Written by Jason Shueh & Colin Wood

The day for driverless cars on city streets is fast approaching, but for former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this future can’t come soon enough.

On Monday, the billionaire and civic philanthropist announced a partnership between his philanthropy organization and the Aspen Institute to bring together a team of 10 mayors from around the world who will collaborate on how to prepare cities for autonomous cars.

“No tech has shaped cities more than cars in the last 100 years. It’s time for cities to turn the focus to self-driving vehicles…” Bloomberg commented on Twitter Monday. “Autonomous vehicles have the potential to complement the work cities are doing – so long as people, not cars, drive the agenda.”

The program, called the “The Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles,” intends to propel this agenda forward by gathering mayors and industry experts around planning efforts, while working to create accessible resources, a set of guiding principles and best practices that all cities can look towards when making transportation policies. Only five of the ten cities were mentioned for the inaugural program. Bloomberg reported the other five cities will be announced before the end of the year. The cities announced so far are:

Austin, Texas

Nashville, Tenn.

Los Angeles

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Paris, France

For Austin, being an inaugural city in this program means a seat at the table where these important discussions are happening, explained Jason Stanford, director of communications for the office of Austin Mayor Steve Adler.

“We find that a lot of the public policy innovation in the tech sphere happens when mayors talk to each other. I know that sounds lo-tech, but that’s really how it occurs,” Stanford said. “Cities have a lot of freedom and flexibility to try things out and a great example for us is these Google cars.”

Austin became the first city outside California last year to pilot two of Google’s self-driving vehicles. Austin was selected, Stanford said, because they don’t have state or local laws prohibiting it. And though they haven’t received any complaints about the vehicles and they’ve been generally well-received, there’s still a place for government in the future of this technology, he said.

“One thing we hope is that we figure out what we don’t know,” he said. “Just having an absence of regulations and laws that forbid it doesn’t mean we’re not doing the most we can as a city to realize the possibilities. Working with other cities and having these conversations might illuminate new possibilities we hadn’t considered yet. Also, inevitably, we’re going to run up against road blocks. There will be at some point the chasm that we have to jump across and that’s when we might have to hold hands with other cities and all do it at once.”

The program also seeks to engage the private sector for input and has reached out to John Zimmer, co-founder of the ride-hailing company Lyft, as one of these experts. Zimmer’s company — like its competitor, Uber — has sights on creating its own set of driverless vehicles in the near future.

“This is a much-needed opportunity to bring together different stakeholders to help ensure we foster a transportation revolution focused on improving quality of life in our cities.” Zimmer said. “I look forward to working together on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reimagine and redesign our cities around people over cars.”

The collaborative planning is meant to sidestep any pitfalls that might arise, and one of these potential hazards is segregation between low-income and high-income residents in cities.

Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Stanford University said, “Driverless cars could potentially reduce segregation and improve upward mobility by connecting many low-income families to areas of opportunity. But this technology also has the potential to increase segregation by allowing higher income families to live in more distant suburbs.”

The goal, Chetty said, is to ensure the transition fosters social and economic policy that “increases opportunity and improves the lives of urban residents.”