best practices
DESIGNING FOR MOBILITY
When
the
first
auto-
mobiles appeared on city streets at the beginning of the twentieth century, they were something of a curiosity among the pedestrians, bicycles, horse-drawn carriages and electric trolleys. But within just a few decades, roadway design and urban form had been almost completely transformed 16
DESIGN QUARTERLY | Winter 2018
to accommodate the new “horseless carriages.” The car had radically changed the way we inhabit and design our cities and regions, for better and for worse — a reminder that an incremental evolution in mobility technology can have a profound impact on built form and how we live in cities for generations to come.
Today, we are on the threshold of a similar transformational change in the way we move and live in urban areas. The advent of self-driving vehicles and other disruptors are now underway, ushering in one of the biggest changes to cities that we will see in our lifetime. Given that the infrastructure projects we
Photo courtesy: Perkins+Will
Autonomous vehicles and the future of urban design By Aaron Knorr