Congratulations to Australia for a peaceful transfer of power and the lack of demagogues proclaiming “election fraud”. 

Towards Zero

Life is full of trade-offs.

When we conduct a business case (benefit/cost analysis), “ideally” we reduce decision making to a comparison of the monetised benefits and monetised costs. We say, e.g., the value of travel time savings is 40% of the average wage rate. If there are any safety impacts, we might note that a  value of a statistical life is $11,800,000 (for Americans, it is much less in other countries, despite the US’s penchant for devaluing life). If we are doing a better than average job, and considering environmental externalities, we price pollutants, and may even have a carbon tax. We say all this as if life or environmental damage can be substituted by money. When designing a transport system, we may choose to invest in one safety feature and not another, and instead spend the funds on something that reduces travel time. 

Of course, we don’t say your life can be substituted by money, your life is priceless (to you), but other people’s statistical lives are not, and as humans, we don’t act as if they are. But following through to its “logical” conclusion, if we assume the average price holds even as the number of people decreases, the lives of some 8,000,000,000 people on planet earth could be traded for (society would be willing to accept) $9.44e+16 in exchange, but who would be there to receive it? So while the average statistical value of (other people’s) life perhaps holds at the margin, it cannot hold for the whole.

We have similar values for pollutants, but clearly a sufficient amount of some pollutants (CO, NOx, SOx, Pb, PM10, PM2.5, O3, CO2) would kill us all. So while the trade-off price might be valid at the margin, it must increase to infinity as the amount of pollution increases. 

In the end, human life is a perfect complement to human transport. More humans begets more travel. If there were no life, there would be no human transport, and vice versa. These are consumed together. And if this is clearly true in the end for everyone, it is probably true at the margins as well. So perhaps we should not be monetising life and the damages caused by pollution, but instead looking at reducing crash risk and pollution in an absolute sense. But even if we took a Pareto Optimisation approach (no one is worse off, or in this case, no externality is exacerbated), there would still be trade-offs, we could still make more safety improvements or more travel time reductions.

Treating externalities in a non-monetary way requires multi-criteria decision-making. But typically that only abstracts the problem away from money, there is implicitly still a trade-off. 

Over the short-run, this trade-off might be necessary, when so much of the system design is fixed; but does it remain over the long run? A system that pollutes is wasting resources. A system that kills people is wasting resources. That can’t be efficient overall, we are just shifting the burden from a subsystem of all life to another subsystem. 

We often treat life and health and the environment as sacred values. We embue lost lives, and polluted environments with emotion and meaning. In contrast, we don’t treat lost time as sacred. If one were to posit “Zero Delay” in the same breath as Zero Deaths, one would be viewed as a crank. Instead, to those stuck in traffic we say you wasted time, ha-ha, we are not saddened by the thought of others in congestion. 

Nevertheless, unlike road deaths and air pollution, delay continues to remain a salient political issue, which we see in the sloganeering of “congestion busting”, and implicit in all traffic engineering decisions aiming for a better Level of Service. I would also argue that delay is largely unnecessary. 1

I posit that it is less expensive in the long run to design a transport system that doesn’t pollute, and doesn’t kill, injure, and maim people, and doesn’t result in needless delays, than one that does. A long-run, over-arching benefit-cost analysis would recognise and reward better long-run designs that resulted in zero externalities, following on the ideas of “Net Zero” and “Toward Zero Deaths” from transport, rather than expecting trade-offs of time for safety or time for emissions.

New Journal: Urban Informatics

Urban Informatics (UI) is an international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal publishing high-quality, original research on urban informatics, including urban system, theories, methods, and technologies for urban big data acquisition, infrastructure and analytics, as well as new solutions to urban problems and applications. 

Though published by Springer/Nature, the Article Processing Charges are waived for the first two years.

I am on the Editorial Advisory Board.

Research

• Zhao, X., Cui, M., & Levinson, D. (2022). Exploring temporal variability in travel patterns on public transit using big smart card data. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083221089662 [doi]

News

Dysfunctions

• Guns have overtaken motor vehicles as the leading cause of death of Americans aged 1-24. [Congratulations all, well done. See also this]. Nevertheless: Deaths on U.S. roads soared to 16-year high in 2021.

