Last Friday, I chose to rent a scooter home from work using the Atlanta BeltLine. I passed walkers but at only 8mph, I barely crawled by runners. As I left the BeltLine, my scooter beeped loudly followed by a burst of speed. Still not enough speed to keep up with the cars around me but twice the speed I was going before.
The decision to limit rental scooter speed came after several complaints from passersby on the BeltLine. Fleet companies worked with the City of Atlanta to restrict their maximum speed on the BeltLine. Rather than paying Atlanta police to enforce the speed limit, a cellular connection allowed fleet companies to create a geofence, a virtual perimeter, around the BeltLine. When a scooter’s sends a signal within the geofenced area, the scooter beeps and then slows itself to the restricted speed limit.
Complaints about scooter behavior can be made about any vehicle on Atlanta’s roads. So what is stoping the City of Atlanta from restricting the speed of any vehicle with a cellular signal?
In 2017, more cars were added to cellular networks than phones. 40% of our cars are connected today and this will rise to 73% by 2023. Geofencing to limit the speed of vehicles will not only save money for Atlanta's police department but it will also increase safety, reduce crashes, and save lives.
In the first 9 months of 2019, 44 people were killed by cars on Atlanta’s roads. Atlantan deaths by car can no longer be called accidents. We know speed caused these deaths, we know speed will cause more Atlantans to die, and we now have a way of stopping that from happening.
Driving is a privilege not a right. Individuals and their vehicles need to pass meet certain requirements to be operate within public spaces. Atlanta’s streets are public utilities owned by the City of Atlanta.
In the sky above Atlanta, planes use transponders to reduce collision risk by sharing the plane's location with everything around it. A plane does not need to have a transponder to fly but it is required for flight within specific air spaces where traffic Is more dense. Like a transponder, a cellular signal can easily share a car's type, location, speed, direction, origin and destination with the city, with the city’s infrastructure, and with other vehicles around them.
Today, our mayor can require all vehicles driving within city limits to share this information. She can go further and require that the manufacturers of these vehicles limit their vehicle’s speed to the speed limit of the roads they are on.
Manufacturers and mobility companies see this need for data sharing and vehicular control coming. They are all forming “mobility divisions” geared to start this conversation with cities.
Working with the great number of manufacturers can take time so the first step for the mayor could be to force the transportation networked companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft and to commercial vehicles like Amazon, UPS, and FedEx to share their data and obey the speed limit. Eventually this can be extended to personal cars through manufacturers and finally to personally owned bicycles and scooters. As the percentage of limited speed vehicular traffic grows, the average speed for all vehicles will decrease.
Atlanta isn’t the only city taking these steps to manage scooter use and growth. LADOT created the Mobility Data Specification (MDS) with the purpose of standardizing basic data exchange regarding vehicle starting point, end point, and trip route in 100 foot increments. 75+ cities and countless mobility providers have embraced and adopted MDS as a standard for data exchange facilitating information to turn into scale of service.
Our city governments are under pressure to keep up with the quickly changing mobility industry. Conflicts like those over dockless shared devices are just the beginning. Cities cannot efficiently plan and operate our infrastructure if it cannot effectively measure how people are using it to move around the city. MDS allows our cities to meet our transportation needs for today while planning to meet our needs for tomorrow.