Transportist: June 2025
Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow on Mastodon, or RSS. A BlueSky feed is also available.
I will be in China (Xi’an, and then Shenzhen) at the end of June and beginning of July for the 3rd Symposium on Cities and Sustainable Transport, and then Shenzhen. Let me know if you want to connect.
The Troubles with TRB
As loyal readers know, I typically attended the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington DC every January. While TRB is nominally part of the non-profit, independent National Academies, it also receives a lot of funding from the USDOT. In addition to the Annual Meeting for which they are well known, they also have historically supported a lot of US-based research through the Cooperative Research Programs between the federal government and the states.
Unfortunately, it appears that TRB is unlikely to be what it was, and like everything else touched by the current administration, has turned to the opposite of gold.
They have “complied in advance”, and cancelled numerous projects. This has been documented in this Bloomberg article by David Zipper, and discussed by Alex Karner et al. in this Op-Ed and podcast. Alex Karner wrote to me:
“Evidently they thought they had to comply with the executive orders, but the swiftness with which they complied is shocking--cuts to TRB happened way before anything moved at NIH or NSF
Even after the court in VT (I believe) issued a temporary restraining order, stating that compliance with the EOs was not sufficient reason to cancel contracts, they didn't revisit their decisions
All of the TRB contracts have a termination for convenience clause and ultimately that's what they exercised to cancel the Cooperative Research Program projects.”
Now it also appears that TRB has completely dismantled its current researcher-led Committee Structure (according to sources) and will be reforming them. This is not inherently bad, but it does look suspect and rushed and entirely unmotivated by good reasons.
Who even knows at this point what the Annual Meeting looks like? How will Quality Assurance by these new committees be done for what used to be thousands of submissions? Undoubtedly, after it is over, the people who declare things a “success” will declare it a “success”, but really?
For those of us who have to plan in advance, this all seems shaky, so along with the increased risk to students traveling to the US, I probably won’t be attending TRB in 2026 myself, and have heard from others similarly.1
Anti-Research
Relatedly:
On the one hand, I feel for those doing research, and those who would benefit from research. On the other hand, Sean P. Duffy starred in Road Rules, so must be a transport expert and know what he is doing.
Posts
The "Future" is the Enemy of the Present
Planning for the “future” has become an excuse not to act for the here and now. Across cities, infrastructure, and government, long-term visions are used to justify delay, complexity, and inaction. Strategic plans promise transformation decades from now, while basic services fail today. Bureaucracies defend outdated rules in the name of foresight, then fail to adapt when the future arrives differently.
A Real Foundation
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) was never really a foundation. Nor are the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) or the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) endowments. They’re federal agencies. They depend on annual appropriations, political moods, and bureaucratic cycles.
Australian Politics
Congratulations to Australia on an efficient election which resulted in the votes being counted without controversy. (And producing a decision by a civilised 20:30). Yet another international repudiation for the US regime.
More on SUVs and Capacity
Laurie Winkless in Forbes writes: SUVs Make Traffic Worse And Are More Dangerous Than Cars
To come to this conclusion, traffic engineer David Levinson (a Professor at the University of Sydney) and data scientist Dr Yang Gao (from City University of Hong Kong) looked at 25 years of traffic data from the Minneapolis–St. Paul freeway network. “We chose this network because the data has been available in a consistent database structure that's open access and well-maintained, since the 1990s. That’s not something you can say for most highway databases,” says Levinson, speaking over Zoom.
Levinson and Gao focused on trucks – a class of vehicle that includes both SUVs and tractor-trailers. “Numbers of both of these vehicle classes have risen over time, but SUVs have risen at a much, much greater rate over the last 25 years,” says Levinson. “We were able to separate out how much of the rise was due to SUVs versus larger freight-carrying trucks, and then look at their impact on throughput.”
Throughput is defined as the maximum number of vehicles than can move through a lane in one hour – it’s a good measure of how traffic is flowing. In practice, this is measured by loop detectors embedded in the roadway. Levinson and Gao had access to daily traffic data from 564 loop detector stations across the freeway network between 1995 and 2019.
They found that, over the study period, average network throughput decreased from approximately 1850 vehicles per lane per hour to about 1600. At the same time, the number of SUVs on the Twin Cities’ freeways jumped almost tenfold, rising from 3.65% of all highway vehicles in 1995 to 30.8% in 2019.
There was a much smaller increase in the number of tractor-trailers on the roads during that time too, but statistical analysis of the data showed that their impact on traffic flow was dwarfed by that of SUVs.
