The Transportist: March 2017

Welcome to the sixth issue of The Transportist. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter.

Transportist Posts

Transit Ridership

• On the predictability of the decline of transit ridership

• More on declining transit ridership

Retail

• Shopping vs. Shipping

Fantasy

• With Hyperloop, India eyes an unrealistic future | Quartz

Infrastructure

• Talking about Infrastructure (me on MPR). You can find the podcast of the show here.

• Transcript of “The Economics for and Against Trump’s Infrastructure Plan”. (me on NPR)

Professoring

• Rules for Researchers

Transport News

The Economy and Suburbanization

• 'It's getting worse': An increasing number of Americans have stopped paying their car loans (Business Insider)

• The Urban Inversion Is Over – In a State of Migration And It Was Exaggerated to Begin With medium.com (Lyman Stone)

• Americans’ Shift To The Suburbs Sped Up Last Year The suburbanization of America marches on. (Jed Kolko, 538)

• Little Canada’s “Other” Transportation Infrastructure: Transit, Part Two (streets.mn)

Funding/Financing|Public/Private

• Remember: Public-Private Partnerships Aren't Free (Laura Bliss at CityLab)

• Can Canada’s infrastructure bank clear backlogs? (Finance-Commerce)

• NSW Minister Andrew Constance says tech advances will see end of government supplied transport (Australian Financial Review)

• Oregon to seek federal approval for tolls on metro freeways (Oregon Live)

• Self-Driving Cars Can’t Cure Traffic, but Economics Can. (NY Times)

• Chao says U.S. drivers may face more tolls to raise infrastructure funds (WaPo)

• This is how you fix Metro’s funding problems [Value Capture] (Greater Greater Washington)

• Trump wants to do tax reform and infrastructure at the same time (Axios)

Health

• Driving Fee Rolls Back Asthma Attacks in Stockholm (Inside Science)

AVs

• How Pedestrians Will Defeat Autonomous Vehicles (Scientific American)

• A trap for self-driving cars (Kottke)

• Intel buys driverless car technology firm Mobileye (BBC)

Air and Space

• Building airports is expensive. Why not use the ones we have? (Bloomberg)

• Space X plans global space internet​ (Kurzweil)

• No One Has Gotten Lucky In Space (Maggie Koerth-Baker 538)

Taxis

(And you thought February was a bad month for Uber)

• How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide (NY Times)

• Uber president Jeff Jones just went full on #DeleteUber and resigned (Mashable)

• Engineers at Uber's self-driving unit passed around 'Safety Third' stickers as a joke (CNBC)

• Why America needs more Teslas and fewer Ubers (Tim Lee at Vox)

• Uber is more fragile than other major tech companies (Tim Lee at Vox)

• Uber Case Could Be a Watershed for Women in Tech (Farhad Manjoo at NY Times)

• In Video, Uber CEO Argues With Driver Over Falling Fares​ (Eric Newcomer at Bloomberg)

• Uber’s autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile (Recode)

• Uber suspends testing of self-driving cars after crash (WaPo) [Temporarily Suspended]

• Q&A: LibreTaxi's Roman Pushkin (Shareable)

• Uber oplyser på et pressemøde, at det er slut med at drive personkørsel i Danmark efter politisk aftale om en ny taxilov. (Nyhader) [Uber is shutting down in Denmark after new taxi law did not provide hoped for deregulation (I don't speak Danish)]

EVs

• Super-Safe Glass Battery Charges in Minutes, Not Hours (Nova/PBS)

Parking

• Using Machine Learning to Predict Parking Difficulty Google Maps now tackles parking problems as well. (iot-for-all)

​Subways in Toronto​, 'Trackless-Trams' in Sydney

• Most Scarborough residents will be on the bus longer with subway option, analysis finds (Toronto Star)

• Globe editorial: The Scarborough subway, a boondoggle on rails [The Toronto Globe and Mail]

• 'Game-changer': the public transport plan for Parramatta Road (Sydney Morning Herald) [Trackless-trams are of course, electric buses]

Construction/De-Construction

• “Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US (Ars Technica)

• Omaha’s Answer to Costly Potholes? Go Back to Gravel Roads (NY Times)

• This house was 3D-printed in just 24 hours (Mashable)

• Watch an Army of Dump Trucks Team Up to Repave a Russian Street (Popular Mechanics)

• Nimuno's Lego Tape Turns Anything Into A Lego-Friendly Surface (Daily Dot)

Equity

• Cops confiscate hundreds of illegal e-bikes in Manhattan (amny.com)

• Jaywalking Crackdown: ‘A Tax On Poor People,’ Light-Rail Riders Complain (Phoenix New Times)

History

• Did nomads and their herds carve out the Silk Road? (Futurity)

Miscellany

• Hippocampal and prefrontal processing of network topology to simulate the future​ (Javadi et al. (2017) Nature Communications)

• John Snow’s Grant Application (Epidemiology)

• Convergent con artists: How rove beetles keep evolving into army ant parasites (EurekAlert AAAS)

Pseudo-science

• Two Cities, Two Times ... In May 1965 Saint Paul actually did do daylight saving time differently than Minneapolis. (Evan Roberts streets.mn)

Open Media

• LBRY Saves 20,000 Courses from the ADA (Marginal Revolution)

Previous Editions

• The Transportist – October 2016

• The Transportist – November 2016

• The Transportist – December 2016

• The Transportist: January 2017

• The Transportist: February 2017

This issue brought to you by Independence Day.