By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

Audi sponsors a biennial Urban Future Award competition among teams that propose and pursue new ideas about urban mobility. By “mobility,” they mean all the ways that we move around a city.

This year’s finalists are conducting projects in Berlin, Seoul, Mexico City, and Union Square. Longtime Union Square resident Philip Parsons leads the home team, and he invites you to participate in a kickoff event, this Saturday at the Armory.

Modes of mobility matter

Perhaps no force has shaped Somerville’s development more than transportation infrastructure innovations. The completion of the Middlesex Canal in 1803 enabled the first industries in what had been a farming community.

The mid-19th Century’s Grand Junction Railroad construction linked Somerville to three other rail lines, fostering local glass, manufacturing, meatpacking and other industries, and making the city a residential suburb populated by professionals who worked in Boston.

The advent of streetcars linking Somerville to Boston in the 1870s greatly accelerated both trends, making the city an industrial center and a magnet for immigrant labor.

The postwar highway system facilitated Somerville’s suburban diaspora in the 1950s and 60s, and I-93 tore the heart out of East Somerville in 1969.

Last week the first new MBTA station in twenty-seven years opened in Assembly Square. The Green Line extension promises to revitalize neighborhoods across the city.

Public and private stakeholders who seek the best outcomes for neighborhood revitalizations are well advised to anticipate how the three broad elements of today’s mobility revolution will transform tomorrow’s urban life as profoundly as railroads, streetcars, and highways transformed yesterday’s.

Vehicle innovations

As much as half the land in American cities is devoted to the automobile. That figure is less in Somerville, which was laid out before the mid-Century car-ownership explosion. But zoning ordinance requirements push new construction back toward the national norm.

Auto and technology companies are producing innovations that, when fully implemented, can dramatically change urban design. A piloted parking facility allows drivers to exit their cars at the entrance and let the facility itself do the parking. Its vertical and horizontal space requirements are cut in half, since drivers don’t need access to their cars.

With piloted cars and “Car-to-X” communications, digital systems can drive our cars, manage traffic, prevent collisions, adjust speeds to maximize traffic flow, minimize fuel consumption, and greatly reduce street and road space requirements. Google already has driverless cars cruising up and down U.S. 101.

Service innovations

Big-data management technologies and digital networking have made services like Zip Car, Uber, and trip information aggregators possible. Increasingly, city dwellers, particularly those of the millennial generation, don’t feel the need to own a car. They simply summon the kind of vehicle they need, when they need it.

Philip Parsons reminds me that for his and my generation, “independence” meant having a driver’s license. For millennials, it’s having a smart phone.

Car ownership is already declining within cities. Zip Car founder and Somerville resident Robin Chase says that vehicle trips also go down about 70% when city dwellers use Zip Car. Since they haven’t already incurred the sunk costs required to own, insure, and maintain a car, they are more selective as to when they choose to use one.

Aggregator services have moved beyond providing the kind of driving, walking, and public transit directions offered by Google Maps. RideScout is an app that will tell you the fastest and cheapest way to get from one place to another, comparing transit, bus, bike, car share, rideshare, parking, and walking directions. It will adjust its information in real time, based on congestion and whether a public conveyance is on time.

Pricing and regulation innovations

Anyone who drives is acquainted with what thirty years of disinvestment have done to our roads and bridges. Today state and local gas taxes and tolls produce revenue that’s only half the cost of maintaining them. The Highway Trust Fund is bankrupt, left on temporary life support by a Congress on vacation.

London, Copenhagen, Milan, Singapore and other cities are implementing new ways to finance transportation infrastructure. And fifteen American states are exploring replacement of the gas tax with a road tax.

It’s now possible to know when any car is on any road. In turn, that technology makes possible charging drivers for the infrastructure that they use and how much they use it. If people pay the real cost of driving a car into the city rather than expecting others to subsidize them through general taxes, their behavior could dramatically change.

A near-term implementation stumbling block is maintaining data privacy. But it can probably be overcome with anonymizing processes and protocols.

Heaven or hell?

Mr. Parsons and Ms. Chase suggest that how vehicle and service innovations are implemented will make cities more heavenly or more hellacious, depending in large measure on how well tax and regulatory innovations are mobilized.

Effective use of open-source comprehensive mobility data by governments and consumers, as well as entrepreneurs and corporations, could give city dwellers more open space, livelier economies, lower housing costs, cleaner air, less congestion, and more time for family, leisure, and civic engagement. In the absence of such a “Multi Modal Mobility Marketplace,” the opposite conditions could well obtain. Imagine driverless cars with no place to park endlessly cruising city streets while their owners work or play.

Bringing it all back home

In many ways Union Square represents what’s best about America. It’s vibrant, multicultural, economically diverse, innovative, entrepreneurial, community conscious, and it works. Revitalization plans now being formulated for the Square could enhance or erode those qualities.

One essential element in determining outcomes will be the extent to which planners anticipate the mobility revolution. Implementation time scales for urban plans and technology diffusion are often similar. So if we’re smart, we’ll factor in mobility innovation now, rather than after infrastructure is laid down and superstructures put up.

This is the focus of Saturday’s event at the Armory, 191 Highland Avenue. It’s called “After the Mobility Revolution: Rethinking the Future of our American City.” It’s an opportunity for a broad group or stakeholders to imagine how their aspirations for the Square can be realized in the context of rapid change in mobility innovation and practice. And it’s about developing commitments to getting it right.

If you would like to participate, show up at 10:00 AM. If you would like to eat a free lunch as well, register here.

The Immigration Again series will conclude in two weeks.