Fall Roads and Future Roadmaps

Heading into October and, unbelievably, the last quarter of 2023, we leave behind another record-breaking month of heat, challenged to think critically and take action on the climate crisis for our planet and communities. Stepping up to the plate, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) unveiled its bold vision and comprehensive approach to meeting the city’s climate targets, the Climate Change Response Framework, developed by Cityfi in collaboration with Sam Schwartz Engineering. This agenda outlines strategies and actions committed to by SDOT and its partners for a more climate-resilient future. Cityfi looks forward to working with other cities to holistically align their climate goals with necessary policies, programs, and resources.

Also looking toward the horizon, the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) released its Strategic Roadmap and Action Agenda to propel the organization toward even greater impact on cities’ evolving digital infrastructure landscapes. This marks the culmination of the yearlong Digital Infrastructure Convening Series, funded by The Rockefeller Foundation and led by Cityfi, to explore the OMF’s role in shaping the future of urban mobility and digital infrastructure and to chart a forward-looking, strategic direction for the organization. Extending this work, the OMF, aided by Cityfi, is shepherding an eight-city collaborative of SMART Grant awardees looking to implement this open and scalable digital infrastructure.

Team Cityfi has also been reflecting on the life of Senator Dianne Feinstein and the indelible mark she left on American politics through her long and distinguished career in public service. Serving as a U.S. Senator from California for nearly three decades, her legacy is characterized by a commitment to progressive values and a tireless dedication to her constituents, including her trailblazing legacy for women and girls.

While our team will be back in the office on Tuesday, we are taking a pause to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day and celebrate the histories, contributions, and sovereignties of Tribal Nations. We recognize and are committed to uplifting the work and investment still needed to equitably serve Indigenous communities.

Building a Climate Change Response Framework with and for Seattle DOT

By Evan Costagliola, Story Bellows, and Erin Clark

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) announced this week its release of the Climate Change Response Framework (CCRF). The CCRF sets a direction to accelerate climate policy, programs, and initiatives that are already underway, while advancing new and innovative ways to further drive down transportation-related emissions. Cityfi led the development of the framework, in partnership with Sam Schwartz Engineering, and helped SDOT determine the necessary steps to rapidly advance climate action.

The CCRF is the culmination of thoughtful collaboration, introspective analysis, and aggressive direction on a best-in-class climate agenda for SDOT. SDOT is taking a leading role nationally to understand the programs, actions, and policies needed to meet its climate targets, but also the internal changes, policies, funding innovation, and partnerships required to unlock the CCRF. We are particularly impressed by SDOT’s intent to encode the CCRF direction into the Seattle Transportation Plan–a 20-year comprehensive plan and policy direction. We applaud SDOT's eagerness to walk the talk, and we are excited to see the next wave of cities to follow suit.

Whether you are a peer city, foundation, private-sector innovator, or potential partner in climate action, reach out to us if you want to work with SDOT on innovative climate partnerships or pilots.

A Strategic Roadmap for the OMF’s Future

By Nicole Davessar

In August 2022, the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) launched a strategic planning initiative in the form of the Digital Infrastructure Convening Series. With global adoption of the open-source Mobility Data Specification (MDS) soaring under the organization’s stewardship and the OMF community becoming a trusted space for cross-sector collaboration, the time was ripe to establish a strategic direction for the future of the organization. Supported with funding from The Rockefeller Foundation and led by Cityfi, the strategic planning process engaged numerous stakeholders of the OMF and a wide range of subject matter experts across multiple touchpoints, including two Digital Infrastructure Convenings. Cityfi is pleased to present the culmination of this yearlong effort, the OMF’s Strategic Roadmap and Action Agenda! Providing both direction and flexibility, this will guide the strategic path of the organization as well as its implementation of key objectives in the short and long terms.

Grounded in a renewed vision, mission, and values, the organization is now equipped with actionable goals and strategies for both deepening its current priorities in the mobility space and testing new programmatic ideas as capacity allows. A compendium of key offering profiles in the Strategic Roadmap and Action Agenda offers possible future drivers of organizational goals, member value, and sustainable revenue, which can be evaluated and operationalized with the accompanying pilot framework and prioritization screen. Drawing from discussions and analysis during the Convening Series, the Strategic Roadmap also examines how the OMF is poised to play an influential role in defining the future of digital infrastructure. Implementation of the Strategic Roadmap and Action Agenda is currently underway, and there is undoubtedly much more on the horizon that this organization will impact in service of the public good. Connect with the Cityfi team to further explore this work and discover how our strategic planning can bring value to your organization.

