The “Virtual Transportation” Lesson from Smart Columbus

Introduction

For some time, transportation planners have studied how Internet-based “telework” affected travel behavior in physical space and used telework as a travel demand management tool. The recent pandemic prompted a reassessment. Rather than view broadband-enabled activities through the lens of travel in physical space, some have started to view broadband as a mode of transportation in its own right. Broadband conveys people to virtual destinations where they work, study, consume services, and recreate, just as highways and aviation transport people to physical places where they do similar things. This shift in perspective has significant implications for transportation planning and investment.

Smart Columbus was the highest profile publicly-funded US transportation technology initiative of the past decade. It looks like after years of pursuing technology solutions to facilitate mobility in physical space, Smart Columbus is pivoting to focus on facilitating mobility in virtual space. This is a smart move.

Smart Columbus Pivot to Broadband/Digital Equity

Smart Columbus was built on a $40 million USDOT grant and a $10 million grant from the Paul Allen Foundation. USDOT selected Columbus in 2016 after a highly competitive, multi-round Smart City Challenge .

During its ambitious five-year grant-funded program, Team Columbus delivered a variety of projects. (Final Report ). These included two automated shuttle deployments, seven mobility hubs, a Mobility-as-a-Service app, and a connected vehicle environment—eight distinct projects in all that ticked most of the then-extant smart city transportation technology boxes. Smart Columbus continues today as a mobility innovation center.

A recent article by Mark Ferenchik in the Columbus Dispatch entitled “Smart Columbus spent $50 million on transportation. What worked and what's next? ” indicates that the program had decidedly mixed results. What is especially noteworthy is Smart Columbus’ pivot to focus on broadband access and digital equity:

Smart Columbus hasn't gone away. After spending $50 million in grant money on everything from vehicle charging stations to a transit app to driverless vehicles, the group is now focusing on digital equity.

"That's more of a focus than ever," said Jordan Davis, Smart Columbus executive director .

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed what is lacking in terms of broadband inequities and basic services for low-income residents, Davis said.

Becoming a more prosperous city means bringing along everyone else, she said.

"We need to build a new ecosystem here," Davis said, including getting more people connected for online learning and telehealth, and to social services so care can be delivered faster and monitored.

Davis’ comments and Smart Columbus’ pivot to broadband and digital equity were echoed and endorsed by several others quoted in the article.

If anything, they understate the importance of digital inclusion. The pandemic forced us to conduct many life activities virtually, not just medicine and education. The virtual experience was not great much of the time, but there are many working on technologies to improve the quality of virtual interactions and expand the range of activities that can be performed virtually. Just as it took several decades to transition from the Wright Flyer to a robust commercial aviation system, it will take time to transition from the two-dimensional Zoom/Teams experience during the pandemic to more robust forms of virtual interaction.

There are many economic and equity benefits from giving people the option of performing their life responsibilities and activities virtually. The current transportation system is stacked against those who are unable to access auto transport for physical or financial reasons. With automobility we often trade higher speeds for lower-density land use that puts our destinations farther away, resulting in a limited net benefit.

Robust virtual connections transcend physical distance. They can give people access to a wider range of jobs than they can access through physical travel, expanding their opportunities and deepening the labor pool for employers. Such broadband connections give people a wider range of options in every life activity that is virtualized in some satisfactory way.

Virtual Transportation Planning

These developments prompted my former employer to establish a Broadband as Transportation Program (BTP), which is now headed by Connor Sadro, MPA . The BTP is driven by the hypothesis that successful regions will have robust physical and virtual transportation systems for connecting people to their life activities. Thus, transportation planning needs to adapt to better understand and support broadband initiatives, just as in the past planning adapted to the emergence of new modes of transportation such as aviation.

Current broadband efforts are focused on overcoming the barriers that keep people from broadband access. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD ) program that is part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA ) is designed to address the physical barriers to Internet access by improving and extending the broadband “plumbing” in the US. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP ), also part of the IIJA, addresses the financial barrier to broadband that many households face by providing them a monthly subsidy for Internet access service.

These are important initiatives and warrant active monitoring and engagement by transportation planners. Planners can be local and regional advocates for effective use of BEAD dollars, which are administered at the state level. They can support efforts to improve ACP participation levels, such as by providing data about ACP participation rates by community and supporting ACP outreach efforts.

If virtual transportation planning stops there, however, it will have succumbed to the same weakness that has undermined physical transportation planning, namely, focusing too narrowly on the hard infrastructure. For decades, transportation planning (and investment) have focused on ways to maximize vehicle throughput on highways but not on whether those investments and associated low-density land uses were actually connecting people to more destinations within a given time frame. Rather than orient planning towards cost-effectively connecting people to more destinations, we’ve prioritized building transportation infrastructure that facilitates low-density development that puts destinations farther apart and puts us in autos and congestion for long periods as we try to overcome these distances to reach our destinations. Thus, VMT per capita has roughly doubled in the past half century and traffic congestion has increased despite major additions to our roadway inventory.

