Florida’s Babcock Ranch and the Future of Autonomous Communities

An 18,000-acre development in southwest Florida seeks to be the model for short-range autonomous mobility and sustainable power for it all.

January 1, 2019

Stephen Baker

An SAE-sponsored demo day at the new Babcock Ranch development allowed participants to sample an automated Range Rover along a pre-described route. (Image: SAE)

A population boom over the last century has transformed the landscape of southwestern Florida, adapting it to the automobile. Thousands of square miles of palm groves, wetlands and scrub have given way to highways, driveways and parking lots. Isolated from this tangle of pavement between Port Charlotte and Ft. Myers is Babcock Ranch, which has remained stubbornly green.

On an 18,000-acre tract within this green patch, a developer named Syd Kitson is pioneering a new and sustainable model for development in Florida and stepping past the century-old order of the automobile age. His mobility strategy features a fleet of autonomous cars shuttling residents on demand. While widespread use of such electric pods is still years away, Kitson predicts that within a decade at Babcock Ranch, “people will go from two cars to one. And soon after that, to none.”

On weekends, Babcock Ranch deploys small driverless shuttles operated by the French company Transdev. (Image: SAE)

For nearly a century, the 91,000 acres controlled by the Babcock family remained isolated from the feverish development to its north and south. The family kept most of the land wild, while using a section of it for cattle farming and limestone mining. Kitson, a former lineman for the Green Bay Packers, had his eyes on the land for years. And in 2006, following complex negotiations, he acquired it. As part of the deal, his company, Kitson & Partners, sold four-fifths of the acreage to the state of Florida for an ecological preserve. On the remaining land — still an area larger than the island of Manhattan — he would build his town of the future.

Kitson’s business plan projects that thousands of families will be ready to spend between $200,000 and $1 million for homes in a sustainable community powered by sunlight. In a partnership with Florida Light and Electric, the development has deployed 343,000 solar panels on 440 acres. Those panels should generate 75 megawatts of electricity — enough, Kitson figures, to supply the bustling town he envisions. His goal is a population eventually reaching 50,000.

Autonomy coming ‘just in time’

One key for Kitson’s development model, including autonomous vehicles, is a self-selected population of early adopters. After all, they put their money on a community where each house has a gigabyte data connection, a charging station for plug-in electric vehicles and a bold blueprint for sustainability.

Jeannine and Larry Reed, a retired couple from Maryland, bought a home last September in Babcock Ranch. They first read about it in an online article that contrasted Babcock with nearby Cape Coral, a sprawling city developed for cars. They preferred the Babcock approach, with its walkable design and plans for autonomous transit. Like many baby boomers, they’ve had their struggles coaxing aging parents away from the wheel. And they’ll be happy to skip that painful drama in their own lives. Autonomous vehicles, says Larry, “are coming just in time for us.”

But the autonomous future will only happen, Kitson said, if the economics work for consumers. He’s confident they will. Studies show that it costs about $8,000 a year to own, fuel and service a car. For all this expense, Kitson says, most cars sit idle for more than 90% of their existence, either in garages, driveways, or in parking lots (parking adds more cost). And most of the time, they carry only one person.

In the Babcock scheme, residents will have a fleet of autonomous cars on call. They’ll be able to summon one, much like an Uber, with a smartphone app. Kitson points to a 2012 study by Columbia University’s Earth Institute, which analyzed the economics of an autonomous fleet at Babcock. It projects utilization of fleet vehicles rising by a factor of more than eight over privately-owned cars, with the cost plummeting, from $1.60 per mile to less than 40 cents. “The savings will be significant,” he says.

He sees families jettisoning one vehicle soon after the service launches. While they may hold onto a single vehicle for a while, mostly for trips outside the community, other possibilities, such as rentals or shared cars, could lead many of them entirely away from ownership. When that happens, he expects many of the garages in the community to be converted into additional rooms. Effectively, he says, residents will end up with more money and larger living spaces.

Babcock Ranch is preparing its residents and prospective buyers for this autonomous future by deploying small driverless shuttles in the community. Operated by the French company Transdev, the shuttles putter back and forth to pick up passengers, but only on weekends. Each one has a human escort, who can take control with a push of a button on a joystick. These escorts also serve as autonomy tour guides, giving riders details on how the vehicles navigate the roads and what they’ll be doing in the future.

“Eventually, they’ll be doing food-service delivery,” predicts Jason Perez, who has clocked more than 4,000 miles in Transdev shuttles.

Others have other ideas

SAE Demo Day participants at Babcock Ranch sampled AVs, but each vehicle had a human safety escort on board to take control if needed. (Image: SAE)

Despite these efforts, the transition to autonomy won’t always be smooth. Last autumn, for example, the Transdev shuttles ran into regulatory trouble about providing students short rides to school. Although the shuttles were traveling only 8 mph and had emergency drivers onboard, the National Highway Safety Administration shut down the service, calling it “unauthorized” and “irresponsible.” Kitson says that the problem boiled down to faulty communication and the failure to spell out that it was a shuttle, not a school bus. “Lesson learned,” he says.

Kitson’s hope is that the Babcock Ranch model, with its solar power and shared electric vehicles, will prove so compelling — economically, environmentally and for quality of life — that it will spread outside Babcock’s acreage to the rest of world. That transition, though, is sure to come more slowly, and with more complications. But it’s far easier to test the future in a controlled laboratory designed for autonomy such as Babcock Ranch — and especially with a population of early adopters.