The Transportist: April 2017
Welcome to the seventh issue of The Transportist. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter. I am pleased to report I am now in Sydney, as long promised. Contact information is at the bottom of this newsletter. Due to the move, it should have been a bit lighter than usual, oh well.

Transportist Jobs
Transportist Posts
Sydney
Minnesota
Atlanta
Professoring
Miscellany
Transport News
Untied Airlines
United: Broken Culture - Gassee
United’s Unfriendly Skies - New Yorker
United Airlines Passenger Is Dragged From an Overbooked Flight - NY Times
United Part 2: Misconceptions and realities - Brad Templeton
What went wrong and how could United do better on bumping a passenger? - Brad Templeton
It’s time for some game theory, United Airlines edition - Tyler Cowan
Today is a good day to remember the great Julian Simon (who developed the auction for bumped passengers, among other things) - Alex Taborrak
Deleted Airlines
Untied Railroads
Train Stuck in Tunnel 3 Hours, Then Stun Gun Sparks Stampede - NY Times
Snarled Commutes, Squabbling Agencies and Amtrak’s Penn Station Responsibilities - NY Times
Explosion in St. Petersburg, Russia, Kills 11 as Vladimir Putin Visits - NY Times
AAR: Rail Traffic increased in March - Bill McBride [But way down from 2006, goodbye coal]
Well-tied Railroads
Grupo Mexico to buy Florida East Coast Railway for $2.1 billion - TCPalm.com (h/t Paul Druce)
First China-bound direct freight train leaves London Xinhua (h/t Marginal Revolution)
Labor’s $400m rail promise that would connect Badgerys Creek airport to suburbs from day ONE - Daily Telegraph
Untied Highways
Sure. Blame The Crackhead. - Georgia Pol.com
Atlanta interstate fire recalls Philly I-95 fire 21 years ago - Philly.com
Atlanta’s 29 Counties Have Helped Spur on a Traffic Disaster - NY Mag
Untied Policy
Australian Government considering decentralization of departments. - Canberra Times
Infrastructure overhaul may top $1 trillion, cut red tape: Trump - Reuters [h/t Yonah Freemark]
Australian Government to fast-track infrastructure in budget - ABC
Untried Policy
Can we ever get road user charging to work? - Thomas the Think Engine
Friedrich Hayek on Carbon Taxes - Niskanen Center
Drivers get repair vouchers instead of tickets for broken car light - Star Tribune
Untied Taxis
(and you thought March and February were bad news months for Uber.)
Uber tried to fool Apple and got caught Apple - The Verge
Road Pricing: A Solution to Gridlock – Uber Under the Hood - Andrew Salzberg on Medium
Uber Executive Invokes Fifth Amendment, Seeking to Avoid Potential Charges - Daring Fireball
How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons - NY Times
Uber's' response to NY Times Article - Andrew Salzberg on Twitter
New York City Drunk Driving After Uber - Research Article
A new self-driving car startup just spun out of Udacity to challenge Uber with its own autonomous ... - Business Insider
LAX Is Raking In Millions From Uber And Lyft - Buzzfeed
There's no bubble. Really, there's no bubble.
Commission your own traffic and construction studies without ever leaving bed - TechCrunch
Tesla Hits a New Milestone, Passing G.M. in Valuation - NY Times
I Stared Into the Political Heart of the Hyperloop - Gizmodo
Google Maps picks up mapping analytics and visualization startup Urban Engines - Tech Crunch
Ford Hires 400 BlackBerry Employees for Connected Cars Work - Bloomberg
Here's how much of America is occupied by big box stores. Strong Towns
Inflation for urban transit and parking running faster than overall CPI (Canada) - Jamie Carson (Twitter)
AAA launches car-sharing service ‘Gig’ for drivers in Oakland, Berkeley - East Bay Times
After this Bubble
Alphabet’s Waymo Offering Families Rides in Self-Driving Cars - WSJ
No, Detroit is not winning the robocar race. - Brad Templeton
Cars and second order consequences. - Benedict Evans
Lillium Jet - Electric VTOL - YouTube
Apparently, the Charming Backstory of Pixar’s “Cars” is that Autonomous Vehicles Killed Off the Human Race thenewswheel.com
Research
By us
By others
Transportation Lifestyle Trends in the United States, 2006–2015 by Sarah Jo Peterson
Bain R (2017), Better Traffic Forecasts?, Infrastructure Investor, Issue 81, 38-41, April 2017, PEI Media Ltd, London.
'The glorious promise of the post-truth world' by Andrew Odlyzko
Civios: Happy Cities by Yingling Fan on Vimeo
Award winning
Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure (2010) by Dave Donaldson. (Forthcoming in American Economic Review) See my brief comments. Congratulations to Donaldson for winning the John Bates Clark medal for work in Transport History, and better still for examining Network Growth and Evolution.
Previous Issues
The Transportist – October 2016
Contact Information
David Levinson,
Professor of Transport Engineering
School of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney
david.levinson@sydney.edu.au
davidlevinson.org
transportist.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
Mail to: David Levinson c/o School of Civil Engineering,
Rm 418, Civil Engineering Building (J05) | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006
Office: Room 314, School of IT Building (J12) at the Corner of Cleveland Street and City Road
Office Phone Number:
Campus 7-6136
Australia: 0286276136.
International +61 286276136.
This month's episode brought to you by the Glyph and Induced Demand (via David King).

