The street is becoming software. This is the Council’s research program on who writes it.
For a century, the street has been governed by paint, signs, meters, and habit. The autonomous fleet reads none of them. It reads prices, permissions, and data specifications — and it will obey whichever rules it finds, the good ones and the foolish ones alike, enforced at scale. The street is becoming software, and somebody is going to write it.
The Programmable Street is the Council’s research program on that transition. Its questions are the six a city cannot avoid: who sets the price of the curb, where the fleets sleep, how every trip ends, who gets to ride, what they ride toward, and who owns the network. Its method is practitioner’s evidence — white papers that set the framework, and companion studies that test it against the record of real corridors, city by city, through university partnerships.
One argument runs through everything published under this name: the technology is not the decision. The rules are the decision — and the window for cities to write them is open now, and closing.
Robotaxis Are Already Reshaping Our Streets. The Question Is Who Steers the Policy. The program’s framework paper: six levers, in sequence, with the evidence for each.
Who pays for the curb after the meter. The public-finance mechanics behind Lever 1.
A lane for people who are actually going somewhere — commuters, delivery robots, and the last half-mile the mobility hub depends on.
How a city loses a good idea — the consent step the white paper says comes before Lever 1, and what happened to a corridor that skipped it.
The first city to zone for autonomous vehicles, and the first to walk it back — Ordinance 5075 as the record of one lever pulled alone.
The series extends through university partnerships, each study carrying the framework into one corridor’s actual record.
The deal isn’t about parking convenience. It’s about who controls the physical infrastructure layer of autonomous mobility — Lever 6, playing out in real time.
The problem isn’t a lack of roads. It’s a lack of pricing — terminal curb space given away for free, at the scale of the largest public works project in Los Angeles history.
A one-year audit of America’s first congestion pricing program — and the uncomfortable questions it raises for every city still pretending the problem will solve itself.
The evolve-ready asset, from the owner’s side of the table — a four-part Urban Land series on designing today’s buildings for the fleet that hasn’t arrived yet.
The findings of this program settle into the Council’s standard reference — fleet staging, passenger zones, and the evolve-ready asset, maintained as living guidance long after the white papers publish.