But the heavy lifting of truly improving transportation and mobility across a region means committing to investing and deploying comprehensive public transit, sidewalks and even land-use reform, policymakers and other leaders said.
“The future is the past,” Javier A. Betancourt, executive director of the Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust in Miami-Dade County, said. “I still think we need to get the things we’ve been talking about for 30 years done.”
“And yes, incorporate technology and innovations where you can to make those things happen, and make them better,” he said Thursday at CoMotion Miami. “But honestly, I just want to fulfill the promises that we made to the voters 24 years ago when they passed the half-penny sales tax.”
Voters approved a “half-penny” tax in 2002 to fund the People’s Transportation Plan and pay for public transit projects, namely, the Strategic Miami Area Rapid Transit (SMART) plan.
Betancourt also advocated for rethinking policies around land use, transportation and housing, and how they align with each other. Or, maybe more to the point, having them align.
“We continue to work in silos,” he said, underscoring how too often, these sectors do not overlap. “I think we just need to be better at working across industries, across sectors, and across our geography.”
Similarly, pedestrian planning should not be imagined separate from transit planning — or, for that matter, from micromobility planning, Andy Boenau, director of transportation for Richmond, Va., said.
“Walking is the primary mode of transportation. So I want it to be convenient and easy to walk,” Boenau said at CoMotion, expanding on the city’s development of a Pedestrian Safety Master Plan this year. Transit, he said, will play a huge role in it.
“It’s not ‘other.’ It’s not an ‘alternate mode.’ It’s just part of a walking trip,” he said. “That’s the type of psychological innovation I want to have. While there is a lot of product innovation and service innovation going on, the Richmond Department of Transportation is going to be very focused on psychological innovation.”
That concept of psychological innovation is rearranging the physical landscape in Richmond. In the last 10 years, the city has gone from virtually no bicycle infrastructure to more than 100 miles of new bike lanes. There has also been “zero expansion for car infrastructure,” Boenau said.
“We’re just rearranging street space, as best we can, because … we want our city to continue growing,” he said. “We’re not going to be demolishing buildings to expand roads like most of the counties and the states have done for the last 75 years across the country.”
Transit systems, including Miami’s, Betancourt said, must “go back to the basics, and get the tried-and-true right.”
“We can apply technology and innovative solutions to those things. But I don’t think that some of these innovative concepts are the solution for moving mass amounts of people. We need mass transit,” he said, indicating the city needs more comprehensive pedestrian micromobility infrastructure too.
“And yes, you can apply innovative solutions to make those things happen, or make them more efficient. Or make them safer,” he said. “But some of these technologies I’m learning about are not replacements for these things.”