To avoid making a similiar mistake in the broadband transportation mode, transportation planners should focus on both the quantity of destinations people can reach virtually and the quality of the virtual connections they can access. Just like the utility of a fast highway is less if it connects people to relatively few destinations, the value of broadband access is less if people are only able to access relatively few jobs, educational opportunities, telemedicine care, and the like virtually.

Transportation planners thus need to develop metrics to assess the quality of broadband access in their regions. Such metrics might include things such as the percentage of:

• Jobs in the region that can be performed fully or partially remotely;
• Educational opportunities such as degree programs that can be accessed and completed virtually;
• Health care providers offering telemedicine options and the share of medical consultations conducted virtually;
• Religious institutions offering virtual worship options;
• Government services that can be accessed virtually;
• Public participation opportunities in government decision making that can be done virtually; and
• People employed, being educated, receiving healthcare, and worshipping virtually rather than in-person in the region.

We need other measures covering the quality of the virtualized activity, such as (i) the time it takes to access a service virtually compared to in-person access, (ii) comparing user satisfaction level from accessing an activity virtually compared to the satisfaction level of those performing the same activity in person, and (iii) the performance quality of an activity done virtually versus the quality from in-person performance. Regions that offer high levels of quality virtualized activities should outpace regions that fail to give their resident high-quality virtual transportation options.

In short, by focusing on the outcomes of broadband access rather than just the mechanics of broadband access itself, transportation planners can identify projects and policies that will improve the ability of people to access life activities through high-quality virtual means. This effort should be paired with an effort to better employ accessibility measures in physical transportation planning.

Challenges Facing Virtual Transportation Planning

There are a number of challenges facing virtual transportation planning:

A key challenge is skepticism whether broadband access should be treated as a transportation mode. There are several responses. First, history suggests that new transportation modes regularly emerge and are assimilated into transportation planning. For example, the aviation mode emerged over a century ago literally in thin air. Second, virtual travel via broadband connects people to the same activities to which they also may travel physically. Anything that connects people to life activities physically or virtually should count as a transportation mode. Third, others have recognized the link between virtual and physical transportation. Germany, for example, has established a Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport .

Another challenge is regulatory. US transportation law is focused on physical transportation—highways, bridges, rail, aviation, pipelines—and broadband efforts are largely housed in the FCC silo, not the USDOT silo. Local USDOT offices can be highly resistant to approving funding for innovative transportation technologies. Getting their buy-in for virtual transportation initiatives will be extra challenging. Nevertheless, there are creative funding strategies for BTP projects by packaging those projects as helping to advance intelligent transportation systems and as serving as demand management tools to help relieve congestion and improve air quality. USDOT leadership needs to press the boundaries of existing regulatory authority to use broadband access as a tool to accomplish USDOT’s goals of equitable, affordable, and sustainable transportation connecting people to their life activities.

A third challenge is efficient resource allocation. How do we assess the value of a dollar spent facilitating broadband access and improving the quantity and quality of virtual connection to life activities? How do we compare those values against the value of a dollar spent on physical transportation?

Our methods for estimating the value of physical transportation investments are weak or not used at all in lieu of line-on-the-map or political squeaky wheel approaches. Ideally, USDOT takes the lead in developing and requiring DOTs and MPOs to use meaningful and comprehensive ROI analysis tools to proposed transportation investments that will allow a cost-effective allocation of resources between physical and virtual transportation mode investments. See, e.g., Comment on Docket No, DOT-OST-2023-0087: Regarding US DOT Equity Action Plan submitted by Michael Replogle on behalf of multiple organizations.

A final challenge is the assumption that virtual transportation will sap demand for physical transportation, devaluing physical transportation systems and the work of those who plan, build, and maintain such systems. In response, it is important to stress that virtual transportation will complement physical transportation, similar to how aviation complements highway travel. Virtual transportation will simply connect more people to more activities and, in the end, these virtual connections may well generate demand for more not less physical travel. The observed continued demand for physical travel by remote workers is one indication that virtual transportation will supplement and not sap physical transportation.?

These are challenges that planners and regions should overcome. Just as metro regions that have integrated multiple modes of physical transportation—e.g., rail, highways, ports, aviation, transit—tend to be more successful than those regions that must rely on a limited number of transportation modes, metros that offer their people rich and useful virtual connections to their life activities—plus good physical transportation to those activities—will do better than metros that offer only physical transportation and poor quality virtual access to life activities.

Conclusion

After years of advancing physical transportation technologies with decidedly mixed results, Columbus has gotten smart by pivoting to broadband and digital equity efforts. In many places, connecting people to more of their life activities virtually will offer comparable or better investment returns than simply adding more physical roadway capacity. Transportation planners should conceptualize broadband/internet access as a transportation mode. They should make maximizing broadband access and the ability of people to engage in their life activities virtually a high priority for transportation planning and investment purposes.