Ford working with Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles
15 November 2016
Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Aspen Institute recently launched the Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles, a new program for leading global mayors who will work together to prepare their cities for the emergence of autonomous vehicles.
The intention of the initiative is to galvanize experts and data to accelerate cities’ planning efforts, and to produce a set of principles and tools that participating cities, as well as cities around the world, can use to chart their own paths forward. The inaugural cities in the initiative include Austin, Texas; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Los Angeles, California; Paris, France; and Nashville, Tennessee. Five additional cities will be announced later this year. At AutoMobility LA, Ford CEO Mark Fields announced that his company is working with Bloomberg in this initiative.
I’m proud to announce that Ford is beginning to collaborate with Mike Bloomberg in his philanthropic work with a coalition of mayors worldwide. We’re discussing how we can work together to help create the City of Tomorrow, incubating ideas around mobility and to accelerate solutions in cities. Working with Bloomberg, we will collect the best ideas from around the world and put them into action.
—Mark Fields
At the CityLab 2016 conference in October, philanthropist and three-term New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called the advent of autonomous cars “one of the most exciting developments ever to happen to cities.”
If mayors collaborate with one another, and with partners in the private sector, they can improve people’s lives in ways we can only imagine today.
—Mike Bloomberg
The Bloomberg Aspen Initiative will accelerate preparedness in 10 leading global cities for the era of autonomous vehicles. Over the course of the year, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Aspen Institute will convene leading global experts, marshal cutting edge data and insights, and facilitate an innovation process that helps city leaders consider the many ways this technology could solve chronic urban challenges, and improve the lives of citizens. By helping participant cities plan for their own future, the initiative will produce and release a set of principles, resources and tools that many other cities can use in their own efforts.
This new initiative responds to discussions with mayors from around the world who are already beginning to feel the impacts of this technology. As regular conveners of mayors, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Aspen Institute are positioned to connect mayors with experts, data and other resources to plan for this shift.
The Initiative will create a cross sector public dialogue around autonomous vehicles, leveraging the Aspen Institute’s history of convening leading thinkers and policy makers to address the most complex issues of our time, and Bloomberg Philanthropies’ experience working in more than 400 cities around the globe to solve major problems and improve city life. The initiative will tap experts across a wide range of practice areas and concerns, from technologists to urban planners to experts in the areas of inequality and mobility.
Greater residential segregation is strongly associated with lower levels of upward economic mobility. Driverless cars could potentially reduce segregation and improve upward mobility by connecting many low-income families to areas of opportunity. But this technology also has the potential to increase segregation by allowing higher income families to live in more distant suburbs. Ensuring that a shift to driverless cars increases opportunity and improves the lives of urban residents across the world will require carefully designed social and economic policies. The Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Autonomous Vehicles takes a valuable step in this direction by bringing mayors and city leaders together to discuss these issues.
—Raj Chetty, Professor of Economics, Stanford University
Ford has decided to take an expansive view of mobility. Let me give you some examples of what that looks like. Imagine if we focused on optimizing roads for the total number of people on them instead of the total number of vehicles. How would that affect the transportation solutions we develop? Or what if we could transform a commute from something painful into an opportunity to take a class, watch a movie or play a game?
Or think about this: What would a city look like if more people were using shared services versus personally-owned vehicles? At Ford, we’ve seen how exciting and liberating it is to imagine the future of mobility in this way. And from our vantage point, cities carry the biggest rewards and risks as we create this City of Tomorrow.
—Mark Fields at AutoMobility LA
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