Transportist: September 2025

Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow me on Mastodon, BlueSky, or RSS.

CONFERENCES

• Mpact Transit + Community (formerly Rail~Volution) October 26-29, 2025 Portland, Oregon

• My slides from my Web of Nets BTR presentation last month can be found here.

PODCASTS

• I was interviewed by Emily @ CompassIOT for their Byte Size Podcast: Mobility Isn’t Enough, We Need Better Accessibility

• I was interviewed by Ian Buck @ Streets.MN for An Oral History of Streets.mn

RESEARCH

• Valuing Travel Time and Reliability from Emerging Connected Vehicle Data

• Communication-free Distributed Control Algorithm for autonomous vehicles at intersections

• ICYMI: Findings Press August 2025

Figure 4: Route observation (top) and route generation (bottom) methods compared. The route observation method defines isodistance zones around the trip’s start and end points. Alternate routes travelling between these zones constitute the route set, which includes both tolled and untolled routes. In contrast, the route generation method specifies alternative routes that originate and terminate at the exact same locations as the observed trip; however, these alternative routes may differ from those observed in the connected vehicle data.

POSTS

• Old People Shouldn’t Drive

• A Transport Media Diet

LINKS

• Fire and Trains

  • The safety issue holding up the reopening of the Bankstown Line as Metro is the lack of $30M in fire hydrants. I assume it operated without hydrants on the platform previously (without incident?). Meanwhile people are subject to real on-road risks.

  • E-bike on Train Ban coming to Sydney (e-bikes still present an actual fire risk. The NIMBYs should figure out a way for the immigrant labour force with e-bikes living in the outer suburbs to securely store bikes in the inner suburbs so the DoorDash users can get their soggy food delivered quickly without having to solve the housing problem.)

• Technological Substitution

  • No mail for Denmark

  • No printed newspaper for Atlanta

• Externalities

  • You can monitor Noise in Brussels in real time

• Cars and Roads

  • Road User Charging moving ahead in NZ

  • Indian Highways are doing an IPO. Own the road.

  • ADAS requires human intervention every 9 minutes

  • Ford’s new way to build cars

• Future Infrastructure

  • NYT Visualisation of New York’s IBX

  • USDOT permanently suspends perpetual environmental review of proposed but never to be built DC to Baltimore Maglev.

  • Queensland government dumps Gold Coast light rail stage four

  • Woollahra Station on Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs line to be opened probably …. Government claims 10000 housing units to be created. I hope so, but will believe it when I see it. Will Thorpe in CityHub asks: Should Woollahra Station be opened? My neutral-ish take from just before the announcement, but after it was more or less leaked:

COMPLETION OF STATION HAS POTENTIAL BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS

David Levinson is Professor of Transport in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney. He said that it is “not obvious” whether or not opening the station would be beneficial, with the answer depending “on what happens.”

“An additional station increases access for those near the station, and slows down travel for everyone else,” Professor Levinson told City Hub. “How that nets out depends on the level of development.”

He noted that the Woollahra station site is a mere 900 metres from Edgecliffe station, and a kilometre from Bondi Junction. This would give trains little if any time travelling at track speed before they would have to decelerate.

“An eight-carriage train itself is about 160 metres long, as a point of comparison.”

OTHER STATIONS ARE NEARBY

It takes about fifteen minutes to walk from the site to Bondi Junction, and slightly more to reach Edgecliffe. “Still, more people will take transit if they are only 400 metres away rather than 800 metres away,” Levinson noted.

With a sufficient increase in employment or population density around the site, the benefit for new travellers would outweigh the extra travel time for those headed to or from Bondi Junction, he said.

He said that Bondi Junction would lose some ridership to Woollahra, and also “because some travellers are now on the margin of taking the train or driving or riding a bike or a bus, and this increase in travel time would cause them to switch modes.”

“Woollahra would gain more ridership than Bondi Junction would lose, if the development were sufficiently dense.” If not, Levinson believes that opening the station would cause ridership to decline.

“Given the location, there might even be opportunities for air rights development, which could minimise disruption to the neighbouring community.”

He called on the Government to disclose how they would justify the station’s opening, should they decide to proceed with it.

GENERAL ADVICE

• All meetings are interviews.

• All interviews are just practice for the next interview.

• All presentation are job talks.

• All job talks are just practice for the next job talk.

• All presentations have a fixed amount of time but an unlimited number of slides(space). Don’t waste time, but use space effectively.