supposedly-imminent-nirvana-of-self-driving-cars

19) McKinsey Auto 2030 Report Jan 2016, p 11. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/disruptive-trends-that-will-transform-the-auto-industry

20) Ibid, p.9.

21) Kate Gibson. “Forecast: Autonomous-Vehicle Sales to Top 33 Million in 2040. The Drive. 2/21/18.    http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/17298/forecast-autonomous-vehicle-sales-to-top-33-million-in-2040

22) See endnote 5. The italicized emphasis was added by NDM.

23) Endnote 19, p. 9

24) Ibid.

25) Schaller Consulting. UNSUSTAINABLE? The Growth of App-Based Ride Services and Traffic, Travel and the Future of New York City. February 27, 2017.  P.1.

26) David Roberts. Unless we share them, self-driving vehicles will just make traffic worse – Vox,  7/24/17,  p.9  https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/18/15604744/self-driving-cars-cities

27)  MERGE Greenwich:  Customer attitudes to Autonomous Vehicles and Ride-sharing. April 2018. https://mergegreenwich.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2018/04/MERGE-Greenwich-Consumer-attitudes-to-AV-ride-sharing-3.pdf

28)  Timothy B. Lee. “We polled Americans about self-driving cars. Here’s what they told us. Vox. Aug 29, 2016.   https://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12647854/uber-self-driving-poll

29) Regina R. Clewlow Gouri and Shankar Mishra.  “Disruptive Transportation: The Adoption, Utilization, and Impacts of Ride-Hailing in the United States.” Research Report – UCD-ITS-RR-17-07. October 2017. Institute of Transportation Studies ? University of California, Davis.  Pp. 1,2.

30) Erin Stepp. ‘Americans Feel Unsafe Sharing the Road with Fully Self-Driving Cars: AAA Fact Sheet: Vehicle technology Survey — Phase II. 2017’, Newsroom/AAA.com, available at http://newsroom.aaa.com/2017/03/americans- feel-unsafe-sharing-road-fully-self-driving-cars/

31) Erin Stepp. ‘More Americans Willing to Ride in Fully Self­Driving Cars” January 24, 2018. Newsroom/AAA.com.  https://newsroom.aaa.com/2018/01/americans-willing-ride-fully-self-driving-cars/

32) Danielle Muoio. “Uber and Lyft could destroy car ownership in major cities.” Business Insider. Sept 4, 2017. http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-and-lyft-limit-personal-car-use-study-2017-8

33) N. David Milder. “Let’s get real about self-driving cars: The transition will take a

significant amount of time.” Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal, February 15 2018. Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 223–232, p. 228

34) David Schaper , “Record Number Of Miles Driven In U.S. Last Year.” NPR. February 21, 2017    https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439/record-number-of-miles-driven-in-u-s-last-year

35) Office of Highway Policy Information. Federal Highway Administration.  “FHWA Forecasts of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT): Spring 2017.” May 4, 2017.  https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/tables/vmt/vmt_forecast_sum.pdf

36) See: http://zillow.mediaroom.com/2017-03-01-Millennials-Buying-in-the-Suburbs

37)  Deloitte. 2014 Global Automotive Consumer Study 6. http://tinyurl.com/y9ygdeew

38)  Joann Muller.  Mar 24, 2016 “Millennials Finally Show Up At Car Dealerships (And Automakers Breathe Easier).” FORBES.   http://tinyurl.com/yckxnwzq

 

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