It turns out that, although urban mobility in California has a long way to go, it is actually a good time to be hopeful. Cities like Los Angeles are receiving more funding than ever before thanks to voters approving sales tax increases, transit systems are benefitting from increasingly progressive housing policies, and California’s ambitious climate agenda makes transportation reforms a necessary part of the conversation. The question is – how do we stay on this track and make sure that new transit systems are resilient to the uncertainty of the future?

A Tool for Uncertainty

As the saying goes, “We can’t predict the future, but we can prepare for it”. This precisely is the goal of scenario planning, a strategic planning method that seeks to deal with the uncertainty of the future by exploring multiple possibilities of what might happen and then creating strategies to deal with those possibilities. This is important for policymaking because, by identifying several plausible futures and exploring the impacts they could have, policymakers can anticipate changes and develop robust policies in response to them.

Urban Mobility in 2040

My group in the course, “Strategic Foresight in Urban Mobility”, headed by Professor Andreas Goldthau and the Mobility Institute Berlin, set out to apply scenario planning to understand what mobility will look like in Los Angeles by 2040 and how this should inform LA’s transit agency’s policy strategies today in their goal to increase ridership.  Note: our group focused on LA, but I think much of the discussion can be applied to the rest of California.

In the end, we constructed four different futures, each having different impacts on public transit. For example, the future that we found to be most favorable for public transit included: people-centered urban design, denser housing, a high variety of private mobility companies (e.g., ride-hailing apps, e-scooters, vanpooling, etc.), high government investment at the state level, and a willingness among consumers to reduce their car usage. A public transit-friendly utopia! From there we identified what strategies LA - and the rest of California - can adopt that would not only nudge the state towards the most favorable outcome but, more importantly, safeguard against the downfalls of the other futures.

Policy Strategies for a Resilient Future

The three main policies that public transit agencies in California should thus adopt to increase ridership and strengthen their resilience are the following:

1.    Support transit-oriented development at the state and local level: With the housing shortage in California pushing more and more people to the outskirts of suburbs, leading to longer commutes, transit agencies need to consider how they can shape housing policy in their favor. At the local level, this means working with neighborhood groups who oppose denser housing or bike/bus lanes, and at the state level this means supporting bills that jointly address transportation and housing, such as a requirement to build affordable housing alongside new transit infrastructure.

2.    Cooperate with the private market to offer a multimodal travel experience: Private mobility options fill an important gap that transit agencies cannot address, so working together with them can offer riders a more seamless travel experience. We see actions such as unified payment and scheduling technologies, as well as their inclusion in future infrastructure projects, as key.

3.    Offer incentives to reduce car usage: One factor that strongly differentiated the transit-friendly future was that people were willing to change their behavior vis-à-vis driving. At the moment, the default action is to drive a car even to go a mile to the grocery store, indicating that without some behavior change, no transit system can be successful. Some ways that transit agencies can encourage behavior like walking or bike-sharing are: offering weekend discounts, opening more “slow streets”, providing group and student passes, and perhaps even investing in some good old marketing.

The Urgency of Future-Proofing

The reality is that without shifting its focus to public transit, California has no chance of meeting its ambitious climate agenda. The stakes of future-proofing its public transit systems thus are high – without taking into account the uncertainty of the future and planning for it, the state cannot adequately implement policies that are in it for the long game. It’s time to dethrone cars and instead give public transit the attention it deserves.

~ The views represented in this blog post do not necessarily represent those of the Brandt School. ~