This month, the Association for Commuter Transportation descended upon North Carolina’s Queen City for its annual TDM Forum. Over two hundred participants met up in Charlotte to share their experiences promoting transit, biking, and carpooling over driving alone. As a sponsor, Jawnt sent several members of our team to listen, learn, and eat barbecue. Here are a few of our takeaways.

What is TDM?

“Transportation Demand Management” is a verbose way of saying “encourage traveling by anything other than driving alone”. ACT has “Commuter” right there in the name, but ACT easily unites professionals from different sectors, industries, and geographies behind this seemingly simple cause. If your motives are big picture, like making streets safer, increasing access, or reducing pollution, you have an interest in managing transportation demand. If your motives are more narrow, such as wanting to provide less parking (like many employers), you have an interest in managing your employees’ demand for transportation. Jawnt is a proud member of ACT.

Y'all, biking can be so fun

If you’ve ever traveled to a conference, you’ve probably experienced that strange effect of spending all your time in a frigid hotel, and eventually losing track of where in the world you actually are. But this was a TDM conference! We needed to get out there and experience some active transportation. About 25 other participants agreed with us, and joined us for a bike ride to kick off the trip.

Dave Campbell, the City of Charlotte’s Bicycle Program Manager, led us on a beautiful 11+ mile ride around the city. The City has been hard at work building serious bike infrastructure, and we spent the majority of the ride on neighborhood trails without a car in sight. We all rode electric bikes from Joy Ride, Charlotte’s bikeshare system, so if there were hills none of us noticed. Cruising safely together during an unseasonably warm sunset was simply perfect. It was an excellent reminder that travel by biking and transit can more than an alternative to driving, that always has to be defined in opposition or competition. With the right investments, infrastructure, and community, active transportation will sell itself.

Obsessing over problems, not solutions

The formal, indoor event kicked off with an opening address from Mitchell Silver, former planning director for the City of Raleigh, North Carolina. There were too many good parts of his address to list, but some favorites:

• As a progressive in a red state, Mitchell perfectly captured how many of the elements of active transportation (density, walkability, transit) are actually well aligned with traditional conservative principles (low taxes, choice, independence).
• “Saying ‘no’ to something means saying means saying ‘yes’ to something else.” If you say no to density and alternative transit, you’re saying yes to higher costs of services and more traffic.
• Whether you’re talking about transportation, technology, planning, or product; the outcomes are better when we obsess over the problem, not the solution. For example, because AI chatbots recently became easier to use, any city planner seeking to score a quick win might propose adding a chat bot to help residents navigate city services. But even with a new technology available, our problems are still the same: the cost and availability of housing, potholes, after school programs. Don’t let new solutions distract us from the problems we already understand.

Micromobility grows up

Anyone that’s been in a city in the past ten years may have noticed an uptick in sleek bikes zooming around, or a pile of scooters on a sidewalk. In its early days, bike/scooter shares proliferated with profligate venture capital, cheap vehicles, and a no holds barred race for market share. As interest rates ticked up, and complaints piled up, cities, advocates, and the more civic-minded operators have wisened up and lifted expectations for safety, ease of use, and equity.

I had the pleasure of moderating an all-star panel to explore the future of micromobility. Alison Cohen, founder of Bicycle Transit Systems, Diana Ward, Executive Director of Charlotte Bcycle, and Carol Antunez, Senior Manager of Government Relations for Lime) spoke about their experiences managing these operations and what they’d advise cities starting out on their own new programs.

Essentially, micromobility has matured. The operators willing to accept the risk of very short term contracts no longer operate. We’ve seen that equity can’t happen by accident: it requires either a public subsidy or sponsorship. And the operators that remain survived because they are better partners, and the cities that are able to collaborate, coordinate, and invest in a long-term project see better results.