Autotech Council's Spotlight Series meetings are open to the public, follow the member meeting format of rapid-fire tech introductions, and are supported by Avanta Ventures. This month, up to 5 startups in the City Mobility Management segment will introduce their ideas and technologies in a virtual lounge setting followed by a roundtable discussion on the opportunities and challenges around curbs, parking, and congestion management.
Autotech Council's first meeting in our Spotlight Series, featured a discussion about City Mobility Management. These super-short agendas dip into a topic with a minimum of analysis, and a focus on pitches from startups or leaders in the sector.
Our City Mobility Management meeting dealt less with the individual vehicles that will bring efficiency to future cities, and more on the infrastructure - the opportunities and challenges around curbs, parking, congestion, micro-mobility, last mile logistics, multimodal transport, and street space management. Our meeting ended with informal networking between members, speakers, and attendees.
For this meeting, supported by our VC friends at Avanta Ventures, we kicked off by introducing our “Experts In Residence”, two key attendees who are knowledgeable about the subject, and would be responsible for asking questions of our presenters. David Li, Principal at Avanta Ventures, and Chrissy Mancini Nichols of Walker Consultants joined us in these key roles.
Ms. Nichols was a great addition, as she has a huge amount of career experience in curb management, and her title is National Director of Curb Management and New Mobility at Walker. While many mobility solutions can bypass the curb (subway, pedestrian), this particular piece of real estate is a critical public asset that is currently poorly optimized, and if managed well, could release a tremendous amount of new value. Ms. Nichols talked about how the curb could be allocated better by pricing it correctly, but also by dealing with it at a much more granular level, broken down into smaller segments, and further broken down by shifting roles during different times of day.
As always, we enjoyed great, brief presentations from the innovators themselves, including computer vision for parking management, open data on municipal space use, decarbonization & cleaner air, & better commercial/fleet/delivery business via better data.
If you enjoy a fast-moving agenda, learning a bit about a topic from some of the experts, and meeting a half-dozen related innovators, our Spotlight Series is for you. Members can find all of the presentations in our Members’ Library.