Learning Together: The SMART Curb Collaborative

By Karina Ricks

There is great value in learning together. Last year, Cityfi was pleased to work with the OMF to help nine cities pursue Phase I funding under USDOT’s inaugural SMART program–and we were even more pleased when all nine of them were selected. (We are working with another batch of cities for the current round and hope they will enjoy the same level of success!) Eight of those cities came together as a collaborative to jointly explore how to create digital infrastructure that can convey curb regulations and management policies in a real-time, open-source format. Digital infrastructure has the possibility to enable demand-responsive curb management, and communication to users, that is not currently possible with static physical signage.

The value of this collaborative cannot be overstated. The cities are learning from one another how to navigate federal grant management, how to measure and evaluate progress, and so much more. Gathering in Washington, D.C. last month, the cities (and county!) of the collaborative worked together to frame their problem statements and to define measures of success. They came together to work out joint procurement strategies that will help accelerate their implementation and shared strategies to increase staff capacity and project management.

Critically, the cities delved into what it really means to be deliberate about equity and inclusion in something as seemingly administrative as curb management and delivery zones. We talked not only about engaging community members to really understand their needs and concerns but also about potential unintended consequences: How might curb management break down or perpetuate systemic inequities? How might cities better understand the user experience, particularly of users who are often marginalized? And importantly, we discussed how the cities (and county!) awarded SMART grant funds–a program specifically intended to support innovation and catalyze new technology enterprises–could deliberately bring in, cultivate and support entrepreneurs of color so that the mobility technologists themselves might begin to look more representative of the communities that need mobility innovation the most and advance the objectives of Justice40.

Breaking Ground: Building an Action Plan for Decarbonization in Philadelphia

By Carolina de Urquijo and Sarah Saltz

The City of Philadelphia has made a commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. This endeavor is all the more challenging considering that transportation alone accounts for 22% of the city's carbon emissions. Decarbonizing any city is a multifaceted challenge with countless potential solutions, often requiring a blend of diverse tactics and strategies to address or at least begin breaking down the big wicked problem into more manageable technical problems. The problem is especially wicked in Philadelphia, a city in which 61% of households living below the poverty line are headed by women. Despite their low income status, over 60% of residents are forced to commute by car given the complexity of alternative modes and are threatened with further transportation insecurity if an inequitable system of zero-emission infrastructure is deployed.

Cityfi is facilitating a series of working sessions to uncover actionable, equitable, short-term initiatives and pave the path forward for the incoming City of Philadelphia Administration. Our approach is rooted in action, bringing together a diverse array of internal and external stakeholders. This diversity ensures that the resulting plan is outcomes-driven and guarantees the equitable deployment of electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure throughout the city.

Our journey began with the first two work sessions, where we guided participants through engaging activities designed to tap into a wealth of perspectives and ideas. There are six more sessions on the horizon, each offering an opportunity to delve deeper into mapping the first steps for decarbonizing Philadelphia. If you share our enthusiasm for this project and would like to explore it further or gain insights into our process, please don't hesitate to reach out.

How to MOVE America

By Ryan Parzick and Sahar Shirazi

Sahar and Ryan attended the MOVE America 2023 mobility tech and start-up conference last week in Austin, Texas. Inside the Austin Convention Center, there was a buzz emanating not only from the EV supply equipment on display, but also from the newest mobility-centric technologies and ideas showcased on both the floor and in the presentation rooms.

Ryan attended several presentations and roundtable discussions centered around EVs and the necessary infrastructure to support their increasing popularity. In a presentation titled Innovation in Personal Mobility - Right-Size the City Ride, the speaker, representing a car company from India, made a comment that resonated with Ryan: “There isn’t a culture war to electrify vehicles in other countries. The work is being done because it is the right way to evolve personal vehicles.” This perspective shines a spotlight on how other countries perceive the U.S.’s politicization of societal and environmental movements, and emphasizes the importance of our work at Cityfi in advancing technology and infrastructure that benefits the planet.

Sahar participated as a speaker in a chat titled Integrating Payments Within a Single MaaS App, focused on how to use standardized data to enable equitable deployment, management, and access to mobility options. Topics included using a common standard to ensure systems can speak to each other, allowing for single payment platforms across options; actualizing policies such as fare capping and Universal Basic Mobility (UBM) through open payment systems and standard data; and streamlining enrollment in programs for low-income and unbanked and underbanked communities. The political appetite for UBM versus Universal Basic Income (UBI) was also addressed, with UBM noted as a lifeline for many communities, and potentially a gateway to increased financial security, if not eventually UBI.

Equitable Electrification Strategies

By Andrew Wishnia

Recently, a couple of executives with whom we met happened to dismiss the notion of transportation equity, and therefore had no initial appetite for the phrase “equitable electrification,” or any variation of it.

