Transportist: August 2018

Welcome to the August 2018 issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter.

Talks

• I am giving a talk August 09 The Street: Design for People by Foreground, talking about the Footpath of the Future. This is at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Tickets here.

Posts

• Comments on Sydney’s Cycling Strategy and Action Plan 2018-2030

• States announce automated vehicle programs | Government News

• On false positives and false negatives and peer review

• Welcome Emily Moylan to Transport Engineering at the University of Sydney

• A Pedestrian Bill of Rights

  • Antecedents to a Pedestrian Bill of Rights

• What will the footpath of the future look like? [Foreground]

• Additions to the JTLU Editorial Team

Jobs

• Post-doc - Arizona State University

New Books

• Inequality in Transport by David Bannister

• Rethinking America’s Highways: A 21st-Century Vision for Better Infrastructure by Robert W. Poole Jr.

• The End of Driving by Bern Grush and John Niles

News

Automated, Autonomous, Driverless, and Self-Driving Vehicles, and Semi-Autonomous Systems

• Is the Zoox plan for a custom car the path to robotaxi domination? - Brad Templeton

• Uber’s self-driving trucks division is dead, long live Uber self-driving cars - TechCrunch

• Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are driving 25,000 miles every day [8 million total] - TechCrunch

• Connected cars can lie, posing a new threat to smart cities - The Conversation

• Robocar "Shark Tank" issues: Cheap rides, vandalism, jobs, dystopia and more - Brad Templeton

• Uber has terminated its self-driving car operators in Pittsburgh - Quartz

• Driverless cars really do have health and safety benefits, if only people knew - The Conversation

• GM Puts Pieces in Place for Robo-Taxis in San Francisco​ - Bloomberg

• A Robot riding a bicycle, for realz.

Shared Vehicles/Ride-sharing/Ride-hailing/Taxis/Car Sharing

• Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast - streetsblog

• Uber says it hit 10B completed trips across rides and deliveries on June 10 - TechMeme

Electric Vehicles [and Renewable Energy]

• Current system of paying for roads will unfairly benefit Tesla drivers - SMH

Human Powered Vehicles/Bikes/Pedestrians/Scooters/eBikes/etc

• A second dockless bike-share company is exiting D.C. [Mobike ] dc.curbed.com

• Chinese bikeshare company Ofo is shutting down in Seattle amid widespread US layoffs - geekwire

• Two Dockless Bikeshare Companies Have Left D.C., Citing Tight Regulations - WAMU

• New Traffic Signals in London Will to Give Pedestrians the Green Light By Default - Streetsblog

• Bike-sharing company Ofo is dramatically scaling back in North America - Quartz

• How did Seattle’s bike-share pilot go? - Curbed

• 50,000 Old Shared Bikes to be Replaced by New Mobikes

• High-visibility clothing ineffective against driver behavior - Medical Xpress

• Dockless bike sharing coming to Canberra as other cities struggle with discarded cycles - ABC

• Two-wheel takeover: bikes outnumber cars for the first time in Copenhagen - The Guardian

• Singapore is giving its senior citizens the power to hold up traffic - Quartz

• Electric scooter rentals debut in Twin Cities - MPR

• Hong Kong bike-sharing start-up Gobee.bike goes bust from losses and high maintenance costs - South China Morning Post

• Bikesharing company ofo cycles out of Australia - ABC

• Curb Cuts - 99% Invisible

• Lyft Follows Uber Into Bike-Sharing Lane, Buying Owner of CitiBike [Motivate] - NY Times

Human Driven Vehicles, Signs, Signals, Sensors, and Markings, and Roads

• Democrats in power always overplay their hand The proposition to repeal the gas tax is a backlash to the Democratic Party's hubris. [If raising gas taxes is this hard, imagine road pricing. So depressing.] -- latimes.com

Transit

• Dublin: A New Bus Network for a More Liberated City - Jarrett Walker

• These Are the American Cities Where Transit Access to Jobs Is Getting Better - Streetsblog

• Study finds transit access to jobs rises, thanks to A-Line [Minneapolis] - StarTribune

• Why Are Canadian Construction Costs So High? - Alon Levy

• Can Andy Byford Save the Subways? - New Yorker

​Land Use/Architecture

• Evolving Floorplans Evolving Floorplans joelsimon.net

• Here's How America Uses Its Land - Bloomberg

• Two Perspectives On The Housing Crisis: Affordable Housing vs Housing Affordability - streets.mn

Justice/Equity

• TSA is tracking regular travelers like terrorists in secret surveillance program - bostonglobe.com

• Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras - NY Times

• Judge: Tennessee can't revoke driver's licenses from people who can't pay court costs - the Tennesseean

Kerbs and Sidewalks

• Cashing In on the Curb Smart cities are paying more attention to the fixtures that define their streets, looking to improve mobility and maximize the value of these assets. governing.com

• American Cities Are Squandering Some of Their Most Valuable Real Estate: the Curb - Henry Grabar, Slate

Retail, Freight, Waste, and Logistics

• What I learned from a Taipei alley - [Trash doesn't touch the ground, garbage trucks come around playing 'Für Elise' and people deposit their trash directly.] - Eugene Wei.

• America’s largest supermarket chain [Kroger] is launching a fully driverless delivery service - The Verge

Technology History

• What's the Purpose of Mass Transit? - Part 4 - What's the Underlying Goal of Transportation? - [Nixon's Governmental Reorg Proposal] - Jeff Davis, Eno

• The Evolution of the Interstate - Geotab

• The Evolution of Victoria's Railways - Steve Pemberton

• Bradfield, 75 years on – part 1: the Science of Engineering - Alex Gooding, Strategic Matters

Research & Data

by Us

• Zhu, Shanjiang and Levinson, D. (2018) An Agent-based Route Choice Model with Learning and Exchange of Information. Urban Science. 2(3), 58 [doi] (open access)

• Janson, M. and Levinson, D. (2018) Choice of High Occupancy/Toll Lanes Under Alternative Pricing Strategies. Journal of the Transportation Research Board: Transportation Research Record. [doi]

by Others

• Comparing City Street Orientations - Geoff Boeing

• Visualizing street orientations on an interactive map - Mapbox

• ‘Everything we’ve heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong’ [Many more people live in cities once definitions are standardized] -- This is Place

• Dionysius Lardner, the denigrated sage of early railways. By Andrew Odlyzko

Books

• Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus (2018) by David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.

• Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. (2018) By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen.

• Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport (2016) by David Levinson.

• The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape. (2017) By David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.

• The Transportation Experience: Second Edition Garrison, William and Levinson, David (2014)