Welcome to the fourth issue of The Transportist. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter. Just like waiting for the bus, this one is long because the last one was early.
Transportist Posts
- The Wait for the Bus Feels Longer If Your Stop Is Near Heavy Traffic | Streetsblog
- What a Logistic Curve of the S&P 500 Tells Us [Long story -> short]
- These U.S. Cities Offer the Best Job Access to Transit Riders | Streetsblog
- Travel from Pittsburgh to Columbus, Ohio, in 15 minutes? | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- Access Across America: UMN ranks accessibility to jobs by transit (Access Across America: Transit 2015 is out)
- On transit subsidies, first and second best
- Fuel Subsidies and the Greening of Transport
- Transportist – Top 21 Posts of 2016
And an 11 part series based on a transcription of an interview I gave on the future of transport.
- What will the local transport system look like in 2045? The future local transport system (1/11)
- What sort of public and passenger transport will be available in 2045? (2/11)
- What will public and passenger transport vehicles look like in 2045, and how might they be configured? (3/11)
- What will the supporting infrastructure look like in 2045? (4/11)
- How will users interface with the transport system in 2045? (5/11)
- Who will be using public and passenger transport in 2045? (6/11)
- How will passenger needs and expectations change in the future? (7/11)
- What types of operator will deliver public and passenger transport services in 2045? (8/11)
- How might the role of local and central government be different in 2045? (9/11)
- What key factors do you see driving these changes over the next 30 years? (10/11)
- Centralised control of driverless cars versus autonomous cars (11/11)
And this from a year ago went viral (thanks to Reddit), giving me about 100x my usual traffic for a day:
Notably when it was posted on Reddit nine months ago, it went nowhere. Virality is such a strange thing.
Journals
Books
If you follow the blog closely, you would have seen announcements that the following books were temporarily on deep discount at Amazon. They are still a good value:
- The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport
- Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport
Previous Editions
Transport Projects
- Brookings Project: Moving to Access (I am on the Scientific Advisory Board)
- CoAXs – Collaborative Accessibility-Based Stakeholder Engagement for transit planning
Transport News
Electricity
- SunShot $1 per Watt Solar Cost Goal: Mission Accomplished, Years Ahead of Schedule (Green Tech Media)
- How Electric Vehicles Could End Car Ownership as We Know It – Christopher Mims wsj.com
- GM announces partnership with Boston startup WiTricity to develop wireless charging technology – electrek.co
Automation
- Cadillacs Will Offer ‘Completely Hands-Free’ Driving Soon AutoGuide.com [Geofenced for Freeway operation only, but still, this could actually be a major step forward in deployment]
- Tesla’s Autopilot Vindicated With 40% Drop in Crashes – Bloomberg
- Panasonic debuts their own autonomous car concept – readwrite.com [Businessmen meeting in motion, because ….?]
- Uber is shipping its self-driving cars to Arizona after being forced out of SF – Recode
- Unexpected Consequences of Self Driving Cars – Rodney Brooks
- How Tesla’s Autopilot is able to steer in the snow even without lane markings or lead vehicle – electrek.co
- Waymo has admitted that it keeps its cars offline to prevent them from being hacked. technologyreview.com [But connected vehicles seemed like such a good idea.]
- Nissan says self-driving cars are impossible. Its solution: Human-run call centers [This will scale, not.] – wired
- BMW, Intel, and Mobileye to unleash 40 self-driving cars on U.S. roads – PC World
- The ABCs of Death [Dark humor on a Volvo car ad for autonomous braking] kottke.org
Transit
- Queen West streetcar riders loving replacement buses – City.ca
- Metro systems from New York to Tokyo, shrunken and simplified – Vivid Maps
- NYC Takes Another Crack at Regulating Dollar Vans – Stephen Miller (Village Voice)
- Mapping Toronto’s street railways in the TTC era (1921-2016) — Part 2 (1891 to 1921) — Part 1 (1861 to 1891) Sean Marshall
- We Asked a Transit Planner How to Up Our ‘Mini Metro’ Game – waypoint.vice.com
- The Legend of El Paso’s Transnational Streetcar – citylab.com
Justice and Equity
- 41 US Police Officers killed in vehicle crashes in 2015, 38 by firearms (FBI Data) – lawofficer.com
- Turned away in Chisago County, Bosnian Muslims search anew for cemetery land Chisago County residents cite fear over property values, burial traditions. Star Tribune
- Minnesota House Republicans rally around “profiteering from protest” bill – Tony Webster
- Bills Introduced to Nullify Fair Housing Regulation – National Low Income Housing Coalition
- The Gutting of Dayton: Why My City Is Gone – Ted Rall (in cartoons)
- Reinventing Poor Cities at Scale – strongtowns.org
- Case dropped against deaf man accused of resisting orders he could not hear – OKC Fox.
