Welcome to the fifth issue of The Transportist. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter.
Transportist Posts
Professoring
Academic Conferences
Transport
- Recommendations to Minnesota Legislature on Transport
- On a new Infrastructure Bill
- Elon Musk’s Tunnel Could Make LA’s Traffic Worse | Popular Science
- Riverview Corridor – Promising Alternatives?
- What’s Behind Declining Transit Ridership Nationwide? | CityLab
Politics
- On Resistance
- On punching Nazis
- On Restoring Obama to the Presidency, Constitutionally
- Congratulations America, Achievement Unlocked.
- A Time for Choosing
Publications
- Is Bikesharing Contagious? Modeling its effects on System Membership and General Population Cycling
- Unexpected versus expected network disruption: Effects on travel behavior
Transport Links
Walking and Biking
- Birmingham’s New Electric Bikeshare (Strong Towns)
- Madrid, Spain is banning cars from its crowded city center (The Independent)
- Great Sydney Harbour Walk push: The trail from Eora Nation to the Opera House (SMH)
Public Transit
- CTA Riders Confused, Concerned As Homeland Security Checks Bags At Addison Red Line (Chicagoist)
- Bakerloo line extension: TfL sets out plans for new Tube route to Lewisham (The Evening Standard)
- The trains are too long. The platform is too short. Bad news for the new station (Miami Herald)
- Bus passenger risked Sydney Harbour Bridge inferno to tap off Opal card (SMH) [and it didn’t work because you can only tap off at official stops]
- GOP lawmakers seeking to divert Southwest light rail money to road, bridge projects (Strib)
- A For Effort, But So Far, A Bridj to Nowhere [Kansas City: 6 months and 597 rides, total] (Transit Center)
Taxis
- Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is leaving President Trump’s business advisory council (ReCode)
- Lyft surges to the top 10 on Apple’s App Store following the #DeleteUber campaign (TechCrunch)
- Former Obama [David Plouffe] aide fined $90,000 for illegally lobbying Emanuel on Uber’s behalf (Chicago Tribune)
- Uber gives subscriptions a test drive in the Philly region (Philly.com)
- Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber (Susan J. Fowler)
- Uber Misled Public About Its Self-Driving Car That Was Caught Running a Red Light (Daring Fireball)
- New Uber Update Allows Users To File Lawsuit Against Company Directly In App (The Onion)
AVs and Robots
- Waymo’s self-driving cars needed far fewer safety-related disengages in 2016 (Electrek)
- MnDOT Works On Bringing Driverless Buses To Minnesota (KSTP)
- Vespa’s new robot will carry your groceries (CNN)
- How soon self-driving cars? How soon self-driving cars everywhere? (AEI – James Pethokoukis)
- Dubai might get autonomous flying taxis as early as this summer (Mashable)
- GM plans to build, test thousands of self-driving Bolts in 2018 (Reuters)
- CSIRO to turn 280 hectares of Sydney into testing ground for urban innovation. (Foreground)
- Microsoft invests in real-time maps for drones, and someday, flying cars (The Verge)
Space
- NASA wants to put astronauts on the very first launch of its new mega-rocket
- SpaceX CRS-10 (Wikipedia)
- NASA wants to put astronauts on the very first launch of its new mega-rocket (c. 2019) (Popular Science)
- Von Braun’s 1952 novel has a pretty spooky take on martian governance: (Michael McLean on Twitter)
Safety
- Motor Vehicle Deaths in 2016 Estimated to be Highest in Nine Years (National Safety Council)
- Hands-Free Texting Is No Safer to Use While Driving (Scientific American)
- MTR train fire at Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui station; at least 17 injured (Channel News Asia)
- To Make Streets Safer, Seattle May Get Rid of Traffic Signals (Streetsblog)
- NC driver w/30 prior traffic arrests & citations who rear ended & killed a cyclist gets 75 day sentence in plea deal [Not the actual headline] (WTVD) (via Peter Flax)
- If the U.S. traffic fatality rate were as low as the U.K.’s, 30,000 lives would be saved annually (Streetsblog)
- How America’s Staggering Traffic Death Rate Became Matter-of-Fact (Streetsblog)
- Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket (Atlantic)
Health
- Driving Fee Rolls Back Asthma Attacks in Stockholm (Inside Science)
- Tube ‘higher than driving’ for air pollution, study finds (BBC)
- Colorado Aims to Expand a Main Artery, but Beleaguered Neighbors Balk (NY Times)
EVs and Renewables and Environment
- UK electric vehicle boom drives new car sales to 12-year high (Guardian)
- Audi tells dealerships to get behind electric vehicles because it will dominate the market within 10 years (Electrek)
- Electric cars are set to arrive far more speedily than anticipated (Economist)
- US Solar Market Grows 95% in 2016, Smashes Records (GTM)
- Federal Highway Administration changes mentions of ‘climate change’ to ‘resilience’ in transportation program (WaPo)
Governing
- America’s One and Only City Council Run by Libertarians [Crystal, MN] (Governing)
- Hogan presses Maryland counties to support repeal of transportation law [that requires projects to be ranked] (Baltimore Sun)
- Should public transport be “returned to the people”? (The Urbanist at Crikey)
- As Trump Vows Building Splurge, Famed Traffic Choke Point Offers Warning [Breezewood] (NY Times)
- “Talk to Your Friends About Zoning”: A PSA Campaign for the NIMBY in Your Life (Slate)
- Here’s the case against a massive federal investment in infrastructure (AEI)
- Can we have a mature discussion about the future of urban transport? (Crikey)
Tolls and Pricing
- Big rise in CityLink truck tolls tipped to push heavy vehicles onto local roads (The Age)
- De Blasio: Charging drivers to ease congestion ‘not part of my vision (AM NY)
Podcasts
Equity
- Racial bias in driver yielding behavior at crosswalks (AAP)
- Examining racial bias as a potential factor in pedestrian crashes (AAP)
- Chicago Amtrak officer who killed Minneapolis man charged with murder (Strib)
Access
- A Brief Note on Modal Access Across America – Mike McGurrin
- Making urban access a priority (Brookings)
- Measuring and exploring the global dimensions of access (Brookings)
Maps
- What If Bike Paths Looked Like Subway Maps? (CityLab)
- Here’s What TfL Learned From Tracking Your Phone On the Tube (Gizmodo)
- German Transit Systems on a To-Scale Map (Transitmap.net)
- Could a subtle tweak to Metro’s map fix overcrowding on the Blue Line? One NYU researcher thinks so. (washingtonpost.com)
- Auto-generated maps of fantasy worlds (Kottke)
Networks
- Multi-criteria robustness analysis of metro networks (Derrible et al. in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications)
- Trains have always catalysed new towns and column inches. Australia’s HSR is no exception (Foreground)
Shopping
Economics
- The value of venture capital investors and the importance of physical infrastructure (TechCrunch)
- Highlights from the comments on Cost Disease (SlateStarCodex)
- New delinquent U.S. car loans at 8-year peak: NY Fed survey (Reuters)
- Why do inner suburban residents oppose development? (The Urbanist)
Reading List
- Transportation: A Reading List (How we get to next)
- How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery To create is human. by Kevin Ashton
- Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
Previous Editions
- The Transportist – October 2016
- The Transportist – November 2016
- The Transportist – December 2016
- The Transportist: January 2017
Sponsorship
- The Transportist is sponsored this month by !, ¡ and Evolving Transportation Networks
David Levinson, Transportist 