Along for the Ride #200
See you soon NYC! 🗽
Heya friends, happy Friday!
Starting this week’s edition with a piece of housekeeping: I’ll be in NYC soon! YAY! One of my favourite cities full of pizza, Citi Bike, and my favourite corgi ever (Murphy). I will be in town August 30 - September 10th, so if you’re around let’s pop on a Citi Bike and catch up.
My travels continue, because I will also be in Toronto / Hamilton for NABSA later in September, so if you’re around and want to chat Bikeshare™️ please reach out!!
Cruise ordered to halve fleet after colliding with a Fire Truck
With great power, comes great responsibility, and welp Cruise may need to work on the responsibility part of that statement. In the past week, Cruise’s vehicles have been involved in not one, but two notable collisions. In one instance, the Cruise did not yield to a Fire Truck (!!), and the two collided in an intersection. A passenger was in the Cruise, and reportedly suffered injuries from the collision. As a result, the California DMV ordered Cruise to cut their fleet in half: 50 cars running during the day and 150 at night.
It’s going to be an interesting few weeks / months as Cruise tries to repair the damage done.
The millions spent by Cruise and Waymo lobbying San Francisco
I mean it’s almost not news, but it’s still astonishing…. Cruise and Waymo spent more than $2.3 million (!) influencing State and San Francisco lawmakers since 2021, according to dozens of lobbyist reports. To think of the R&D and other costs, this is really just a drop in the bucket of each organization’s overall budget, but still. Here’s hoping the newly approved license that allows them to charge for rides can uhhhh… start to fill that void.
Cities need the power to regulate AVs
“California’s bifurcated system of regulating robotaxis doesn’t help. The Department of Motor Vehicles permits self-driving cars to operate on public roads and regulates general safety issues with the vehicles. The California Public Utilities Commission regulates commercial passenger service and is focused on the safety of riders inside the robotaxi. Cities, where the rubber meets the road, have no say in how, where and when AVs can operate.”
The more you know:
Rethinking one-way streets (Transfers Magazine)
And of course, they refer to AVs as “self-driving cars” 🫠 [NB: here’s why “self-driving” is a misnomer]. Michael Barbaro takes a break from reporting Ron DeSantis and the Republic presidential nomination to talk about AVs in San Francisco. It’s interesting to hear how folks explain and experience AVs in this format (the interviewee describes them as both too slow and like a ride at Disney). I remain unimpressed with the wider discourse of transportation and AVs, but the podcast does an OK-good at detailing the history of AVs in the US.
And of course: listening to people argue in favour in AVs when they could advocate for better public transit just makes me 😵💫 Last but not least… if anybody from the NYT / The Daily reads this and wants to learn why we use language like collision vs. accident, pls slide into my dms lol.
GM plans to launch AV trial in China, but not with Cruise
Filed under: 👀. GM has approval to test Level 4 AVs in China alongside AV start-up Momenta (a business they previously invested $300M into in September 2021). The trial will use Cadillac Lyriqs and be based in Shanghai. No mention of bringing Cruise’s vehicles to China was made.
The false promises of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving
Another podcast for the group, this one from Verge. The focus for this one is on Tesla’s long-awaited Full Self-Driving program which is always just another year away. It talks about how Tesla’s vehicles using FSD and Autopilot have been involved in hundreds of crashes resulting in dozens of deaths.
The more you know:
Cruise adds Raleigh, NC to its list of cities where it is testing AVs (GovTech)
Spatial characteristics of unpleasant cycling experiences
“Our findings show that unpleasant experiences while cycling happens in a wide range of places spread over the city. The geographic variables correlated to these experiences were related to public transport infrastructures, places where pedestrians and cyclists used combined roads and higher road speed limits, higher levels of road traffic, and a high employment density. The higher length of a road section in the network, was related to fewer negative experiences, indicating that they are related to intersections. In general, those with lower weekly amounts of cycling were more likely to feel unsafe or to avoid specific places.”
Hot take: speed limits don’t matter
This article starts off by stating that twitter spats (I will literally never refer to it as “X”) have already sprung to life based on this hypothesis from the one and only AAA. For those of you outside the US, AAA is the American Automobile Association, and yes this headline seems to align with their general interest areas.
AAA researched how driver behaviour shifts when speed limits shift (their research is here). The findings show that when speed limits go up, fewer people get tickets; when they go down, the opposite happens. But fewer tickets don’t inherently mean safer drivers—nor does it represent safer outcomes when collisions take place.
I spent last weekend at Sea Ranch, up the coast in Northern California. Sea Ranch is an architectural marvel—what was once sheep farms is now a (very low density, boooo) housing development with stringent design guidelines. It is a modernist utopia, right by the sea. SF MoMA has curated this great video about the development for the architecture nuts out there.
I have been dog-sitting Coco again (if you’re a long time subscriber she’ll look familiar). She’s been loving our train commutes and bopping around the neighbourhood down car-free JFK. Shared some cute pictures of our week together so far.
Last but not least, I grabbed dinner with a friend this week (Late HBD to another Sarah!) at Pasta Supply Co in San Francisco, and they have stroller parking?? And it was so cute?? More of this please. The restaurant has their own locks to prevent strollers from wondering off.
That’s all from me. Have a beautiful weekend friends.
Sarah