- “At least 60 officers who fatally shot someone this year had done so previously.” – Fatal shootings by police remain relatively unchanged after two years — washingtonpost.com
- New govt stats suggest US cops killed 1,900 people in year ending July, or around 5 per day – Mother Jones [or 12% of all US homicides]
- Hidden dangers ahead: How states keep accident-prone roads secret – revealnews.org
- Living near busy roads increases dementia risk, scientists say – smh.com.au
- In Divided Denver, a Highway Promises Reconnection – citylab.com
Logistics and Retail
- Amazon patented a subterranean network of delivery tunnels and an airborne fulfillment center – Recode
- These six-wheeled robots are about to start delivering food in the US ( Starship) – theverge.com
- Daimler Invests In ‘Last Mile’ Robotic Delivery Startup Starship Technologies makes drones that travel short distances on sidewalks or roads – wsj.com
- Now’s the Time for Big-Box Stores to Embrace the 19th Century – Virginia Postrel (Bloomberg)
Political Economy
- London congestion charge should be scrapped as it is no longer ‘fit for purpose,’ report warns – Evening Standard [… and replaced with real time of day pricing]
- Most Americans don’t want new tolls to pay for road and bridge improvements – Washington Post
- Seattle’s Mayor Murray kills city-run bike-share program – Seattle Times
- Why killing a mass transit funding board may be the only way to save mass transit funding in the Twin Cities – minnpost.com
- MTA Rethinks Approach to Second Avenue Subway – WSJ
- Where the Second Avenue Subway Went Wrong – newyorker.com
- How the plan to fix the Howard Street Bridge fell apart (in Legos) – Tampa Bay Times
- California’s bullet train is hurtling toward a multibillion-dollar overrun – latimes.com
- Better Road, Grumpier Drivers and the Logic of Discontent – Tyler Cowan bloomberg.com
Technology Change
- Dynamism vs. stasis and stagnation: Professional drivers want a 50-year ban on driverless cars – James Pethokoukis (AEI)
- Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls – theverge.com
- The long inexorable decline of the landline in Australia smh.com.au
Taxis
- Lyft to go global and take on Uber outside the US – cnbc.com
- Lyft lost $600 million last year, but it’s making progress in its ride-hailing war with Uber -businessinsider.com
- Uber is finally releasing a data trove that officials say will make driving better for everyone – washingtonpost.com
- Google Patent Supports Using Autonomous Vehicles for Ride-Sharing – eweek.com
- Google Maps’ redesigned ridesharing feature lets you hail a ridesharing service like Uber, Lyft, Gett or Hailo – techcrunch.com
Interfaces
- Alexa, Take the Wheel: Ford Models to Put Amazon in Driver Seat – Bloomberg
- The first radio communication from an aircraft in flight was, “Roy, come and get this goddamn cat.” (h/t @PourMeCoffee )
Geography
Recent Papers by Us
- Accessibility and the Evaluation of Investments on the Beijing Subway – Haibing Jiang and David Levinson
- Transit Riders’ Perception of Waiting Time and Stops’ Surrounding Environments – Martine Lagune-Reutler et al.
- TRB 2017
Recent Papers by Others
- Najmi, Rashidi, Abbasi and Waller (2016) Reviewing the transport domain: an evolutionary bibliometrics and network analysis. Scientometrics. [paywall]
- Darroch, Beecroft, Nelson (2016) A conceptual framework for land use and metro infrastructure
Some Other Newsletters
As a public service, I list some other transport newsletters here:
- Eric Jaffe: Sidewalk Labs (signup at bottom of page)
- Allan Kornhauser: Smart Driving Cars
- Susan Bregman: The Transit Wire
- Jeff Wood: The Direct Transfer
- Transportation Research Board eNewsletter
- Adie Tomer: Infrastructure at Metro (Brookings)
- Your local chapter of WTS, ITE, ASCE, etc. (WTS)
- IEEE-ITS
- Transport Studies Unit at University of Oxford
This is surely an incomplete list, if you know of others, please pass them along.
Calls for Papers
Music Video
- The Roundabout Song – by Joe Totten
Puzzles
- Identify the Turnpike by Rob Bain
Quote
- In 2032, we will wonder how we ever walked around in winter before autonomous electric municipal sidewalk plows proliferated. – Charles Carlson on Twitter
Sponsorship
- And if you like this, The Transportist is sponsored this month by the at sign (@) and Planning for Place and Plexus.
David Levinson, Transportist 