The Transportist: September 2017

Welcome to the September 2017 issue of The Transportist. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter.

Announcements

• Spontaneous Access, now in Print.

  

Transportist Posts

• How you want your books

• A Busful of Knowledge: On Going from the University of Sydney to the University of New South Wales

• Infrastructure Spending Done Right

• Warranties and Indemnities …

Media Appearances

• Seminar: The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap for the New Transport Landscape

• Is Infrastructure Spending Good for the Economy? It’s Complicated - Streetsblog

Transport News

Transit

• Short Trip

• Farewell, competitive commuting: TfL paints zones where tube doors open - The Guardian

Roads

• Sidewalk Labs | Traffic Signals: Catalyst of Car-Driven Cities Traffic lights did make city intersections safer for cars, but they came at the expense of pedestrian freedom. - Sidewalk Labs

• Saudi Arabia Agrees to Let Women Drive - NY Times [I tend to think the progressive solution would be to prohibit men from driving to equalize things, and save lives]

AVs

• Autonomous Cars Don't Have a 'Trolley Problem' Problem In a you-versus-them scenario, there's only one choice the self-driving car can make. - Alex Roy

• How More Self-Driving Cars Could Make Traffic Worse And Cost Us More Money - HuffPo

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

• Google Has Spent Over $1.1 Billion on Self-Driving Tech - IEEE Tech

• Autonomous Cars: The Level 5 Fallacy – Monday Note by Jean-Louis Gassée mondaynote.com

• How we built the first real self-driving car (really) - Cruise

• Full transcript: Self-driving car engineer Chris Urmson on Recode Decode

• India rejects driverless cars to save jobs Transport minister says the country will not be developing autonomous cars in order to protect jobs. BBC

• Don't fear the future: Congress just did something good on promoting driverless cars - AEI

• Group of 17 Apple Auto Engineers Join Startup Zoox - Bloomberg

CVs

• Danger Ahead: The Government’s Plan for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Threatens Privacy - eff

EVs / Energy

• US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in just one year - RenewEconomy

• Tesla Boosts Car Battery Power During Irma, Raising Questions of Control - NY Times

• Mercedes-Benz will electrify its entire car lineup by 2022 - TechCrunch

HPVs / Bikes

• Mobike debuts bike sharing in Washington, reflecting latest move in arms race with Ofo - SCMP

• Build it and they will come? - The Guardian

• Bike-share locks meet industry standards, but were no match for Baltimore thieves, manufacturer says - Baltimore Sun

• Bike Sharing Atlas - bikesharingatlas.org

• Toward Micromobility: The Low End Disruption of Transportation - Horace Dediu slideshare.net

• Beijing bans new sharing bikes - BBC

• As Bike-Sharing Brings Out Bad Manners, China Asks, What’s Wrong With Us? - NY Times

• People take to their bikes when we make it safer and easier for them - The Conversation (Melanie Crane et al.)

• The battle for Australia's footpaths: Nationals senator pushes for scooter speed clampdown - SMH

• OpEd: The Unintended Consequences Of Bicycle Helmets We should encourage people to cycle, not scare them away. medpagetoday.com

SVs / Taxis

• Uber threatens to leave Quebec, if ... - CBC

• Understanding Uber: It's not about the App - London Reconnections

• Australian taxi industry calls for Uber review following London ban - SMH

• Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s memo to staff: he’s ‘disappointed’ by the London ban Here’s his memo to the staff about London’s ban - ReCode

• Lyft thinks it can fix Los Angeles traffic with fewer lanes - Engadget

• Alphabet Said to Be in Talks to Invest About $1 Billion in Lyft - WSJ

• Taxi Medallions, Once a Safe Investment, Now Drag Owners Into Debt - NY Times

• Uber taxis petrol-bombed in Sandton timeslive.co.za

• Car-sharing startup Turo raised another $92 million to help people pay for their dream cars - Quartz

• Car subscription services to take 1 of 5 sales by 2023 - Green Car Reports

Canals/Shipping/Maritime

• Second-Class Puerto Rico: Trump declines to waive the Jones Act for hurricane relief. - WSJ

Land Use

• Sidewalk Labs weighs up how to run its own Alphabet City - FT

• Is Melbourne already bigger than Sydney? It would only take a modest statistical tweak to make Melbourne number 1 - SMH

Equity / Justice

• Access denied: wheelchair metro maps versus everyone else's - The Guardian

• Officer named in Georgia Tech shooting - AJC

• US people of color still more likely to be exposed to pollution than white people - The Guardian

• Air Pollution Levels in Barcelona Rise During Public Transport Strikes - IS Global

Safety

• Some of the best parts of autonomous vehicles are already here - Lee Vinsel and Costa Samaras at The Conversation

• The Invisible Route - Where you can travel and not be tracked - Maarten Inghels

Fantasy

no hyperloop news this month

Retail​ / Delivery

• ​You’re Using Foursquare All the Time. You Just Don’t Know It - Bloomberg

• The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing - The Atlantic

• Why the Future Could Mean Delivery Straight Into Your Fridge - WalMart

• One Surprise Standout for Uber: Food Delivery Despite a late start, the company’s foray into delivering food, a cutthroat $100 billion-plus service industry, eclipses ride hailing in some markets. - NYTimes

Etymology

• Trending: 'Bodega' Startup Draws Criticism, Mockery A lesson in not reinventing the wheel (or corner store). merriam-webster.com

• The Closing of a Great American Dialect Project - New Yorker [Where is Parking Ramp preferred to Parking Garage, DARE will tell you]

Aviation and Space

• Investigation launched into flight chaos caused by air traffic control outage - SMH

• Australia commits to establish space agency with no budget, plan, name, deadline - The Register UK

Isochrones

• A new kind of map: it’s about time - Peter Liu @ MapBox

Science

• Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty - Scott Alexander @SlateStarCodex

• The sun just belched out the strongest solar flare in 12 years - New Scientist

• Engineering journal removes article co-authored by former president of Iran - retractionwatch.com

• Super-Accurate GPS Chips Coming to Smartphones in 2018 - Spectrum IEEE

Research

By Us

• A model of two-destination choice in trip chains with GPS data

• Justice, Exclusion, and Equity: An Analysis of 48 U.S. Metropolitan Areas

• Safety in Numbers and Safety in Congestion for Bicyclists and Motorists at Urban Intersections

• Spatiotemporal Short-term Traffic Forecasting using the Network Weight Matrix and Systematic Detrending

• Traffic Flow Variation and Network Structure

• Accessibility Oriented Development

• The Healthiest vs. Greenest Path: Comparing the Effects of Internal and External Costs of Motor Vehicle Pollution on Route Choice

Previous Issues

• The Transportist: October 2016

• The Transportist: November 2016

• The Transportist: December 2016

• The Transportist: January 2017

• The Transportist: February 2017

• The Transportist: March 2017

• The Transportist: April 2017

• The Transportist: May 2017

• The Transportist: June 2017

• The Transportist: July 2017

• The Transportist: August 2017