2015-08-27 – David Levinson, Transportist

Dorothy Cox at The Trucker wrote about my panel at the really interesting CVO Conference yesterday in Dallas “Industry must change, but tech advancements carry their own challenges, panelist says“. The conference can be followed on Twitter at the #CVOutlook hashtag .

… And of course the conversation got around to autonomous trucks, the bywords of the day.

By the year 2030, maybe half of all miles driven will be by driverless trucks, predicted David Levinson, chair of transportation at the University of Minnesota. [Ed: NOT ACTUALLY WHAT I SAID, I PUT THE TIMEFRAME FOR CARS IN MID 2030s, BUT OK, I WAS TALKING FAST]

But he painted a somewhat different picture than other speakers in discussing the subject. He said a driver might be engaged in supervising multiple drone trucks on set routes from a control center, intervening if something goes wrong, and told attendees that in the future, goods pickup and delivery could be bid on, leading to supply chain networking and consolidated home delivery.

Where does that leave trucks?

Recent working paper:

Murphy, B., D. Levinson, and A. Owen (2015) Evaluating the “Safety In Numbers” Effect With Estimated Pedestrian Activity (working paper)

Pedestrian and bicyclist collision risk assessment offers a powerful and informative tool in urban planning applications, and can greatly serve to inform proper placement of improvements and treatment projects. However, sufficiently detailed data regarding pedestrian and bicycle activity are not readily available for many urban areas, and thus the activity levels and collision risk levels must be estimated. This study builds upon other current work by Murphy et al. (1) regarding pedestrian and bicycle activity estimation based on centrality and accessibility metrics, and extends the analysis techniques to estimation of pedestrian collision risk. The Safety In Numbers phenomenon, which refers to the observable effect that pedestrians become safer when there are more pedestrians present in a given area, i.e. that the individual per-pedestrian risk of a collision decreases with additional pedestrians, is a readily observed phenomenon that has been studied previously. The effect is investigated and observed in acquired traffic data, as well as estimated data, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.