Cityfi Launches New Practice Areas

Strategy/PlanMobilityEVsEventsMicromobility
Written By Cityfi

By Nicole Davessar

Snowfall in the Hollywood Hills is only the most recent and visible indication of the dramatic and unpredictable changes facing us today - and climate isn’t the only thing changing. Markets, technology, and policy priorities introduce yet more complexity. Cityfi works to simplify that complexity and craft actionable strategies to catalyze positive, sustainable change that lifts up people, the planet, and profits. We push past the hype to craft clear, actionable strategies to get to human-centric outcomes.

While we have deep expertise in a number of practice areas - mobility, digital transformation and connectivity, public affairs, civic innovation, resiliency and clean technologies - the Cityfi special sauce is working across these disciplines to develop holistic, integrated, and long-lasting solutions. We leverage our team of professionals who have implemented at high levels in government, foundations, and the private sector to develop out-of-the-box solutions for directional, and rapid, change in the way cities work. In the next week, be on the lookout for special features of each of our practice areas to discover how our expertise can help your team achieve its objectives.

Join Cityfi at South by Southwest

By Karina Ricks, Story Bellows, and Erin Clark

The last twelve months have been disruptive amongst the disruptors. Autonomous driving system developers have faced challenges–some have closed their doors while others have stalled–literally and figuratively. But the pursuit to design, demonstrate and deploy self-driving freight, delivery and passenger transportation has not stopped. Yet, most cities and local governments remain unprepared or ill-equipped to manage, engage with or respond to self-driving vehicles or other highly disruptive transportation technologies.

For the past four years, through an initiative of the Knight Foundation, Cityfi and our partners at Urbanism Next have convened and collaborated with four local governments from across the country–San Jose, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Miami-Dade County–as they experimented with and learned from controlled and public-led autonomous technology pilots and demonstrations. From sidewalk delivery devices to autonomous vehicles to advanced air mobility, we have learned the vital importance of proactive policy, planning, and community engagement.

Join us at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas as we discuss the critical and valuable role of cities in protecting and promoting the public good with the advance of autonomous mobility. Our panel, “What Robots Can Teach Us About Autonomous Vehicles,” will be moderated by former Argo AI executive–and self-described skeptic–Alex Roy. Panelists include Knight Foundation Program Officer Bernardo Rivera Muñozcano, Miami-Dade Chief Innovation Officer Carlos Cruz-Casas and our own Karina Ricks, who will talk about managing disruption, promoting public engagement in technology, and preparing for whatever comes next.

Setting Yourself Up for SS4A Success

By Karina Ricks

 
 

“Everybody in this country knows somebody who’s been lost to traffic crashes,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. That’s a sobering and all too true reality. With over 40,000 people killed in traffic crashes each year, there is an urgency to move, and move swiftly, to make systemic changes to deliver holistic safety.

Having recently announced the inaugural round of Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) funding–$800 million distributed to 510 communities–USDOT is getting ready to open up the next round.

Cityfi and partner Flow Labs are pleased to feature FHWA Associate Administrator for Safety Cheryl Walker and San Antonio Director of Transportation Tomika Monterville in a webinar on Wednesday, March 15 at 12 p.m. ET. Participants will learn more about the SS4A program and how to prepare for the next round of applications. They will hear about how data intelligence can inform a safe system approach and how to align organizations for swift project delivery and effective long term implementation.

Some of the topics that we will discuss are:

  • How to win an SS4A grant: What distinguishes a successful application from an unsuccessful one?

  • What funders are looking for

  • How agencies can use the funds they win

  • How to implement safety initiatives

  • How to use new technologies to achieve safety improvements

Strategic Planning with the Digital Infrastructure Convening Series

By Nicole Davessar, Camron Bridgford, and Story Bellows

Beginning in August 2022, the Open Mobility Foundation’s (OMF) Digital Infrastructure Convening Series has engaged key stakeholders of the organization to plan for its future. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation and Cityfi, the second convening kicked off with a virtual gathering of public and private members of the OMF. Participants joined three workshop sessions aimed at grounding visionary strategies from convening efforts so far into tangible action steps and associated resources and timelines. We examined organizational values, future programmatic offering concepts, and the OMF’s value proposition for the private sector. The culmination of this work will be a strategic plan and action agenda to help guide the organization in the next months and several years.

