Envisioning Tomorrow with the Audi Urban Future Initiative

Somerville, MA, Dec. 17 – Somerville, as part of “Team Boston,” recently competed for, and lost, in a four-way bid for the Audio Urban Futures Award. But losing has still produced a win – the city is part of a pilot with the Audi Urban Futures Initiative, which aims to envision mobility and transportation challenges and solutions for the future.

“Team Mexico” won the 2014 award, but on December 2, the award’s curator, Christian Gärtner, was in Somerville to meet with Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone and with “Team Boston.”

Gärtner said he expected to do some testing of transportation innovations in “real time” in the city.

“The award is a more theoretical exercise to rethink how the relation of mobility and the city will change. The year after the award, we always look for first pilot to really investigate in real time what could that affect be,” he explained.

Curtatone said he is pleased about the collaboration.

“Somerville is the most densely populated city in New England,” he said. “There are more and more baby boomers, young ‘hipsters’ who want to live in an urban area that is connected by good public transit, bicycling and walking and connected to housing, jobs.”

The mayor said that official city planning documents seek to shift how people get around.

“Somerville has as one of its… community goals to seek, over the next 20 years, to shift all future trips by 50 percent more towards biking, walking, public transit. So we can create a more sustainable and more healthy community,” he said.

Team Boston consists of urban designers Philip Parsons, a Somerville resident, along with urban planner Janne Corneil and Federico Parolotto, an Italian mobility expert.

Parsons said that he and his colleagues think technologies like self-driving cars and piloted parking will be able to change the use of space in cities and also provide more public space for residents. Because of that, they want city planners take these innovations into consideration when designing today.

“We thought we could find a way to manage innovation so that the city could really benefit,” Parsons said. “Because, all these changes could just make the city worse.”

Parsons cited, as an example, self-parking cars.

“When cars park themselves in garage, you can save between 30 to 50 percent of the space you need in the garage,” he noted. “We don’t need to have parking underneath each building, or the parking doesn’t have to be associated with buildings... and that frees up a lot of land.”

According to Team Boston research, Somerville’s redevelopment requires 40 percent of the space be devoted to cars, including parking and roadways. They think that number can be lowered, and that other changes can also be made, if the future is taken into account.

“Right behind me is an intersection where you can wait three minutes to across the street,” Parsons noted, pointing to the Union Square intersection of Somerville Avenue and Prospect Street.

“Why you are waiting this 3 minutes?” he asked. “The new Green Line train will come and then it will leave again and you will miss the train because we manage the intersection here so badly.”

“We have given up our cities to cars, rather than people. We should give our cities back to people,” Parsons said. “We can do this by much efficient use of roadways. We can build more public space. When we do that, we can create more housing. When we do that, we can have more space for creating jobs. We can make our commutes much shorter.”

Team Boston also looked into changes already taking place, like the recent emergence of zip cars and ride-sharing that demonstrates a declining of car ownership among young people.

Even though the future is mostly a long way off, City Hall and Team Boston are both excited about the collaborations that will help assure Somerville is prepared.

“We will be putting together our proposals of looking at the future in Somerville. But not just look at Somerville,” Parson said. “We are using Somerville as an illustration, but potentially using this strategy nationally or globally.”

“We are proud to support the Boston Team. We are seeking to use Somerville as a test lab for many of these ideas and innovations,” said Curtatone. “Whether it’s new parking technology, whether it’s roadway congestion management or whether it’s smart vehicles, we are interested in all these things so that we will have smarter and more sustainable approach to manage the mobility of the future.”