The Transportist: February 2017
Welcome to the fifth issue of The Transportist. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter.
Transportist Posts
Professoring
Academic Conferences
Transport
Elon Musk’s Tunnel Could Make LA’s Traffic Worse | Popular Science
What’s Behind Declining Transit Ridership Nationwide? | CityLab
Politics
Publications
Is Bikesharing Contagious? Modeling its effects on System Membership and General Population Cycling
Unexpected versus expected network disruption: Effects on travel behavior
Transport Links
Walking and Biking
Birmingham's New Electric Bikeshare (Strong Towns)
Madrid, Spain is banning cars from its crowded city center (The Independent)
Great Sydney Harbour Walk push: The trail from Eora Nation to the Opera House (SMH)
Public Transit
CTA Riders Confused, Concerned As Homeland Security Checks Bags At Addison Red Line (Chicagoist)
Bakerloo line extension: TfL sets out plans for new Tube route to Lewisham (The Evening Standard)
The trains are too long. The platform is too short. Bad news for the new station (Miami Herald)
Bus passenger risked Sydney Harbour Bridge inferno to tap off Opal card (SMH) [and it didn't work because you can only tap off at official stops]
GOP lawmakers seeking to divert Southwest light rail money to road, bridge projects (Strib)
A For Effort, But So Far, A Bridj to Nowhere [Kansas City: 6 months and 597 rides, total] (Transit Center)
Taxis
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is leaving President Trump’s business advisory council (ReCode)
Lyft surges to the top 10 on Apple’s App Store following the #DeleteUber campaign (TechCrunch)
Former Obama [David Plouffe] aide fined $90,000 for illegally lobbying Emanuel on Uber's behalf (Chicago Tribune)
Uber gives subscriptions a test drive in the Philly region (Philly.com)
Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber (Susan J. Fowler)
Uber Misled Public About Its Self-Driving Car That Was Caught Running a Red Light (Daring Fireball)
New Uber Update Allows Users To File Lawsuit Against Company Directly In App (The Onion)
AVs and Robots
Waymo’s self-driving cars needed far fewer safety-related disengages in 2016 (Electrek)
MnDOT Works On Bringing Driverless Buses To Minnesota (KSTP)
How soon self-driving cars? How soon self-driving cars everywhere? (AEI - James Pethokoukis)
Dubai might get autonomous flying taxis as early as this summer (Mashable)
GM plans to build, test thousands of self-driving Bolts in 2018 (Reuters)
CSIRO to turn 280 hectares of Sydney into testing ground for urban innovation. (Foreground)
Microsoft invests in real-time maps for drones, and someday, flying cars (The Verge)
Space
NASA wants to put astronauts on the very first launch of its new mega-rocket
SpaceX CRS-10 (Wikipedia)
NASA wants to put astronauts on the very first launch of its new mega-rocket (c. 2019) (Popular Science)
Von Braun's 1952 novel has a pretty spooky take on martian governance: (Michael McLean on Twitter)
Safety
Motor Vehicle Deaths in 2016 Estimated to be Highest in Nine Years (National Safety Council)
Hands-Free Texting Is No Safer to Use While Driving (Scientific American)
MTR train fire at Hong Kong's Tsim Sha Tsui station; at least 17 injured (Channel News Asia)
To Make Streets Safer, Seattle May Get Rid of Traffic Signals (Streetsblog)
NC driver w/30 prior traffic arrests & citations who rear ended & killed a cyclist gets 75 day sentence in plea deal [Not the actual headline] (WTVD) (via Peter Flax)
If the U.S. traffic fatality rate were as low as the U.K.'s, 30,000 lives would be saved annually (Streetsblog)
How America’s Staggering Traffic Death Rate Became Matter-of-Fact (Streetsblog)
Health
Driving Fee Rolls Back Asthma Attacks in Stockholm (Inside Science)
Tube 'higher than driving' for air pollution, study finds (BBC)
Colorado Aims to Expand a Main Artery, but Beleaguered Neighbors Balk (NY Times)
EVs and Renewables and Environment
UK electric vehicle boom drives new car sales to 12-year high (Guardian)
Electric cars are set to arrive far more speedily than anticipated (Economist)
Governing
America’s One and Only City Council Run by Libertarians [Crystal, MN] (Governing)
Hogan presses Maryland counties to support repeal of transportation law [that requires projects to be ranked] (Baltimore Sun)
Should public transport be "returned to the people"? (The Urbanist at Crikey)
As Trump Vows Building Splurge, Famed Traffic Choke Point Offers Warning [Breezewood] (NY Times)
"Talk to Your Friends About Zoning”: A PSA Campaign for the NIMBY in Your Life (Slate)
Here’s the case against a massive federal investment in infrastructure (AEI)
Can we have a mature discussion about the future of urban transport? (Crikey)
Tolls and Pricing
Big rise in CityLink truck tolls tipped to push heavy vehicles onto local roads (The Age)
De Blasio: Charging drivers to ease congestion ‘not part of my vision (AM NY)
Podcasts
Equity
Racial bias in driver yielding behavior at crosswalks (AAP)
Examining racial bias as a potential factor in pedestrian crashes (AAP)
Chicago Amtrak officer who killed Minneapolis man charged with murder (Strib)
Access
A Brief Note on Modal Access Across America - Mike McGurrin
Making urban access a priority (Brookings)
Measuring and exploring the global dimensions of access (Brookings)
Maps
Here's What TfL Learned From Tracking Your Phone On the Tube (Gizmodo)
German Transit Systems on a To-Scale Map (Transitmap.net)
Could a subtle tweak to Metro’s map fix overcrowding on the Blue Line? One NYU researcher thinks so. (washingtonpost.com)
Networks
Multi-criteria robustness analysis of metro networks (Derrible et al. in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications)
Trains have always catalysed new towns and column inches. Australia’s HSR is no exception (Foreground)
Shopping
Economics
The value of venture capital investors and the importance of physical infrastructure (TechCrunch)
Highlights from the comments on Cost Disease (SlateStarCodex)
New delinquent U.S. car loans at 8-year peak: NY Fed survey (Reuters)
Why do inner suburban residents oppose development? (The Urbanist)
Reading List
Transportation: A Reading List (How we get to next)
How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery To create is human. by Kevin Ashton
Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
Previous Editions
The Transportist - October 2016