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Table of Contents
Transportation
Information about Transportation
Articles
Off-Peak Public Transport Usage
2019/12/26
Earlier this year, I slowly stumbled across something that I don’t think is well-known in comparative public transportation: European cities have much higher public transport ridership than someone experienced with American patterns would guess from their modal splits. From another direction, Europe has much lower mode share than one would guess from ridership. The key here is that the mode share I’m comparing is for work trips, and overall ridership includes all trip purposes. This strongly suggests that non-work public transportation usage is much higher in European than in American cities even when the usage level for work trips is comparable. Moreover, the reason ought to be better off-peak service in Europe, rather than other factors like land use or culture, since the comparison holds for New York and not only for truly auto-oriented American cities.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/12/26/off-peak-public-transport-usage/
Modes of Transportation, Ranked From Coolest to Least Cool
Sam Rutherford - 4 May 2020
Even in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, rollerblading isn’t very cool.
See, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking out my window (as one tends to do during The Quarantine), watching as the occasional jogger or delivery person with a pizza strapped to the back of their bike rides by. This got me thinking. I’m not a huge fan of running (bad knees) and I don’t own a bike, so I figured the next best thing would be to go out on rollerblades. I’ve played hockey for more than 20 years, and considering the difficulty of playing basketball while maintaining social distancing, I thought now might be a good time to get some solo skating practice in. Boy, was I wrong.
https://gizmodo.com/modes-of-transportation-ranked-from-coolest-to-least-c-1843048803
Ford's Big Nugget is a tiny home built inside a Transit cargo van — see inside the 4-'room' vehicle.
14-Year-Old Inventor Solves Blind Spots
Alaina Gassler, a 14-year-old inventor from West Grove, Pennsylvania, came up with a clever way to eliminate the blind spot created by the thick pillars on the side of a car's windshield. All it requires is some relatively inexpensive and readily available tech available at an electronics store. Gizmodo reports:
Her solution involves installing an outward-facing webcam on the outside of a vehicle's windshield pillar, and then projecting a live feed from that camera onto the inside of that pillar. Custom 3D-printed parts allowed her to perfectly align the projected image so that it seamlessly blends with what a driver sees through the passenger window and the windshield, essentially making the pillar invisible. Gassler's invention isn't quite ready to be installed in vehicles across the country just yet, but the technologies already exist that would allow it to be implemented in cars without serving as a distraction to the driver. Short-throw projectors could be installed at the base of the passenger side windshield pillar to create the image without having to worry about the passenger blocking the beam. And many cars have already replaced side mirrors with cameras, or include nearly invisible cameras in the rear for safely backing up, so adding one more on the side of the pillar would presumably be trivial.
Gassler won the top prize for her invention at this year's Society for Science and the Public's Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology, and Engineering for Rising Stars) science and engineering competition.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/11/01/2241213/14-year-old-inventor-solves-blind-spots
Lightyear One solar car sets record for world’s most aerodynamic car
Posted on October 30, 2019 by Bridie Schmidt
Dutch solar car company Lightyear says it has achieved a record score for aerodynamics for its 5-seater Lightyear One while undergoing wind tunnel tests in Turin, Italy.
https://thedriven.io/2019/10/30/lightyear-one-solar-car-sets-record-for-worlds-most-aerodynamic-car/
New Atlas: On the move in 2019: The wackiest ways to travel from A to B
Lun-class ekranoplan
The Lun-class ekranoplan is a ground effect vehicle (GEV) designed by Rostislav Evgenievich Alexeyev in 1975 and used by the Soviet and Russian navies from 1987 until sometime in the late 1990s.
It flew using the lift generated by the ground effect of its large wings when within about four metres (13 ft) above the surface of the water. Although they might look similar to regular aircraft, and have related technical characteristics, ekranoplans like the Lun are not aircraft, seaplanes, hovercraft, nor hydrofoils. Rather, “ground effect” is a distinct technology. The International Maritime Organization classifies these vehicles as maritime ships.
How four European cities are embracing micromobility to drive out cars
A look at urban transformation in Paris, Barcelona, London and Milan
Natasha Lomas, Romain Dillet / 2:47 AM PST•November 20, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic is acting as a catalyst for urban transformation across Europe as city authorities grapple with how to manage urban mobility without risking citizens’ health or inviting gridlock by letting cars flood in. Micromobility and local commerce are being seen as both short and long-term solutions for urban revival in a number of cases. We’ve run down key policy developments in four major cities, Paris, Barcelona, London and Milan, which — at varying speeds — are pushing to rethink and reclaim streets for feet and two wheels.
