Along for the Ride #172

It's the last newsletter of the year 🎊

Heya friends, happy [who knows what day of the week anyway] Friday!

I had originally intended to send this newsletter on the 23rd, with a nice quip about how there would be no newsletters for the next two weeks because I would be napping. The bad news? I did not send the newsletter. The good news? I have been napping (and hope you have been able to rest too).

December seemed to hit me like an oversized SUV travelling 10 miles over the speed limit, torpedo-ing my best intentions to write. Thankfully, this subscriber base continues to very supportive of my sometimes haphazard schedule.

Before we dive into the news… I’d also like to take a moment to thank each of you because this year the newsletter more than *doubled* in readership (🥳), and for that I am very, very grateful. I didn’t even have to send out that many promotional tweets!! I’ll be back later in January to get my roll on again, but in the mean time a big ol’ “thank you, thank you, thank you” from my keyboard to yours.

P.S. I will be in the cold tundra of Calgary until January 6th, if anybody wants to get together for hot chocolate, a winter walk, or attempt ice-skating.

Read(s)-ish of the Week

Autonomous vehicles in New York City

I am sure many-a-subscriber is familiar with Jeff Wood’s Talking Headways podcast (if you’re not, well you are in for a treat!). This past month he posted an episode with Sarah Kaufman of the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation. The topic? A report recently released by Sarah: AVs in New York City: A Policy Framework. Personally, I relish whenever transportation policy actually enters public discourse when talking about autonomous vehicles, and am grateful for the spotlight discussed here!

Are you a neocolonial transport planner?

This week I was greeted with Benjie de la Peña’s delightful newsletter (Makeshift Mobility), and in it he and Dr. Jackie Klopp ask readers to consider what neocolonial ideas of transport planning we may be seeing the world through. As we enter a new year, an inflection point for many, I’d highly recommend sitting down with a warm beverage, Benjie and Jackie’s neocolonial planner checklist, and taking a personal inventory of your world view and how it translates into the work we try and do.

Government and Policy

Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

AVs are wrecking havoc in San Francisco

Starting with an excerpt from this Slate article before I continue further…

“On Sept. 30 at around 11 p.m., an N Line streetcar ground to a halt at the intersection of Carl Street and Cole Street because an autonomous vehicle from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, had halted on the streetcar tracks and wouldn’t budge.”

Those who know me well know that I am an early bird. Those who know me really well, know the N is my beloved transit line in San Francisco. And those who know me really, really well know I live right at Cole and Carl where I spend most of my day counting Muni frequency as I type away at my keyboard. This is the one time I am sad my early-bird tendencies likely meant I didn’t get to watch this AV meltdown melodrama with my own two eyes (#TeamTransit5ever).

Ok back to the actual story: AVs continue to malfunction on San Francisco city streets, interrupting transit service and creating safety concerns. And as more testing happens, more “incidents” seem to follow. This article discusses San Francisco’s pretty unsavoury experience as North America’s Test City.

The technology that isn’t going to save our cities

Is cars. Who would have thunk. This Bloomberg piece is an excerpt from Jeff Speck’s book Walkable City. I once looooved Jeff Speck (watched his ted talk, bought his book, and was very bought into his other pet project, Congress for New Urbanism, an ironic twist on Corbusier’s International Congress for Modern Architecture).

As I age—and obviously become wiser—I am more critical of Speck’s general attitude towards cities. Much of Speck and CNU’s work has warranted a critical eye for the ways that new urbanism can white-wash communities as they endeavour for “walkability”. Speck appears to be reckoning with this implication of his work and growing from it, but there is still a long way to go.

See here for another Bloomberg excerpt from Speck discussing how streets in the US became so dangerous.

London increases rates of cycling and walking

Because every once and a while we need a “woop woop”. Here are the highlights:

• Twice as many people now live near a high-quality cycle route in London;

• Cycling levels in autumn 2022 were 40% higher than in 2019, with cycling on weekdays 20-25% higher than pre-pandemic levels, and around 90% higher at weekends;

• Santander Cycles has broken a number of records throughout the year, with 10.9 million hires so far in 2022; and

• The demand for Tube services across the week has been around 82 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

The more you know!

• Japan is allowing a limited number of Level 4 AVs to operate, starting next year (JustAuto)

• Barcelona is imposing a “public space tax” for delivery services (Cities Today)

• Detroit is turning highway I-375 into a boulevard, complete with bike lanes and plans to honour communities displaced during its original construction (DetroitIsIt)

• Sao Paulo forbids the sale of diesel buses (Electrive)

Industry

Tesla’s pretty shitty December

There are literally too many links to have one associated with the header. So, here’s a quick run down of all the bad news Tesla received this month:

• First off, their stock price is plummeting (this article by The Atlantic is aptly named, “Why is Elon Musk Lighting Billions of Dollars on Fire”).

