The Transportist: January 2017
Welcome to the fourth issue of The Transportist. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter. Just like waiting for the bus, this one is long because the last one was early.
Transportist Posts
The Wait for the Bus Feels Longer If Your Stop Is Near Heavy Traffic | Streetsblog
What a Logistic Curve of the S&P 500 Tells Us [Long story -> short]
These U.S. Cities Offer the Best Job Access to Transit Riders | Streetsblog
Travel from Pittsburgh to Columbus, Ohio, in 15 minutes? | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Access Across America: UMN ranks accessibility to jobs by transit (Access Across America: Transit 2015 is out)
And an 11 part series based on a transcription of an interview I gave on the future of transport.
What will the local transport system look like in 2045? The future local transport system (1/11)
What sort of public and passenger transport will be available in 2045? (2/11)
What will the supporting infrastructure look like in 2045? (4/11)
How will users interface with the transport system in 2045? (5/11)
Who will be using public and passenger transport in 2045? (6/11)
How will passenger needs and expectations change in the future? (7/11)
What types of operator will deliver public and passenger transport services in 2045? (8/11)
How might the role of local and central government be different in 2045? (9/11)
What key factors do you see driving these changes over the next 30 years? (10/11)
Centralised control of driverless cars versus autonomous cars (11/11)
And this from a year ago went viral (thanks to Reddit), giving me about 100x my usual traffic for a day:
Notably when it was posted on Reddit nine months ago, it went nowhere. Virality is such a strange thing.
Journals
Books
If you follow the blog closely, you would have seen announcements that the following books were temporarily on deep discount at Amazon. They are still a good value:
Previous Editions
Transport Projects
Brookings Project: Moving to Access (I am on the Scientific Advisory Board)
CoAXs - Collaborative Accessibility-Based Stakeholder Engagement for transit planning
Transport News
Electricity
SunShot $1 per Watt Solar Cost Goal: Mission Accomplished, Years Ahead of Schedule (Green Tech Media)
How Electric Vehicles Could End Car Ownership as We Know It - Christopher Mims wsj.com
GM announces partnership with Boston startup WiTricity to develop wireless charging technology - electrek.co
Automation
Cadillacs Will Offer ‘Completely Hands-Free’ Driving Soon AutoGuide.com [Geofenced for Freeway operation only, but still, this could actually be a major step forward in deployment]
Tesla’s Autopilot Vindicated With 40% Drop in Crashes - Bloomberg
Panasonic debuts their own autonomous car concept - readwrite.com [Businessmen meeting in motion, because ....?]
Uber is shipping its self-driving cars to Arizona after being forced out of SF - Recode
Unexpected Consequences of Self Driving Cars - Rodney Brooks
How Tesla’s Autopilot is able to steer in the snow even without lane markings or lead vehicle - electrek.co
Waymo has admitted that it keeps its cars offline to prevent them from being hacked. technologyreview.com [But connected vehicles seemed like such a good idea.]
Nissan says self-driving cars are impossible. Its solution: Human-run call centers [This will scale, not.] - wired
BMW, Intel, and Mobileye to unleash 40 self-driving cars on U.S. roads - PC World
The ABCs of Death [Dark humor on a Volvo car ad for autonomous braking] kottke.org
Transit
Queen West streetcar riders loving replacement buses - City.ca
Metro systems from New York to Tokyo, shrunken and simplified - Vivid Maps
NYC Takes Another Crack at Regulating Dollar Vans - Stephen Miller (Village Voice)
Mapping Toronto’s street railways in the TTC era (1921-2016) --- Part 2 (1891 to 1921) --- Part 1 (1861 to 1891) Sean Marshall
We Asked a Transit Planner How to Up Our 'Mini Metro' Game - waypoint.vice.com
The Legend of El Paso's Transnational Streetcar - citylab.com
Justice and Equity
41 US Police Officers killed in vehicle crashes in 2015, 38 by firearms (FBI Data) - lawofficer.com
Minnesota House Republicans rally around “profiteering from protest” bill – Tony Webster
Bills Introduced to Nullify Fair Housing Regulation - National Low Income Housing Coalition
The Gutting of Dayton: Why My City Is Gone - Ted Rall (in cartoons)
Reinventing Poor Cities at Scale - strongtowns.org
Case dropped against deaf man accused of resisting orders he could not hear - OKC Fox.
