2020-05-29 – David Levinson, Transportist

Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow along at the transportist.org or on Twitter. The next issue of the Transportist will be August, as July will be reserved for the TransportLab newsletter.

Urban riots in response to police murders [tears for my old hometown Minneapolis, the riots were a few miles from our house, and we sometimes went to those shops] moves into the top spot of the armageddon-of-the-month rankings, as Covid-19 fades from attention, because people got bored.

When will Tesla Full Self Drive be functional?

End of 2020 0%
End of 2021 3.9%
End of 2025 20.9%
Never 75.2%

I interpret this to be when will Tesla Autopilot be “Level 4” autonomous on a large share of roads, with drivers not needing to touch the wheel or pedals for most trips. This poll comes with a sample size of 153 Twitter people, most of whom have some transport knowledge. The respondents are very skeptical of Elon Musk. Now much of this is probably deserved with Hyperloop and the Boring Company and his general antics, but on the other hand, Tesla Autopilot already exists and works reasonably well on freeways (death rates are probably lower than humans, though this is debated) and they have been testing on arterials for over 4 years, and it’s not like he is the programmer.

I did a similar poll of GM’s Ultracruise (Supercruise for freeways plus new autonomous/driver assist features for city streets, similar tech to Tesla FSD without the hype), though with a smaller and non-identical sample. People trust GM more than Tesla, but remain skeptical.

GM Ultracruise will be functional in at least one model by:

End of 2020 3.4%
End of 2021 7.2%
End of 2025 20.7%
Never 58.6%

I’m at 2021 on both of these.

Recall Notice: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The Huanan Seafood Market would like to recall “Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”. It has severe side-effects and should not be consumed. A replacement virus is available with exchange at site of purchase.

Universities, which are financially strapped at the moment, could save money by canceling subscriptions to expensive journals. We can get that knowledge in other ways now.

In contrast, their current plans are highly uncertain.

Research

Ji, Ang and Levinson, D. (2020) A Review of Game Theory Models of Lane Changing. Transportmetrica A. (online version) [doi]
Ji, Ang and Levinson, D. (2020) Estimating the Social Gap with a Game Theory Model of Lane Changing. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. [doi]
Wu, Hao and Levinson, D. (2020) Unifying Access. Transportation Research part D.Volume 83, June 2020, 102355 [doi][free until June 25]