The Goal of Seamless Urban Mobility
We won't Uber our way out of traffic congestion. What's needed is a system to integrate all transportation options.
Bob Graves. M.S., associate director of the Governing Institute, is the designated content curator for the FutureStructure initiative and also a co-founder of e.Republic, the parent organization of Governing. As associate director, Graves writes, presents, moderates and provides advice on smart and sustainable approaches to water, waste, energy, transportation and building systems drawing from his more than 25 years of experience working with private sector companies, nonprofits and state and local governments.
In the 1980s as a co-founder of e.Republic, Graves was instrumental in establishing the Government Technology event and publishing divisions of the company. These divisions expanded rapidly from a single Government Technology Conference in Sacramento, California (1987) to scores of regional and local conferences and print and online publications providing news, in-depth articles, and research to hundreds of governments agencies and IT companies across the country. He also served as its Chief Administrative Officer and president, ensuring that the company's organization kept pace with its growth into new sectors of research and online publishing.
In 2006 capitalizing on his academic training in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Graves co-founded and served as president and editor-at-large of Green Technology, a California based nonprofit publishing organization providing strategy and leadership for clean and sustainable communities. Bob helped produce three international "Governors' Global Climate Summits" with a team from then California Governor Schwarzenegger's office. He has also headed the production of numerous conferences on green technology, moderated roundtables on high performance buildings and guided training activities for over 5,000 government building officials and design/construction professionals on CALGreen - California's new green building code.
We won't Uber our way out of traffic congestion. What's needed is a system to integrate all transportation options.
California is setting the pace in the U.S., but one small country is far ahead of the rest of the world. Many factors are at work.
Hardly any of it is being recycled now. But with California leading the way, there are signs of real progress.
As they increasingly understand that they're in the mobility business, some agencies are making the most of innovative approaches.
Aiming to build an efficient, sustainable and multi-modal transportation system, Tempe, Ariz., is taking a particularly comprehensive approach.
Predictions for their widespread adoption and the impacts they will have vary wildly. It will be up to government to sort out the issues.
To preserve their communities' economic and social wellbeing, leaders will need to manage an endless cycle of technological disruption.
Its ports and freight system account for a significant portion of its air pollution. Will aggressive new state and regional efforts once again serve as a model for the nation?
With a bottom-up approach, Detroit is making surprising progress toward turning around its neighborhoods.
In planning for an autonomous-vehicle future, governments need to pay attention to the broader picture.
New green certification programs give communities the flexibility to set their own goals and targets.
Interest is growing in approaches that look for redundancies to overcome infrastructure's risks and vulnerabilities.
Sales are lagging in the proving ground of California. But maybe it's too early to be keeping score.
Networked alternatives for getting around are about to redefine our cities as much as the horseless carriage did a century ago.
Planning that doesn't account for technology's exponential impact will be off the mark.
Technology is boosting the idea of a zero-waste framework in which everything is used, reused and recovered.
Legislation it passed a decade ago has produced significant gains without wrecking the state's economy. A new law holds promise for accelerating those gains.
Fights over payments and charges for rooftop solar are getting a lot of attention, but the underlying issue is deeper and broader.
We ought to be doing what many other countries are doing: making far more use of public-private partnerships for infrastructure.
Once derided as the world's least environmentally sustainable city, Phoenix is in the midst of a remarkable transformation.
With the technology maturing and public support growing, it's looking more and more realistic.
Technology has a role in moving toward a goal of zero waste, but so does the "soft" infrastructure of citizen activism and effective policies.
Ride-sharing and car-sharing are complicating life for transportation planners, not to mention automakers.
Policy and technology are driving innovation in the energy sector, and much of it is coming from the utilities themselves.
By linking environmental sustainability and economic growth, Charlotte is showing the way.
In guiding the transformation, governments need to be in the driver's seat.
As a new report makes clear, few of our urban areas are adapting to the changes that are revolutionizing the way we get around.
Regulating them will be a challenge for governments at all levels, but we're going to have to figure out how to do it.
As new ways of buying and selling energy emerge, the system of monopoly control is being challenged.
With everything increasingly connected, there is a growing awareness of new vulnerabilities.
Lancaster's effort to build a seamless, integrated energy infrastructure points the way to long-term robustness and sustainability.
To attract young professionals, cities increasingly are going to have to think multi-modal.
Los Angeles is leading the way with a dashboard that shows the public how the city is doing.
A project that was designed to study space colonization has lessons for communities on this planet.
A new report covering the national capital area could serve as a template for other regions to engage the public and deal with funding gaps.
Public attitudes are shifting in favor of government action. What's playing out in Salt Lake City is worth watching.
Nowhere is that more true than within regions. It calls for an integrated approach to planning and funding.
Despite regional and local differences, officials from around the country see eye to eye on some important concerns.
Los Angeles' and California's efforts to cope with an ongoing drought highlight the need for a systems approach.
Government has a big role to play as we work to develop an intelligent, multimodal transportation system.
Looking to maximize its water resources, California is finding that better management and efficiency are key.
It will be technology that will enable "Cities 3.0" -- the transformation of metropolitan centers into hubs of innovation and entrepreneurship.
California is well along in an effort to transition to a environmentally friendly economy. Will the rest of America follow?
The food we don't eat gives us gas. But beyond renewable energy generation, organic waste holds the potential of big benefits for our communities.
A resource recovery rate of 100 percent may be a worthwhile goal, but there are plenty of challenges facing governments that want to achieve it.
Thanks to technology, the systems that run our cities are becoming more and more interconnected. But how we use those systems is always going to be guided by human intelligence.
Voices of the GOVERNING Institute
In the midst of the worst drought on record, some California communities are showing that there's plenty that can be done.
Voices of the GOVERNING Institute
A new initiative aims to provide a forum for public officials to talk about the future of their communities in an age of upheaval.
Voices of the GOVERNING Institute
Unmanned aircraft are coming, and they will raise a lot of issues for local governments to sort out.
Voices of the GOVERNING Institute
The city is well along in an effort to leave gasoline and diesel fuel behind and power its vehicles with cheaper, cleaner natural gas. The payoffs go beyond cost savings.
Voices of the GOVERNING Institute
Sprawl has obliterated much of our neighborhoods' and communities' social infrastructure. The challenge is finding a new economic model that could turn that around.
Our one-way, hub-and-spoke model for delivering electricity dates back to the days of Thomas Edison. But disruptive technologies are enabling a new model that will transform utilities as we know them.
By reusing, recycling or composting everything possible, the Canadian city of Edmonton is on its way to reaching the seemingly impossible goal of diverting 90 percent of trash from landfills.
When the state stopped picking up litter on the highways, Bakersfield, Calif., found a sustainable way to get the job done -- and help the homeless in the bargain.
The ways we produce and distribute energy are going to change, with end users empowered much as in the world of computing. What we can't predict is when that will happen.
A new rating system aims to build sustainability considerations into the entire infrastructure process, from planning to implementation.
An engineering feat more than a century ago created a host of problems for communities that depend on Lake Michigan for their water. But those problems also present opportunities.
Excellent tools are available to monitor energy use across a community. Isn't it time for cities to be benchmarked against each other?
Governments are beginning to look at energy and other life-cycle costs in their purchasing. It's about more than saving money.
The way we light our streets can do more than save money for the taxpayers. It can contribute significantly to reducing air pollution.
Get a hands-on perspective on what it takes to start a citywide street lighting upgrade project. Governing Senior Fellow, Bob Graves interview with David Gassaway, management analyst, City of Rancho Cordova, California.