China stops networked vehicle data going offshore under new infosec rules
Hands-off driving detectors required, over-the-air updates to be strictly regulated
Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor - Fri 13 Aug 2021 / 06:58 UTC
China has drafted new rules required of its autonomous and networked vehicle builders. Data security is front and centre in the rules, with manufacturers required to store data generated by cars – and describing their drivers – within China. Data is allowed to go offshore, but only after government scrutiny. Manufacturers are also required to name a chief of network security, who gets the job of ensuring autonomous vehicles can't fall victim to cyber attacks. Made-in-China auto-autos are also required to be monitored to detect security issues. Over-the-air upgrades are another requirement, with vehicle owners to be offered verbose information about the purpose of software updates, the time required to install them, and the status of upgrades.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/china_networked_car_rules/
Engineers Should Not Design Streets
September 7, 2021
I stole this title, Engineers Should Not Design Streets from a Strong Towns article. I thought I would give another perspective.
I am a software engineer (also commonly called a programmer.) Building software involves many different roles. Different companies have different roles and different names for roles, but a typical set up for me involves software engineers, product managers, and UX designers. Each role has their own strengths and their own skin-in-the-game. The product managers identifies the needs of the user and dictates what we should build. The UX designers determine the look-and-feel of the product - the layout, different screens, wording, images, branding, etc. The software engineers do the actual implementation - they solve the technical problems needed to build the product. This is usually not a one way flow of command - the engineers get involved early and influence the product based on technical feasibility, or the UX designers can find that a particular feature does not resonate when shown to a user research panel. We work as a team and each person has their role to play.
When it comes to performance reviews, each role is rated differently; product managers have skin-in-the-game to make products that users actually want to use, UX designers are rated based on how well they were able to design something that was both elegant and resonated with users, and software engineers are rated based on the execution and technical difficulties they overcame. A product can be an absolute flop with users, but there might have been many difficult technical challenges that were overcame by the engineers to build it, that the product manager receives a bad performance review while the engineers gets promoted, or vice versa if the product was a success but trivial to build.
Now we understand that each role has their own strengths (a jack of all trades is a master of none) and also their own value system. Everyone wants the product to be successful, but the top priority for the UX designer is likely to build beautiful things, and for the software engineer it is likely to solve technical problems.
In the software world (most commonly in the video game world), when you let software engineers design the visuals, we call it “programmer art”. Often, programmer art refers to the placeholder graphics that come before the artists are able to produce the nice graphics of the end product.
Micromobility
Why micromobility may emerge from the pandemic stronger than before
Megan Rose Dickey / 7:30 am PDT May 20, 2020
Since its inception, shared micromobility services have been in a precarious position — one supported by millions of dollars in venture capital. But the COVID-19 pandemic has brought even more turmoil upon an industry that has long struggled with unit economics. It has led to mass layoffs, operation shutdowns across several markets and more consolidation.
Despite the struggles of individual operators, micromobility as technology will come out of this stronger than before, industry analyst Horace Dediu tells TechCrunch.
Acton’s latest acquisition hints at the future of docked micromobility
Rebecca Bellan - 6:00 AM PST February 10, 2022
The term “shared micromobility” often calls to mind that Lime e-bike on the nearest street corner or the Voi e-scooter parked next to the bus stop, either of which could on any given day be standing upright or knocked over onto the pavement. In fact, dockless vehicles have become so normalized that they’re almost synonymous with the idea of scooter and bike shares. That might be changing.
Acton, a U.S. startup that provides electric micromobility vehicles and the cloud-based software infrastructure to run shared fleets for cities and operators, has just acquired Duckt, an Estonian docking and charging infrastructure startup, a move that Acton says will help it to beef up its product offerings, especially for cities.
The company, which has partnered with hundreds of cities and shared operators around the world, wants to offer customers more of an end-to-end product and sees an opportunity to add a bit of order to the chaos of the dockless vehicles today and gain back some operational expenses that are spent finding and charging vehicles in the wild.
Scientific study shows how much traffic increases when e-bikes and e-scooters are banned
Micah Toll - Oct. 31st 2022 2:50 am PT
A study published last week in the scientific journal Nature Energy studied the effects of traffic and travel time in a city when micromobility options like electric scooters and e-bikes are banned. The results documented exactly how much traffic increased as a result of people switching back to personal cars instead of smaller, more urban-appropriate vehicles.