• Secondly, in order to comply with the California Vehicle Code, Tesla will have to change the name of their popular “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” programs to uhhh… something more accurate. The law comes into effect in January 2023 (Gov Tech).

• Next up, Tesla is currently being sued for their lack of delivery on “Full Self-Driving” mode. The company’s lawyers argued that “even though the company’s CEO promised fully self-driving cars for the last nine years and failed to deliver, no fraud was perpetrated against owners.” It was merely an “aspirational goal” (Jalopnik).

• And finally, NHSTA is once again investigating Tesla over a car collision that took place on Thanksgiving Day on the Bay Bridge. From what we know so far, the eight car pile-up is being linked to the company’s “Full Self-Driving” phantom braking mishap (The Verge).

OK, now that we’re done with Tesla’s “mishaps”… on to everybody else’s!

Cruise is also being investigated by NHSTA

In the words of Lizzo, it’s about damn time. It’s been a pretty rough few months for Cruise, a company that has seen numerous server errors in its San Francisco pilots resulting in their vehicles immobilizing mid-route, with no drivers in sight. The NHSTA also received reports directly from GM that Cruise’s AVs would suddenly slow down, and on three occasions were hit from behind.

But don’t you worry, this won’t stop Cruise from expanding! What’s a little safety mishap here or there? Cruise has not only launched service in Phoenix and Austin—they’re also charging riders for this fun game of chicken (Bloomberg).

Waymo applies for San Francisco permit to sell rides

Waymo could join Cruise as one of two companies that can charge riders for their service in San Francisco. Waymo submitted their application to the California Public Utilities Commission, and a decision could take months.

Baidu expands Apollo Go service to Wuhan

Baidu is expanding its AV taxi service (“Apollo Go”) to Wuhan, as the company aims to build the world’s largest autonomous ride-hailing area (130 sq km!) in 2023. I for one am low-key freightened by this comment from Wang Chong:

“The generalization ability of Baidu’s autonomous driving technology has progressed at a more advanced pace than expected. Now, the lead time to deploy autonomous driving technology in a new city is only 20 days,” said Wang Chong, Chief Brand Officer of Baidu Intelligent Driving Group

The more you know!

• Testing the competition: Cruise, Tesla, and Ford (Jalopnik)

• Volvo partners with Uber Freight for autonomous services (Uber)

• Uber and Motional launch AV service in Las Vegas (CarBuzz)

• Autonomous and electric freight company, Einride, raises $50m (TechCrunch)

Research and Academia

Interdependence of driver and pedestrian behavior

Shout out to Pamela for the recommendation! The MIT AgeLab studies the complex social interaction that occurs when pedestrians and drivers when pedestrians cross the street.

“At “undesignated” crossings—areas with no crosswalk or other notation for pedestrians to cross—driver and walker are interdependent on each other in their behaviors. That is, each actor plays a role in guiding the other’s behavior.  At “designated” but “unprotected” crossings, such as a crosswalk without a stoplight, drivers appear to be influenced by the pedestrian’s behavior in their behavior, while pedestrians act relatively independently of the driver – perhaps using the crossing instead as the prescriber for their behavior. And in more formalized and rules-based environments, such as when traffic lights are present at an intersection, neither driver and walker depend on each other, instead using the infrastructure to guide their behavior.”

Exploring how the built environment correlates to walking in Shanghai

“The results showed that the built environment had larger predictive power for utilitarian walking, whereas socio-demographics were more important for recreational walking. Land use mix and distance to the city center, which are important for predicting walking, had opposite effects on utilitarian versus recreational walking. These findings support the theory of a physical activity budget. Road density is associated with different types of walking in a similar pattern.”

Is walkability equitably distributed across socio-economic groups?

And in a similar vein from Lisbon..

“Although it seems plausible to assume that walkable environments are not always equally distributed among socio-economic groups in dense metropolitan areas, we lack empirical knowledge. This paper, therefore, evaluates the relationship between the socio-economic characteristics of the population of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Portugal) and the distribution of walkable environments, focusing exclusively on the urban part of the metropolitan area.”

Opinion

AVs are a natural fit for rural communities

Every now and then I share an article I more or less disagree with. Happy holidays, lol.

“Rural Americans aren’t the most obvious early adopters for robo-taxis. But right now they need transit innovations far more than people in more densely populated communities, and are far more willing to accept them. For autonomous technology companies, that’s an opportunity to establish the reliability and usefulness of technologies that have struggled to gain acceptance in cities and suburbs.”

When the Sunday Times tries an AV..

“While engineers appear to be making some progress on autonomous robotaxis… no matter what the operators say, the technology still has teething issues. With a number of autonomous taxis currently being trialled on the streets of San Francisco, California, a Times reporter went to investigate and found that, while overall the technology works reasonably well in certain areas, more work needs to be done.”

The more you know!

• AVs are a solution waiting for a problem (Slate’s What’s Next TBD podcast)

That’s all from me. See you in the new year wonderful friends.

Sarah