Welcome to the July 2017 issue of The Transportist. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter.

I was in Brisbane for the WSTLUR 2017 conference at the beginning of the month, and the family moved down, and it’s winter break, so slow this month.

Last call (closes July 30)

• Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Transport at the University of Sydney

Transportist Posts

• Commuter car parking
• Mo’ Rankings, Mo’ Bragging
• On the Differences between Autonomous, Automated, Self-Driving, and Driverless Cars

Sydney

• Closing the Cahill Expressway at Circular Quay
• The Surprisingly Not Terrible Urban Interface of McDonald’s in Alexandria, NSW

Media Appearances

• Elon Musk’s Chicago Tunnel makes a dumb idea even dumber | Wired

 

Transport News

Transit

• Parramatta Road tram plans developed – then scrapped – SMH
• Sydney’s labyrinths [Sydney’s lost transit tunnels] – Telegraph
• The real reason New York City can’t make the trains run on time Don’t buy the excuses about overcrowding. – Alon Levy at vox.com
• Overcrowding Is Not the New York Subway’s Problem – CItylab
• Every New York City Subway Line Is Getting Worse. Here’s Why – NY Times
• Subway Derailment in Manhattan Injures Dozens – NY Times
• MARTA Ridership Like the I-85 Collapse Never Happened – Planetizen

Bike

• Thousands of red bikes set to hit Sydney’s streets – and footpaths [Sydney gets (stationless) bikesharing]- SMH
• Bike helmet laws don’t reduce head injuries, UBC study finds – CBC

Roads

• Congestion is not the enemy – Daniel Bowen

Taxis

(Almost no Uber news this month)

• Lyft to Develop Self-Driving Car Technology in New Silicon Valley Facility– NY Times
• Uber Offers a Thankless Job, and the Applications Flood In – NY Times
• Uber and Yandex, a Russian Ride-Hailing Rival, Opt to Share the Road– NY Times

Delivery

• The return of the stagecoach? – Søren Have

AVs

• Govt says no to driverless cars on Indian roads – zeebiz.com

EVs

• New diesel and petrol vehicles to be banned from 2040 – BBC
• When Will Electric Cars Go Mainstream? It May Be Sooner Than You Think – NY Times
• Volvo goes electric, ditches cars powered solely by gas – Star Tribune (AP) [For new models]
• Why Tesla is overhyped — and overvalued – Vox

Rail

• Should the Sydney to Wollongong rail line be upgraded? – Transport Sydney
• Cabinet told benefits from a Wollongong-to-Sydney rail upgrade would exceed costs – SMH
• High speed rail between Canberra and Sydney possible by 2032 – SMH

Land Use

• Here’s a suburban experiment cities can learn from [Columbia MD turns 50] – WaPo [My paper on Columbia: The Next America Revisited]
• For 23 World Cities, a Visual Inventory of Parking Lots – Citylab

Equity / Justice

• Australian woman Justine Damond killed in police shooting in Minneapolis – SMH (Really shaking my head)

[As a Minneapolitan relocated to Australia, I am the mirror of Justine Damond, so I have been following this. Really, the police shouldn’t be killing anyone, there are better solutions in almost every case. And, as the Guardian reports, police manage to kill hardly anyone at all in many developed countries. In Australia, police killed 94 people in 20 years (5 per year), US police kill that many in one month. After controlling for population (325M vs. 25M (13x), police homicides in the US are still hugely more (1093 per 325M in 2016, vs. (scaling Australia levels to the US) less than 65 per 325M in Australia). For the math inclined, I am 16 times more likely to be shot by a police officer in the US than Australia. This is not random. It is not bad luck. It is systemic and systematic and it is not getting noticeably better. I have no special transport angle here, though the police apparently shot from the inside of the car, because why? Unlike Philando Castile, last year’s wrongful police shooting in the Twin Cities, after a traffic stop, where the police were outside the car and shot inside.]

 

Safety

• The Traffic Safety Establishment Needs to Take More Responsibility for Soaring Pedestrian Deaths – Streetsblog
• The Everday Surrealism of Automobile Violence – Bill Lindeke TC Sidewalks [A car went through a Metro Transit bus, killing a passenger. As I tweeted “If cars were a new product, they’d be banned”]
• Woman hit by a van in Chatswood in a critical condition – SMH [I saw the aftermath of this, including the still wet blood on the pavement]

Internet of Things

• Roomba’s Next Big Step Is Selling Maps of Your Home to the Highest Bidder – gizmodo.com
• Google Glass 2.0 Is a Startling Second Act – wired.com
• How did a single computer failure take out the whole of the Melbourne rail network?​ – Citymetric

Fantasy

• Elon Musk says he has ‘verbal’ OK to build N.Y.-D.C. Hyperloop – NPR [Is all news reporting so credulous? Famous person tweets something absurd, and it is just repeated far and wide by NPR, among others. My response: Today we launch a new solution to America’s traffic, The Pricing Company. We received tweets of approval from all 50 states to toll roads.]

Urbanism

• Jane Jacobs on Transportation – Andrew Salzberg

 

Research

By Us

• An Introduction to the Network Weight Matrix
• Talk: Full Cost Analysis of Accessibility

Call for Papers

• Livable Cities Conference 

CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline October 31, 2017
55th International Making Cities Livable Conference on Healthy, 10-Minute Neighborhoods
May 14-18, 2018, The Shaw Center, Ottawa, Canada