How e-bike use affects traffic
The study, titled “Impacts of micromobility on car displacement with evidence from a natural experiment and geofencing policy,” was performed using data collected in Atlanta. The study was made possible due to the city’s sudden ban on shared micromobility devices at night. That ban provided a unique opportunity to compare traffic levels and travel times before and after the policy change.
The ban occurred on August 9, 2019, and restricted use of shared e-bikes and e-scooters in the city between the hours of 9 p.m. and 4 a.m.
The study’s authors used high-resolution data from June 25, 2019, to September 22, 2019, from Uber Movement to measure changes in evening travel times before and after the policy implementation. That created a window of analysis of 45 days with and without shared e-bike and e-scooter use at night.
Impacts of micromobility on car displacement with evidence from a natural experiment and geofencing policy
Omar Isaac Asensio, Camila Z. Apablaza, M. Cade Lawson, Edward W. Chen & Savannah J. Horner - 27 October 2022
Micromobility, such as electric scooters and electric bikes—an estimated US$300 billion global market by 2030—will accelerate electrification efforts and fundamentally change urban mobility patterns. However, the impacts of micromobility adoption on traffic congestion and sustainability remain unclear. Here we leverage advances in mobile geofencing and high-resolution data to study the effects of a policy intervention, which unexpectedly banned the use of scooters during evening hours with remote shutdown, guaranteeing near perfect compliance. We test theories of habit discontinuity to provide statistical identification for whether micromobility users substitute scooters for cars. Evidence from a natural experiment in a major US city shows increases in travel time of 9–11% for daily commuting and 37% for large events. Given the growing popularity of restrictions on the use of micromobility devices globally, cities should expect to see trade-offs between micromobility restrictions designed to promote public safety and increased emissions associated with heightened congestion.
Accident
Erin Sagen Car accidents cause death, injury and trauma. Why do we shrug them off?
Americans are in total collective denial about how lethal our car dependency is. We have to stop normalizing the suffering caused by cars.
Oct. 24, 2021, 1:30 AM PDT - By Erin Sagen
Americans don’t always fear the things we should.
This summer, my dad visited us every week in the Pacific Northwest to play with the grandkids, and every week I could predict what his complaints would be: The record-breaking heat in the area was aggravating him, as was the chronic pain in his back — a deep ache still lingering from a major car accident two years ago. The common cause in these events was not lost on me.
When it comes to car accidents, we’ve mostly shrugged our shoulders and accepted the carnage as an unavoidable fact of life.
The threat car emissions pose to the environment gets some attention. But what we Americans are still in total collective denial about is how lethal our car dependency already is. Every year, nearly 40,000 people die in crashes, and at least another 3.3 million are seriously injured. Cars put us in clear, imminent danger every day, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized: Motor vehicle traffic is a leading cause of death for children, well ahead of firearms or drownings. Among adults, Black and brown people are more likely to die or be injured by cars than white people are.
More than 20,000 people died on US roads in the first half of 2021
Vehicle miles traveled increased, but not enough to offset the rise in deaths.
Jonathan M. Gitlin - 11/1/2021, 11:44 AM
The United States registered its greatest-ever six-month rise in traffic deaths for the first half of 2021. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has just published its early estimate for the months of January-June for this year, and the numbers are grim reading. During the first half of the year, 20,160 people died on US roads, an increase of 18.4 percent compared to the same six months of (an already very deadly) 2020.
As we've noted previously, Americans started driving more riskily during 2020 than ever. Although the pandemic resulted in a decrease in the total number of vehicle miles traveled in 2020, the total number of deaths actually increased.
The mass availability of highly effective vaccines and nationwide loosening of public health restrictions saw a big rise in vehicle miles traveled for the first half of 2021—an increase of 173.1 billion miles (278.6 billion km) versus the same six months of 2020.
