Transportist: September 2024
Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow on Mastodon or RSS.
Research
Research by Others
This new paper is really good
Tavakoli, Zahra, Shabnam Abdollahi, E. Owen D. Waygood, Antonio Páez, and Geneviève Boisjoly (2024) Traffic danger’s potential impact on children’s accessibility. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment. Volume 135, October 2024, 104370
It reminds me of this
Murphy, B., & Owen, A. (2019). Implementing low-stress bicycle routing in national accessibility evaluation. Transportation Research Record, 2673(5), 240-249.
Posts
The Conversation: 50 cents, 0 cents, 1 question: how much can fare cuts boost public transport use?
Links
Aviation
Rex [airline] strengths were secrets taken to the grave From the article: “Rex’s 737 services were good value, punctual, never crowded and the in-flight service was warm and friendly.” Never crowded may be good for the traveler in the short run. It is however bad for the airline.
Energy
Imaginary Futuristic B*****t
Toyota’s Woven City (Toyota wants to be a mobility company rather than a car company).
Climeworks Direct Air Capture and Storage . Human activity emits about 35,000,000,000 billion tonnes of CO2 annually. DACS facilities currently reduce in the 1,000s. So we need on the order 1,000,000X scaling up for this to fully accommodate human emissions, or less if humans actually reduce emissions, leaving aside removing historic emissions. This is a tall problem.
Social Science
What If Social Scientists Had Reviewed Great Scientific Works of the Past? David Trafimow, Stephen Rice, 2009
EVs
China is done with global carmakers: Thanks for Coming” [China will be at 50% new car EV sales this year.]
Australia to export Solar Power to Singapore via a long cable.
AVs
Robotaxis are worrying China’s ride-hailing drivers as permits pick up the pace [“Eastern Pioneer Driving School has more than halved its instructor number since 2019 to about 900. Instead, it has teachers at a Beijing control center remotely monitoring students in 610 cars equipped with computer-instruction tools.”]
Waymo cars honk at each other at 4AM every night in this San Francisco lot
Waymo hits 100k rides per week. [But somehow, people still think AVs are vaporware. It’s a large complicated system that will take decades to fully deplay, like cars themselves].
Traffic Control