10 ways to boost effectiveness of public-private partnerships

When it comes to making urban mobility initiatives successful, public-private partnerships have proved to be a crucial ingredient.

Participants say suspending some traditional boundaries between government and business entities is important to avoid initial stumbles.

"These partnerships are inevitable and absolutely indispensable to the future of transportation," said Rick Walawender, leader of the autonomous vehicle practice at Miller Canfield law firm in Detroit.

Among the public-private partnerships in the sector are:

Project Kinetic in Detroit, in which the city and companies including General Motors and Bedrock Detroit are launching mobility pilots for transportation in underserved communities.

An autonomous shuttle system being tested in Hamburg, Germany, by governments and a unit of auto supplier Siemens.

The Smart Mobility Ecosystem in Dublin, Ohio, which joins auto supplier Denso with Ohio officials to gather traffic data, test mobility concepts and implement AV-infrastructure pilots.

In each of these partnerships, and in dozens of others forming around the world, participants are grappling with important and complex new technologies, resource constraints, an array of expectations by shareholders and by public constituencies, the limitations of existing municipal services and infrastructures, differing benchmarks for success — and prospects for failure.

Here are 10 strategies they're using to make the partnerships effective.

Detroit found that using information and relationships from its failed effort in 2018 to land Amazon's "second headquarters" helped give Project Kinetic a fast start.

"We took advantage of that momentum to say, 'Let's take another opportunity to work together,' said Mike Quinn, a Boston Consulting Group principal working on Project Kinetic.

But what really accelerated the effort was the partners' determination to launch a 12-week "innovation sprint" in early 2018 to brainstorm more than 120 ideas, which the consortium ultimately narrowed to the five it initiated for Project Kinetic (See Page 14).

A partnership to turn 537 miles of roads in Colorado into a connected highway includes Ford, Qualcomm, Panasonic, the federal government, Denver International Airport and a bevy of consultants as well as the state government.

"All this involvement is a little vision of what needs to happen with every project, all over the world's transportation grid," Walawender said.

For Project Kinetic, a Michigan business-development entity called PlanetM became a crucial accelerant.

"A big part of their role is to create new partnerships and opportunities and an environment favorable to them," said Kevin Bopp, vice president of parking and mobility for Bedrock Detroit, a major parking vendor and commercial real estate player in the city. "They don't act like government."

From the start of Project Kinetic, "we had to check our egos at the door and participate in full transparency and collaboration, given the schedule of where to be and when to be there," Bopp said. "That's part of what made it so successful: telling everyone what their role needed to be."

Companies and governments need to find reasons to participate. Cities "often fear a bit that they'll be left out and behind when only private companies are involved," said Jan Voss, Siemens project manager in Hamburg.

And municipalities' motives vary. For Detroit, Project Kinetic could help low-income residents get to and from jobs. For Dublin, partnering with Denso gives the city "an excellent opportunity to participate in advanced technology and testing that otherwise wouldn't have been possible," said Megan O'Callaghan, public works director. "We want to be on the leading cusp of innovation."

Bedrock's Bopp noted, "I don't want my competitors to have my data. And the public has concerns: How do you protect their personal data? And entities want to monetize the data. You have to work through those things."

Ohio State University is working with Denso and Dublin, and so are two public high schools — one a science, technology, engineering and math magnet — in the research zone.

"The public responds well to involving schools, and we've worked with them in the past," said D.J. Smith, director of strategy at Denso. High schoolers have become involved in pitching the pilot in various forums, and the project is using an OSU graduate student.

"Patience is a virtue in this space," Smith said. "Cities may not move at the speed that some companies like." Mark de la Vergne, Detroit's chief of mobility innovation, conceded that "doing things new is hard, especially in government."

For instance, Project Kinetic wanted Detroit to buy some shuttle buses for one program, but de la Vergne said "legal and liability" concerns meant the procurement still wasn't complete as of August, 20 months after the idea was hatched.

"Unbanked" residents in urban areas are a big problem for mobility companies because they don't have credit cards that these systems depend on for payment.

"We could have spent six more months trying to figure that out before launching" a car-sharing test in a low-income area, said Alex Keros, smart cities chief at GM's Urban Mobility/Maven. "But we said, 'Let's get this going and see how we can react in the middle of it.' "

Denso and Dublin are planning "some events that will give residents hands-on experience," Smith said, to "educate and communicate the goals of the project. Being transparent about what you're trying to accomplish may make the public more receptive."

Thomas Walbrun, head of self-driving vehicles for Siemens Mobility, said partnerships "must have a communications and marketing campaign to make the entire thing more convenient and understandable, and to smoothly prepare passengers and customers for the transformation. If you lose people from the very beginning, you have a problem."