Highways
Please stop adding more lanes to busy highways—it doesn’t help
Why do highway planners refuse to accept that more lanes means more traffic? Jonathan M. Gitlin - 8/27/2021, 9:20 AM You often hear people say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I bring this up because of an interesting—if infuriating—thread I read this morning about Texas' plan to widen I-35 as it cuts through the heart of Austin. Unsurprisingly, the state wants to build more lanes, which it thinks will ease congestion. At some points, this could leave I-35 as much as 20 lanes wide; this will require bulldozing dozens of businesses along the way. An alternative that would have buried 12 lanes of the highway in two levels of underground tunnels was apparently considered too costly. But it would be wrong to single out this 8-mile proposal as an outlier. In Houston, the state plans to widen I-45 despite plenty of opposition, including from the Federal Highway Administration. And you don't have to look far to see other state governments wanting to build new roads to reduce congestion.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/08/please-stop-adding-more-lanes-to-busy-highways-it-doesnt-help/
New Tolling Systems Are Poised To Hit Highways
Posted by msmash on Thursday September 16, 2021 10:25AM Electric vehicles might be good for the environment, but they're terrible for state budgets, which depend on fuel taxes to pay for road maintenance. So states like Oregon and Utah are experimenting with new road user fees – known as “vehicle mileage taxes” or VMTs – that reflect changing mobility trends. From a report:
By charging drivers for the miles they drive – instead of taxing the gas they use – states can ensure that everyone pays their fair share for public roads. But some drivers might wind up paying more than they do now, and the preliminary technology involved is raising privacy concerns.
https://slashdot.org/story/21/09/16/1657237/new-tolling-systems-are-poised-to-hit-highways
Hitting the Books: How Los Angeles became a 'Freewaytopia'
The city of angels wouldn't be the town it is today without them.
Andrew Tarantola - October 9th, 2021
Some 515 miles of freeway snake through greater Los Angeles, connecting its 10 million residents from Sylmar in the north all the way down to the shores of San Pedro. Since the opening of the Arroyo Seco Parkway in 1940, have proven vital to the region but their construction has not come without significant social costs — neighborhoods razed, residents displaced, entire communities cleaved in twain by the sprawling transportation infrastructure. In his latest book, Freewaytopia: How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles, author Paul Haddad takes readers on a whirlwind tour through the history and lore of Los Angeles' sprawling highway system. In the excerpt below, we take a look at the 110 Harbor Freeway where the first live traffic updates via helicopter took place.
Over the next four years, the Harbor Freeway began to coalesce. Press alerts went out with each new off-ramp as they came online: Olympic. Washington. Slauson. Almost all were accompanied by the kind of theatricality that defined the era. One of the dedications featured a shapely model named Ann Bradford, who wore a sash emblazoned with the words “Miss Freeway Link”—certainly one of the clunkier female honorifics dreamed up by a Chamber of Commerce. Even the freeway’s old nemesis, Kenneth Hahn, couldn’t resist attending the 124th Street opening. At the ribbon-cutting on September 25, 1958, Hahn boasted that the freeway—now stretching ten miles—was already L.A.’s second-busiest after the Hollywood Freeway. When it’s completed, he said, it will carry more traffic than “any street, highway, or freeway in the world.”
Hoverboard
DGL Group
93,000 Hoverboards Recalled Over Safety Concerns
The Hover-1 Superfly boards are being pulled for a dangerous software malfunction that can keep them moving even when a rider wants to stop or stay still.
Lauren Leffer - 19 May 2022 5:05PM
f you experienced deja vu reading that headline, there’s good reason. The proliferation of so-called “hoverboards” (i.e. self-balancing scooters) has come with lots of safety issues and recalls. This time, at least, the boards aren’t spontaneously combusting.
On Thursday, DGL Group, the distributor of the Hover-1 Superfly Hoverboard, asked owners to stop using the scooters. The New Jersey-based company has issued a safety recall of 93,000 hoverboards manufactured in China, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
https://gizmodo.com/hover-1-superfly-boards-recall-hoverboard-scooter-b-1848951113
I-90 Bulge
I-90 - Bulge
WalterBright on Sept 7, 2020
In Seattle, the old I90 floating bridge across Lake Washington had a “bulge” where a section of the roadway could be pushed into the bulge to make room for boat passage. When the section was retracted, the highway abruptly ended, and a barrier was put up.
The Bulge was infamous for traffic accidents where you suddenly had to swerve right then left then right at highway speed, with narrow lanes lined with concrete walls. This was a challenge for my old car with its loosey goosey suspension. I remember news radio at the time would report on another “flamer” at The Bulge.