When asked why SUVs reduce throughput, Levinson says, “Well, first there’s their physical size – they literally take up more space on the road, and it takes them longer to brake because of mass and momentum.” The behavior of other road users also plays a part, “Our data is too aggregated to show this specifically, but it is apparent that because they are taller, vehicles behind SUVs tend to give them more space, which also influences traffic flow.”
Once a lane reaches its maximum capacity, the addition of any vehicles will cause delays and congestion. If those additional vehicles are SUVs or LTVs rather than standard passenger cars, that will have a larger effect on congestion. “SUVs impose a greater delay on the vehicles behind them than do smaller cars,” says Levinson.
Your regular reminder that vehicles are weapons
Wikipedia: List of vehicle-ramming attacks
Child and adult seriously hurt and dozens more injured after car ploughs into Liverpool crowd
11 people killed, more than 20 hurt after SUV rams into Vancouver street festival
Man whose son was killed by Cincinnati police now charged in death of deputy
A man who struck and killed a county deputy with his car Friday is the father of a teen who was shot and killed by a Cincinnati police officer a day earlier as officers were responding to a call about a stolen car, police said. Authorities said the crash appeared to be intentional. …
Mt Pritchard supermarket ram raided and set alight, suspects flee as residents evacuated
Vehicle smashes through Illinois building, killing 4 young people and injuring others
Woman admits targeting crowd in downtown Minneapolis with SUV, killing teen and injuring others (incident from 2024, admission now)
Woman dead, man injured in police shooting in South Melbourne
A police officer shot a woman dead and wounded her male passenger after she drove a car into the senior constable in South Melbourne.
Research by Others
How to Build High-Speed Rail on the Northeast Corridor (from the excellent Transit Costs Project)
Our proposal’s goal is to establish a high-speed rail system on the Northeast Corridor (NEC) between Boston and Washington. As the corridor is also used by commuter trains most of the way, the proposal also includes commuter rail modernization, speeding up the trains and regularizing service frequency. For both intercity and commuter trains, the aim is to use already-committed large spending programs, such as the Gateway tunnel between New Jersey and New York, to redesign service. We then propose lower-budget ancillary projects to take maximum advantage of existing and under-construction infrastructure, prioritizing both speed and reliability.
This way, we believe that an infrastructure program totaling about $12.5 billion and new high-speed trainsets costing about $4.5 billion, both in 2024 prices, are enough to build a high-speed rail network permitting trains to reduce the trip times on the Boston-New York and New York-Washington segments to 1:56 each. Today, Amtrak takes 3:40 and 3:00 on those two segments, respectively. The capacity we plan on permits high-speed trains to run on the NEC every 10 minutes around New York, and every 15 minutes near Boston and Washington.
Remember if stuff costs less, you can have more of it.
News
Nationalisation
Great British Railways is underway, as South Western Railway is renationalised. And we have now gone around the circle twice. Private → Public → Private → Public. Odds on what year this is privatised again? 2045?
Safety
With Auckland Transport racing towards risky speed increases at the behest of the previous Minister of Transport’s Speed Rule, all eyes are on the consequences. These include an increase in risk for everyone on Auckland’s transport network, and a legal risk for those implementing the changes.
Rail
Delivery
Aviation
Environment
Why You Should Care That Congress Might Use the CRA to Overturn California Waivers
Dangerous fungal spores can surf the stratosphere—and survive
Autonomous Vehicles
Waymo says it reached 10 million robotaxi trips, doubling in five months
Waymo plans to double robotaxi production at Arizona plant by end of 2026
Waymo and Toyota are dating — if they get serious, a new autonomous vehicle could be created
Amazon’s Zoox issued a robotaxi software recall after a crash in Las Vegas
Ridesharing
Security
Reliability
A Live Wire on a Sydney Train shut down the western mainline on May 20 and disrupted travel into the next day. [ABC][SMH]
Geology
Stoush over sinkhole threatens to upend M6 motorway [I don’t really understand why, in Australia, contractors, (in this case the contractors are: CPB Contractors (part of CIMIC) and UGL (also part of CIMIC), in a joint venture with Ghella) ,get to walk away from projects, and then expect to get hired again.]
Advocacy
Ken Jennings, who I played and beat multiple times in Quizbowl in the 1990s, and now has some other job, is also doing videos for Community Transit in Washington State: The Transit Effect With Ken Jennings - Ep. 1: The History of Transit. As someone else might say, “Welcome to the War on Cars.”
So sadly I won’t be in DC in January, but instead during a more pleasant time of year.