AI

• Baidu and Pony.ai become first robotaxi services to operate without safety drivers in Beijing
• Driverless shuttle survives its first Minnesota winter
• Michigan Plans Special Robocar/ADAS Smart Highway On I-94; A Dumb Highway Is Better

Pricing

• Congestion tax in the mix for Sydney CBD, secret document reveals. [When everything is “cabinet in confidence”, only confidants have cabinet papers (which are then leaked)]. Related: Time for Sydney to embrace congestion charging. [The only meaningful path forward is for AVs and EVs to have distance charges to replace the fuel tax, which is discounted in the off-peak. One car at a time.]

Infrastructure

• ‘Radically faster’: Parramatta at centre of NSW’s high-speed rail future. [Faster rail from Newcastle will go to Epping and Parramatta, where almost all passengers will transfer, rather than Sydney Central, where almost almost all passengers otherwise would transfer. This is not a terrible suggestion.]

Electrification

• Why electric scooters in India keep going up in flames
• Ultrathin Fuel Cell Generates Electricity From Your Body’s Own Sugar
• Toxic particles from brakes to be included in ‘Euro 7’ emission rules

Security

• ServiceNSW’s Digital Drivers Licence Security appears to be Super Bad

Futures Past

• Sea World monorail future unclear after carriages removed from Gold Coast theme park to be destroyed
• Ontario Place featured in the last week’s Star Trek
• Here’s How Crossrail Will Transform London Travel
• Average Age of Vehicles in the US Increases to 12.2 years, according to S&P Global Mobility

1

Recognising that journey delay (time wasted in-vehicle driving at speeds below “freeflow”) would have to be replaced by schedule delay (time spent at the trip origin waiting to travel later, or departing early than desired to avoid journey delay, and thus spending time at the destination you would prefer not to). We assume journey delay is worse than schedule delay because you have more flexibility at your origin and destination to pursue other activities than when sitting in traffic or on a train. This despite time being a fraction of life, and certainly we would rather typically be doing something else.

Andrew Taylor of the Sydney Morning Herald writes “Sydney’s motorists are still suffering breakdowns despite the lockdown” about a relative spike in NRMA calls (calls have not fallen as much as traffic). My quote:

David Levinson, professor of transport engineering at the University of Sydney, said an increase in battery call-outs could indicate less driving, as a battery will drain more if a car is unused, rather than being recharged daily.

“People may prefer to call NRMA than ask their neighbours for a battery jump start in these conditions, presuming professionals are more likely to be vaccinated,” he said.

“Even more speculatively, additional NRMA calls may be made by people who are especially lonely for any kind of in-person interaction during lockdown, and otherwise would not have made a call.”

Calls have fallen, but not as much as traffic has (according to the article numbers: 17.5% NRMA vs. 50% traffic compared with 2019), but I am not sure that is surprising.

1. NRMA may be substituting for people traveling to service stations (servos, or whatever the local Australian term is for car repair). Cars that are not properly maintained are more likely to fail.

2. The people who belong to NRMA are not the same as the general population. My guess is they have higher than average income, and thus be more likely to be office workers (and thus be more likely to be working from home during this period), but you would have to ask them for the socio-economics and demographic makeup of their membership. But they also may be located disproportionately in areas that are not as subject to as stringent a lockdown as non NRMA members are (i.e. their membership rate in hard lockdown areas is lower than average).

3. An increase in battery call outs could be indicative of less driving, as the battery will drain more if the car is unused, rather than being recharged daily. (This is also consistent with increased calls from home.) After not starting the car for a month, people find the battery is dead.

4. Speculatively, people may prefer to call NRMA than ask their neighbours for a battery jump start in these conditions, presuming professionals are more likely to be vaccinated.

5. Even more speculatively, additional NRMA calls may be made by people who are especially lonely for any kind of in-person interaction during lockdown, and otherwise would not have made a call.