Dodgers fans like to see stuff fly. Cody Bellinger home run shots, Yasiel Puig diving catches, another pennant catching the wind. Well, Rally Grannys and Pappys, get a load of this new airborne thing. On Thursday, a company called Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies (ARTT) officially approached the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority with an unsolicited proposal to build a $125 million gondola that would ferry 5,000 fans an hour to and from Dodger Stadium.
The aerial tram is a solution to LA’s greatest problem: traffic. During the Dodgers’ 81 annual regular season home games and other stadium events, like Beyoncé concerts, the surrounding Echo Park neighborhood is choked with cars. Just one Metro Express bus, running along Sunset Boulevard, allows the blue-clad hordes to travel car-free. Solution: By 2022, ARTT wants to run gondola service high above the 110 freeway, connecting the stadium to other transit options at the city’s Union Station, less than a mile away. The best part is that ARTT wants to build the whole thing for free.
So why submit this proposal to LA Metro, a lumbering transit agency better known for bus-tinkering and track-laying than for taking flight? Because ARRT wants to take advantage of the agency’s boring, painstaking technical knowledge. Armed with engineers, Metro knows a thing or two about public outreach and getting projects past environmental review. Plus, it has a handy process for such unconventional projects, one that’s unique among government agencies: an unsolicited proposal policy.
The unsolicited proposal process is run out of Metro’s extraordinarily-named Office of Extraordinary Innovation, a 10-person team within a 10,000-person agency that seeks to bring a bit of fast-moving techno-pizzazz to public transit. Usually, an agency decides what it wants to do—”we could use a train tunnel here”—puts out a request for contractor bids, picks the one that makes most sense, and gets what it wants in a few years (or decades). The OEI turns this on its head. We can’t want what we don’t know about, LA Metro says. Whoever you are, show us what we’re missing.
“We need to be open to innovative ideas and we need to show that we’ll consider any good idea that comes to us,” says Joshua Schank, LA Metro’s chief innovation officer, who oversees OEI.
Other American agencies accept unsolicited proposals, but most focus on capital infrastructure projects, like tunnel-building or lane-widening. LA Metro will take anything. And it has a formalized process to do so—one that the federal Department of Transportation highlights as a model for others seeking to engage the private sector. Since the policy’s launch in February 2016, LA Metro has received 101 unsolicited proposals and asked 24 of those proposees for more specific plans. It has given 11 the green light so far, including experimental forays into on-demand ride sharing, tolling, and real-time bus-location software.
Government bidding and procurement processes may be the stuff of lullabies to the average transit rider, but this tweak in the process comes at a critical time for the nation’s transportation agencies. In less than a decade, swarms of private companies—ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft, microtransit enthusiasts like Chariot and Via, bike-share companies like Motivate and Ofo, and electric-vehicle sharers like Bird, Jump, and Spin—have metamorphosed the way urban dwellers think about city streets.
“The transit agencies around the country have been very slow to consider the implications of this big revolution that’s going on,” says Genevieve Giuliano, who studies transportation policy at the University of Southern California. “They’re just beginning to wake up and notice that ride-sharing services may be cutting into their business, or maybe can be used to help their business.”
Yes, transit agencies like LA Metro insist that they still have a role to play in an Uber world. That they can get large masses of people here to there in the way that a passenger car or van can’t, and do it equitably and cost effectively, so everyone can get a ticket to ride. They want to move quickly. They wouldn’t mind looking a little cooler. So tapping the young, hip life force of the private sector, through an unsolicited proposal process or public-private partnerships, probably doesn’t hurt.
There are, of course, downsides to this give-us-stuff-to-throw-at-the-wall approach. For one, most of the country’s transit agencies struggle to keep functional buses running. They don’t have much in the way of free time or spare cash for ambitious innovation.
Private companies, too, face risks when taking their ideas public. It’s possible that Metro could evaluate a proposal, find is appealing, put it up for a public bidding process—and award the contract to another company. In 2016, Metro received a proposal from a drone operator for UAV-powered infrastructure inspections. Great idea!, the transit folks said. They ended up running the entire project internally. (The company understood, Schank says. By going through the process, “they benefited tremendously by understanding what to offer other transit agencies.”)
Unsolicited proposals can also burn valuable agency time. For every reasonable gondola pitch, there’s two—or 20—nonsensical ones. “Everybody and their brother is going to submit proposals, and many of them are going to be crazy,” Giuliano says. “So there’s going to be a lot of staff time devoted to weaving through this stuff to find promising things to do.”
Here, LA Metro has an advantage over other agencies. Thanks to a series of sales tax hikes passed by voters (the latest in 2016), LA has a bit of extra money and manpower to throw around. So sure, a gondola really could make sense and might get built. Or something even wilder—coming in from left field like a Joc Pederson throw—could take off.
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