"At least 60 officers who fatally shot someone this year had done so previously." - Fatal shootings by police remain relatively unchanged after two years -- washingtonpost.com
New govt stats suggest US cops killed 1,900 people in year ending July, or around 5 per day - Mother Jones [or 12% of all US homicides]
Hidden dangers ahead: How states keep accident-prone roads secret - revealnews.org
Living near busy roads increases dementia risk, scientists say - smh.com.au
In Divided Denver, a Highway Promises Reconnection - citylab.com
Logistics and Retail
Amazon patented a subterranean network of delivery tunnels and an airborne fulfillment center - Recode
These six-wheeled robots are about to start delivering food in the US ( Starship) - theverge.com
Now's the Time for Big-Box Stores to Embrace the 19th Century - Virginia Postrel (Bloomberg)
Political Economy
London congestion charge should be scrapped as it is no longer 'fit for purpose,' report warns - Evening Standard [... and replaced with real time of day pricing]
Most Americans don’t want new tolls to pay for road and bridge improvements - Washington Post
Seattle’s Mayor Murray kills city-run bike-share program - Seattle Times
Why killing a mass transit funding board may be the only way to save mass transit funding in the Twin Cities - minnpost.com
Where the Second Avenue Subway Went Wrong - newyorker.com
How the plan to fix the Howard Street Bridge fell apart (in Legos) - Tampa Bay Times
California's bullet train is hurtling toward a multibillion-dollar overrun - latimes.com
Better Road, Grumpier Drivers and the Logic of Discontent - Tyler Cowan bloomberg.com
Technology Change
Dynamism vs. stasis and stagnation: Professional drivers want a 50-year ban on driverless cars - James Pethokoukis (AEI)
Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls - theverge.com
The long inexorable decline of the landline in Australia smh.com.au
Taxis
Lyft to go global and take on Uber outside the US - cnbc.com
Lyft lost $600 million last year, but it's making progress in its ride-hailing war with Uber -businessinsider.com
Uber is finally releasing a data trove that officials say will make driving better for everyone - washingtonpost.com
Google Patent Supports Using Autonomous Vehicles for Ride-Sharing - eweek.com
Google Maps’ redesigned ridesharing feature lets you hail a ridesharing service like Uber, Lyft, Gett or Hailo - techcrunch.com
Interfaces
Alexa, Take the Wheel: Ford Models to Put Amazon in Driver Seat - Bloomberg
The first radio communication from an aircraft in flight was, “Roy, come and get this goddamn cat.” (h/t @PourMeCoffee )
Geography
Recent Papers by Us
Accessibility and the Evaluation of Investments on the Beijing Subway - Haibing Jiang and David Levinson
Transit Riders’ Perception of Waiting Time and Stops’ Surrounding Environments - Martine Lagune-Reutler et al.
Recent Papers by Others
Najmi, Rashidi, Abbasi and Waller (2016) Reviewing the transport domain: an evolutionary bibliometrics and network analysis. Scientometrics. [paywall]
Darroch, Beecroft, Nelson (2016) A conceptual framework for land use and metro infrastructure
Some Other Newsletters
As a public service, I list some other transport newsletters here:
Eric Jaffe: Sidewalk Labs (signup at bottom of page)
Allan Kornhauser: Smart Driving Cars
Susan Bregman: The Transit Wire
Jeff Wood: The Direct Transfer
Adie Tomer: Infrastructure at Metro (Brookings)
Your local chapter of WTS, ITE, ASCE, etc. (WTS)
This is surely an incomplete list, if you know of others, please pass them along.
Calls for Papers
Music Video
The Roundabout Song - by Joe Totten
Puzzles
Identify the Turnpike by Rob Bain
Quote
In 2032, we will wonder how we ever walked around in winter before autonomous electric municipal sidewalk plows proliferated. - Charles Carlson on Twitter
Sponsorship
And if you like this, The Transportist is sponsored this month by the at sign (@) and Planning for Place and Plexus.