The Transportist: February 2025
With LLMs and AVs, we are not far from anthropomorphic trains like Thomas the Tank Engine being realised.
Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow on Mastodon, or RSS. By popular demand, a BlueSky feed is also available. And apparently you can follow my Mastodon account on Meta’s Threads (@transportist@mastodon.social), though it is a bit complex. The account on Twitter/X has been deleted.
Books

Posts
A busy month of travel in the US and back
Research
Obituaries
One of my favourite advisors and collaborators from my time at the University of California, David Gillen, passed away at the end of October last year. His Obituary from The Globe and Mail. He was loved by Transport Economics students and will be missed.
Links
Fires
The Los Angeles wildfires are self-inflicted - Casey Handmer [If you read the articles above you will note I was in LA, actually between the times of the ravaging fires, so if people and media and map warnings and the weather report hadn’t been talking about the fires, I wouldn’t actually know there were fires. They were of course devastating, and the article reviews whether there were things that could be done by, among other things, importing Australian policies to California]
Electrification
Norway on track to be first to go all-electric - BBC [Norway new vehicle sales now about 90% EVs.]
Congestion Pricing
New York first US city to have congestion charge - BBC [It is done!]
In first days of congestion prices, New Yorkers see signs of reduced gridlock - Gothamist [My favourite quote from the article: “It hurts garages”. … Think of the poor sheltered parking spaces.]
Congestion Relief Zone is Also a CRASH Relief Zone: Data - Streetsblog [Good news, but unlike article comments this is not an obvious outcome. Less congestion also implies faster cars. But higher prices probably mean more professional and higher skilled drivers remain.]
Congestion Pricing Tracker - Brown University [It is working]
Introducing Tolls - Critical Density by Lewis Lehe
Air Safety
There was a plane-helicopter collision over the Potomac River in Washington DC. The present US Administration is beclowning itself with its response. And I am not saying post hoc ergo propter hoc, but I am also not not saying that. Obviously the investigators will investigate the causes of the crash.1
Trump blames diversity hires, Biden for fatal aircraft crash without evidence
Trump reportedly drove out key aviation safety officials before crash — because of Musk
Trump fires heads of TSA, Coast Guard and guts key aviation safety advisory committee
New US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was a Reality TV star before being elected to Congress. Maybe that’s not the best preparation, and should be constitutionally disqualifying, from being a senior official.
Road Safety
Should Waymo Robotaxis Always Stop For Pedestrians In Crosswalks? - Slashdot [The answer is Yes, but the laws around pedestrian crossing are ambiguous and better designs of pedestrian crossings that aided in detecting pedestrian intent would be helpful]
Maryland road fatalities decreased in 2024, but number still ‘ridiculously high’ - The Baltimore Banner
Waymo among vehicles hit in deadly 7-car crash in San Francisco - KTVU [The Waymo was not at fault] (also KRON)
Barricades were supposed to keep Bourbon Street revelers safe. Here’s why they weren’t operational - CNN
Grifts
Carvana: A Father-Son Accounting Grift for the Ages - Hindenburg Research
Brisbane traffic congestion ranked 10th worst in world but experts question ‘black box’ analysis. Academics say traffic scorecard uses ‘rogue metric’ which may make Brisbane’s congestion appear as bad as Los Angeles and Jakarta - The Guardian
[I wasn’t the only expert calling bullshit on the exercise, but my quotes are below.
University of Sydney professor of transport David Levinson said the methodology was unclear, but it clearly included a weighting by size of city.
“Compared to a city that was congested all the time, where the peak and the off peak were very similar, you would say that the other city was less congested, when, in fact, it was just congested all the time,” he said.
“[That] makes me very suspicious of a lot of the methodology here.”]
Cisportation
What Ever Happened to Laundry Chutes? - Dwell [A interesting form of freight “cisportation” (movement inside the gates) that has gone away. I remember this from my youth, but later houses don’t have them.]
AI
OpenAI Operator [Watching video of #OpenAi Operator agents , which only has utility because the world could not agree on or implement proper data standards and APIs for querying stores and restaurants. Cool tech of course.]
DeepSeek - A much lower cost to estimate, much lower cost to run, open source, and Chinese-based, alternative to the market leaders with seemingly equivalent or better output. Everyone will have a full AI in their pocket, and not need to be connected online to run it. Uses reinforcement learning rather than supervision.
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 - Simon Willison
Strangely as far as I can tell. none dare call it terrorism, yet. Obviously there is no evidence that it is or isn’t at the time of this writing, but when someone drives a car into a crowd, that’s a fair assumption, so when someone flies one aircraft into another, one would think the prospect would be raised. Waiting for the 1/29 Truthers to come out.