Cityfi at the Aspen Ideas: Climate 2023 Conference

By Karla Peralta

 
 

Last week, our team attended the Aspen Ideas: Climate 2023 Conference in Miami Beach, and we had the opportunity to discuss and learn from colleagues and global experts about the critical actions needed to address the realities of a changing climate.

Among our highlights was our participation in the round-table “Climate Smart Economic-Development: Opportunities and Challenges ” where we discussed with stakeholders from the public, private and non-profit sectors the importance and hurdles of incorporating a climate-smart economic development approach at the local, state and national levels, and the significance of measuring its impact in order to design better policies based on data. Moreover, the key role that communication plays in building trust in climate science, and therefore on the implementation of climate solutions, was a common thread throughout the conference. Bottom line, everyone wants a better future for their descendants, and it is our duty as citizens, advisers and public servants to better convey the impacts of climate change in our present in order to act for a better future.

We left the conference inspired and encouraged to keep working on building more resilient cities. If you want to know more about our work on Resiliency and Climate Mitigation Strategies, visit our website, or reach out to us!

Cityfi Heads to the Curb at Curbivore

By Sarah Saltz

This month, we gathered in Downtown Los Angeles to explore all things curb at Curbivore’s annual all-outdoor conference. We enjoyed seeing old friends and colleagues and learning about the newest technologies that will impact how we use the curb–from automated delivery to shared locker hubs.

While we were there, we also ran a workshop where we explored new ideas for curbside charging. We heard from Tiya Gordon, who is creating a design-focused curbside electric vehicle (EV) charger that has a differentiated business model focused on property owners; Sam Roxas, who is helping shape how government and private sector companies alike understand and use travel data to make more equitable, impactful decisions around mobility; and Ariana Vito, who is developing and managing the complexities of Santa Monica’s EV charging program. Through short presentations followed by group discussion, we discussed why this space is so challenging and what ideas might actually work to move the industry forward.

New Team Members

Carolina de Urquijo

Carolina, a resourceful strategic problem solver, is skilled in managing creative analytical processes and systems thinking. As an Associate at Cityfi, Carolina brings a service design perspective to the engagements with our partners and clients.

Before Cityfi, Carolina was part of the Strategic Planning team of the Brooklyn Public Library, one of the largest public library systems in the United States. Prior to her shift to strategic design, Carolina worked as a product and interior designer in Mexico City. She holds a BFA from Universidad Iberoamericana CDMX in Industrial Design and an MS from Parsons School of Design in Strategic Design and Management. She was born and raised in Cuernavaca, a charming city with great weather year-round in Mexico.

Monique Ho

Monique is a Senior Associate at Cityfi, based out of Los Angeles. Monique is deeply focused in helping to transform the ways in which communities are supported and served by transportation systems and public services. As a multi-disciplinary planner, she leverages her professional experience working for public agencies and private mobility providers to translate data-driven policies to local and regional contexts to help realize their social and fiscal benefits for communities, policymakers, and public and private stakeholders. She has led and supported the development of emerging mobility road maps, pilot programs, program evaluation frameworks, and equity assessments for clients across the country.

Prior to joining Cityfi, Monique served as a transportation planner at Nelson\Nygaard, guiding clients in navigating and strategically leveraging today's fast-changing transportation technology market in service of elevating community goals of access, safety, health, and sustainability. She delivered high-profile, cutting-edge projects and programs related to shared mobility planning, curb management, and mobility hub planning that involved bridging equity-focused GIS and qualitative analyses with ethnographic research and robust stakeholder engagement to craft actionable policy and program recommendations.

Before joining Nelson\Nygaard, Monique helped shape, implement, and evaluate some of the nation's earliest micromobility pilot programs for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. In these roles, she leaned on her operations background working with private mobility providers to develop innovative and scalable compliance programs and regulatory frameworks to support their growth and evolution.

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