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

Announcements

• Spontaneous Access, now in Print.

Transportist Posts

• How you want your books
• A Busful of Knowledge: On Going from the University of Sydney to the University of New South Wales
• Infrastructure Spending Done Right
• Warranties and Indemnities …

Media Appearances

• Seminar: The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap for the New Transport Landscape
• Is Infrastructure Spending Good for the Economy? It’s Complicated – Streetsblog

Transport News

Transit

• Short Trip 
• Farewell, competitive commuting: TfL paints zones where tube doors open – The Guardian

Roads

• Sidewalk Labs | Traffic Signals: Catalyst of Car-Driven Cities Traffic lights did make city intersections safer for cars, but they came at the expense of pedestrian freedom. – Sidewalk Labs
• Saudi Arabia Agrees to Let Women Drive – NY Times [I tend to think the progressive solution would be to prohibit men from driving to equalize things, and save lives]

AVs

• Autonomous Cars Don’t Have a ‘Trolley Problem’ Problem In a you-versus-them scenario, there’s only one choice the self-driving car can make. – Alex Roy
• How More Self-Driving Cars Could Make Traffic Worse And Cost Us More Money – HuffPo
• Uber’s autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile – ReCode
• Google Has Spent Over $1.1 Billion on Self-Driving Tech – IEEE Tech
• Autonomous Cars: The Level 5 Fallacy – Monday Note by Jean-Louis Gassée mondaynote.com
• How we built the first real self-driving car (really) – Cruise
• Full transcript: Self-driving car engineer Chris Urmson on Recode Decode
• India rejects driverless cars to save jobs Transport minister says the country will not be developing autonomous cars in order to protect jobs. BBC
• Don’t fear the future: Congress just did something good on promoting driverless cars – AEI
• Group of 17 Apple Auto Engineers Join Startup Zoox – Bloomberg

CVs

• Danger Ahead: The Government’s Plan for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Threatens Privacy – eff

EVs / Energy

• US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in just one year  – RenewEconomy
• Tesla Boosts Car Battery Power During Irma, Raising Questions of Control – NY Times
• Mercedes-Benz will electrify its entire car lineup by 2022 – TechCrunch

HPVs / Bikes

• Mobike debuts bike sharing in Washington, reflecting latest move in arms race with Ofo – SCMP
• Build it and they will come? – The Guardian
• Bike-share locks meet industry standards, but were no match for Baltimore thieves, manufacturer says – Baltimore Sun
• Bike Sharing Atlas – bikesharingatlas.org
• Toward Micromobility: The Low End Disruption of Transportation – Horace Dediu slideshare.net
• Beijing bans new sharing bikes – BBC
• As Bike-Sharing Brings Out Bad Manners, China Asks, What’s Wrong With Us? – NY Times
• People take to their bikes when we make it safer and easier for them – The Conversation (Melanie Crane et al.)
• The battle for Australia’s footpaths: Nationals senator pushes for scooter speed clampdown – SMH
• OpEd: The Unintended Consequences Of Bicycle Helmets We should encourage people to cycle, not scare them away. medpagetoday.com

SVs / Taxis

• Uber threatens to leave Quebec, if … – CBC
• Understanding Uber: It’s not about the App – London Reconnections
• Australian taxi industry calls for Uber review following London ban – SMH
• Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s memo to staff: he’s ‘disappointed’ by the London ban Here’s his memo to the staff about London’s ban – ReCode
• Lyft thinks it can fix Los Angeles traffic with fewer lanes – Engadget
• Alphabet Said to Be in Talks to Invest About $1 Billion in Lyft – WSJ
• Taxi Medallions, Once a Safe Investment, Now Drag Owners Into Debt – NY Times
• Uber taxis petrol-bombed in Sandton  timeslive.co.za
• Car-sharing startup Turo raised another $92 million to help people pay for their dream cars – Quartz
• Car subscription services to take 1 of 5 sales by 2023 – Green Car Reports

Canals/Shipping/Maritime

• Second-Class Puerto Rico: Trump declines to waive the Jones Act for hurricane relief. – WSJ

Land Use

• Sidewalk Labs weighs up how to run its own Alphabet City – FT
• Is Melbourne already bigger than Sydney? It would only take a modest statistical tweak to make Melbourne number 1 – SMH

Equity / Justice

• Access denied: wheelchair metro maps versus everyone else’s – The Guardian
• Officer named in Georgia Tech shooting – AJC
• US people of color still more likely to be exposed to pollution than white people – The Guardian
• Air Pollution Levels in Barcelona Rise During Public Transport Strikes – IS Global

Safety

• Some of the best parts of autonomous vehicles are already here – Lee Vinsel and Costa Samaras at The Conversation
• The Invisible Route – Where you can travel and not be tracked – Maarten Inghels

Fantasy

no hyperloop news this month

Retail​ / Delivery

• ​You’re Using Foursquare All the Time. You Just Don’t Know It – Bloomberg
• The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing – The Atlantic
• Why the Future Could Mean Delivery Straight Into Your Fridge – WalMart
• One Surprise Standout for Uber: Food Delivery Despite a late start, the company’s foray into delivering food, a cutthroat $100 billion-plus service industry, eclipses ride hailing in some markets. – NYTimes

Etymology

• Trending: ‘Bodega’ Startup Draws Criticism, Mockery A lesson in not reinventing the wheel (or corner store). merriam-webster.com
• The Closing of a Great American Dialect Project – New Yorker [Where is Parking Ramp preferred to Parking Garage, DARE will tell you]

Aviation and Space

• Investigation launched into flight chaos caused by air traffic control outage – SMH
•  Australia commits to establish space agency with no budget, plan, name, deadline – The Register UK

Isochrones

• A new kind of map: it’s about time – Peter Liu @ MapBox

Science

• Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty – Scott Alexander @SlateStarCodex
• The sun just belched out the strongest solar flare in 12 years – New Scientist
• Engineering journal removes article co-authored by former president of Iran – retractionwatch.com
• Super-Accurate GPS Chips Coming to Smartphones in 2018 – Spectrum IEEE

Research

By Us

• A model of two-destination choice in trip chains with GPS data
• Justice, Exclusion, and Equity: An Analysis of 48 U.S. Metropolitan Areas
• Safety in Numbers and Safety in Congestion for Bicyclists and Motorists at Urban Intersections
• Spatiotemporal Short-term Traffic Forecasting using the Network Weight Matrix and Systematic Detrending
• Traffic Flow Variation and Network Structure
• Accessibility Oriented Development
• The Healthiest vs. Greenest Path: Comparing the Effects of Internal and External Costs of Motor Vehicle Pollution on Route Choice