Time moves on, and it was time to replace the bridge with a modern, safe one. The construction crew was astonished to find a car at the bottom where the highway abruptly ended when the bridge was retracted. In it was a woman who had been missing for 20 or 30 years. It was a famous case when she went missing, and people searched everywhere for her, including forests where psychics claimed she was.
Apparently, she was simply driving one night, didn't realize that the bridge was out, drove through the barrier into the water and nobody noticed.
Traffic
U.S. Traffic Deaths Spiked in 2020, Even as People Stayed Off the Road
Ed Cara - 5 March 2021 1:50PM
The covid-19 pandemic had a surprising effect on road fatalities in 2020, new data released this week suggests. Despite people staying at home more and driving less overall, more than 42,000 Americans were estimated to have been killed during a car crash last year—a higher death toll than seen in 2019. It’s likely that increased reckless driving was to blame.
On Thursday, the National Safety Council, a long-running nonprofit organization focused on public and occupational safety, released its latest report on motor vehicle fatalities. According to their report, which relies on mortality data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 42,060 people were killed by a motor vehicle in 2020. That’s a number 8% higher than the 39,107 deaths estimated in 2019, and the first yearly increase seen in four years. In raw numbers, 2020 was the deadliest year in motor vehicle deaths since 2007. There were also 4.8 million people seriously injured by cars last year, along with an estimated $474 billion in societal costs.
https://gizmodo.com/u-s-traffic-deaths-spiked-in-2020-even-as-people-stay-1846416419
Traffic congestion dropped by 73 percent in 2020 due to the pandemic
US drivers averaged 73 fewer hours in traffic in 2020 because of the pandemic.
Jonathan M. Gitlin - 3/9/2021, 8:34 AM
In 2020, the average US driver spent 26 hours stuck in traffic. While that's still more than a day, it's a steep decline from pre-pandemic times; in 2019 the average American sacrificed 99 hours to traffic jams. Around the world, it's a similar story. German drivers averaged an identical 26 hours of traffic in 2020, down from 46 the year before. In the UK, 2019 sounded positively awful, with 115 hours in traffic jams. At least one thing improved for that island nation in 2020: its drivers only spent 37 hours stationary in their cars.
This data was all collected by traffic analytics company Inrix for its 2020 Global Traffic Scorecard that tracks mobility across more than 1,000 different cities around the world based on travel times, miles traveled, trip characteristics, and the effect of crashes on congestion in each city.
Traffic bounces back in year two of the pandemic, minus the commuters
COVID continues to kill congestion from commuters, but that effect is waning.
Jonathan M. Gitlin - 12/7/2021, 8:10 AM
As we head toward the end of the second year of a global pandemic, the effect of COVID-19 on road traffic around the world is clear. Congestion has begun to return, though not everywhere, and not to 2019 levels. Traffic patterns have changed, too, with more traffic popping up in the middle of the day as commuters continue to stay away from the office. That's according to the 2021 Inrix Global Traffic Scorecard, an annual report prepared by the traffic analytics company.
Here in the US, Chicago and New York are the worst cities for traffic, with their drivers giving up 104 hours and 102 hours of their lives respectively to congestion in 2021. Inrix actually ranks New York as number one in the country due to the higher costs traffic imposes on the city, despite the fact that Chicagoans spent an extra couple of hours behind the wheel. However, traffic in both cities remains almost 30 percent down from pre-pandemic levels.
Other cities have yet to show as much recovery. Washington DC stands out, with traffic still 65 percent lower than in 2019, which translates to 80 fewer hours in traffic per person.
Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?
With billions of dollars available to improve transportation infrastructure, states have a chance to try new strategies for addressing congestion. But some habits are hard to break.
Eden Weingart - Jan. 6, 2023
Interstate 710 in Los Angeles is, like the city itself, famous for its traffic. Freight trucks traveling between the city and the port of Long Beach, along with commuters, clog the highway. The trucks idle in the congestion, contributing to poor air quality in surrounding neighborhoods that are home to over one million people.
The proposed solution was the same one transportation officials across the country have used since the 1960s: Widen the highway. But while adding lanes can ease congestion initially, it can also encourage people to drive more. A few years after a highway is widened, research shows, traffic — and the greenhouse gas emissions that come along with it — often returns.
California’s Department of Transportation was, like many state transportation departments, established to build highways. Every year, states spend billions of dollars expanding highways while other solutions to congestion, like public transit and pedestrian projects, are usually handled by city transit authorities and receive less funding.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/widen-highways-traffic.html