But then, we talked about some facts, like the correlation of heavier vehicles and pedestrian safety, the disproportionate pollution burden on disadvantaged communities from our transportation system, and screening tools like EJ Screen, the USDOT Equitable Transportation Community Explorer, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, each of which provides more precision to analysis that supports infilling investment in overburdened and underserved communities consistent with the President’s Justice40 initiative. Disadvantaged communities tend to live closer to our transportation systems, and medium and heavy-duty vehicles are a significant pollution burden in those communities.

That is why I am so grateful to the Climate Group for inviting me to moderate an opening panel as part of Climate Week on cross-border freight electrification. With the likes of Tesla, Ikea, NADBank, CalEPA, WHO, NACFE, Prologis, CalStart, the City of Quebec, Microsoft, GageZero, and LACI, the executive session broached a problem statement centered on disadvantaged communities and in particular how emissions from this segment may be addressed. In addition, the session also dispelled a resonant myth that freight trucks in the near term carrying full payloads are not technologically advanced enough to become electrified. To this end, NACFE, or the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, reported on their ongoing collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and its “Run on Less” electric depot fleet study, that a freight efficiency demonstration running for three weeks starting September 11 offered data that a Tesla Class 8 truck for PepsiCo carrying beverages achieved ranges of up to 450 miles a day with a payload of 81,000 pounds. Long-distance electric depot charging is possible, and my sense is the lessons learned from “Run on Less” will be vital to advance the national conversation on what challenges remain, and how soon we can solve them, if we work together to do so.

As for Tesla, Hyundai this week became the latest auto manufacturer to announce a switch to Tesla’s North America Charging System, or NACS. Through the Society of Automotive Engineers and Underwriters Laboratory certification, Tesla endeavors for NACS to become a charging connector system standard, with the likes of Ford, General Motors, Rivian, Volvo, Mercedes, Nissan, and Honda having already announced via press release that they will switch to that standard. As to the list of original equipment manufacturers (OEM) that have actually adopted NACS hardware, that list is more contained: Tesla. A reminder that the NEVI standards final rule (applicable to all Title 23 funds) already allows NACS connectors or adapters as long as the connectors or adapters can still charge a different standard called CCS, or combined charging system, at each stall. Therefore, while these announcements continue to be significant in providing market signalization of future convenience to EV customers, no changes will be imminent for consumers quite yet, but how and when to prepare for those changes will be an adjudication that the government will make in the weeks and months to come.

Finally, one way in which local, state, and the federal government, in addition to the private sector, have already acted upon, is with regard to permitting EV charging infrastructure. Whether it’s the Department of Transportation’s recent official adoption of an existing categorical exclusion from the Department of Energy to reaffirm the reduced burden needed to satisfy National Environmental Policy (NEPA) requirements; charging deployment guidelines from the Sustainable Energy Action Committee, Interstate Renewable Energy Council, and RMI to create more predictable processes for local decision makers; or a permitting exemption under Section 106 from historic preservation review, government at all levels are attempting to simplify processes without undermining environmental protections in order to build good things well.

In form and substance, equitable electrification made progress this week, including becoming more convenient, accessible, and reliable now and in years to come, and with the right policy nudge, will make significantly more progress with our support and partnership.

Designing Better Cities: The UX Approach

By Carolina de Urquijo

Imagine a unique partnership between a local library and a college, where free user experience (UX) classes were offered to eager learners. As a judge in such an innovative program, I had the privilege of witnessing this firsthand. The Business and Career Center of Brooklyn Public Library and Kingsborough Community College partnered through the BKLYN Incubator to create Flex Into UX!, a public program with free lessons to reduce the economic barriers to pursuing education that requires industry-relevant knowledge and skills. This collaboration culminated in a thrilling Design-A-Thon where participating teams were tasked with crafting digital solutions that addressed one of Brooklyn's four crowdsourced challenges. This initiative not only highlights the power of design in driving transformative change within cities but also emphasizes the importance of incorporating users' perspectives when tackling the multifaceted issues cities face today.

Libraries, often at the heart of communities, are hubs for civic innovation. They are where ideas are nurtured, skills are honed, and communities unite to address their unique challenges. At Cityfi, we recognize that human-centered design plays a pivotal role in reshaping urban landscapes, and we champion the inclusion of diverse voices to bring about meaningful change. Our expertise lies in our ability to facilitate and incorporate these voices, ultimately driving real change in urban environments. We are dedicated to harnessing the power of design to create more inclusive, responsive, and sustainable cities, with users at the forefront of this exciting transformation. Take a look at our work or reach out to explore with us how human-centered design can drive transformational change in your city.