Along for the Ride #203
Reporting to you live from the train
Heya friends, happy Friday!
I am writing to you today from the Metrolinx GO train between Hamilton and Toronto. I’m sat beside my friend Michael who is just one of those lovely people the universe brought me and said “you two will be friends, and you will ride lots of bikes together, in lots of different places and it will be great”. I feel very, very grateful for his friendship, trains, bikeshare at large, and the sheer amount of pastries we’ve consumed together.
This week I’m bringing back Read of the Week because it’s not every week that my friends are published in Bloomberg (but tbh, they do seem to be in the news more, which is just so exciting!). Without delay, here’s ze news:
Read of the Week
Why AVs have no place in cities
Friends involved in organizing San Francisco’s Safe Street Rebel published a piece in Bloomberg’s CityLab about why AVs have no place in cities. Their argument is that cars are fundamentally unfit for cities, and AV technology can’t change that. “AVs fail in all the same ways human drivers fail, but they are also fail in new ways.”
For this piece, Bloomberg pits an opposite perspective against the one shared above. While not aligned with my personal perspectives, it’s still a worthy exercise to read and understand how others approach the problem. I’d also like to believe my critical thinking skills improve through opinion pieces such as this (lol). I’d highly recommend reading both and seeing where you net out.
British PM rolls back ban on internal combustion engines
And Ford’s UK General Manager denounces the plan saying it will hurt their EV business. We may actually live in the upsidedown because that was not on my bingo card for 2023. As the British PM tries to pretend climate change is just going to solve itself, automakers who are already on board with EVs do not seem happy. Ford, for example, is investing $470M to manufacture EV components in Halewood, U.K and will continue on, but national-level policy and funding to support that work are part of the core business fundamentals of delivering on EVs.
How highways bring traffic pollution to BIPOC communities
It’s not really new, but it is always important to have regular reminders that our existing infrastructure is already detrimental to numerous communities, especially BIPOC communities that were forced near highways through redlining. This piece looks at the communities neighbouring Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans, finding that the mostly Black residents are being exposed to a daily dose of toxic chemicals including benzene, formaldehyde and diesel particles that come from vehicles on the expressway.
This has major public health implications as the overall lifetime cancer risk (per million) from toxins associated with traffic is 2.9 times higher when comparing neighborhoods closest and farthest away from a highway.
The more you know:
Beijing wants to bet big on AVs (CNBC)
A new railway will bring Laos even closer to China (Sixth Tone)
Hannover Germany is removing all (yup, all) street parking (MSN)
And their plan is to become a city to “party and stroll about” (we love).
Cruise brings traffic jams to Texas
It’s interesting to see how Cruise continues to expand across the US, despite numerous instances of their cars repeatedly demonstrating that they can’t cope with the complexities of urban life. At least 10 Cruise AVs were involved, and while Cruise apologized for “the inconvenience” they didn’t mention how dangerous events like this become or describe the hazard they caused.
After the incident, a police officer went viral after a clip showed him trying to pull over one of the fancy cars and failing miserably.
The more you know!
Waymo starts to test waters for their AV fleet in LA (The Verge)
Fernride, a German AV freight start-up raises $50M (Yahoo)
Parking reform in small university cities—and what happens once minimum parking requirements are abolished (Journal of the American Planning Association)
Beware of tech billionaires building new cities
You should really just click on this link for the image, if for nothing else.
“Tech leaders are fed up with cities and their politics. So they want to start over. And that doesn’t bode well for cities old or new. We recently learned that the mysterious company gobbling up land in Solano County, Calif., is funded by venture capitalists including Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman and Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs… The tech leaders may have the money to build new cities, and they certainly have the hubris. What they lack is the disposition.”
I spent most of the last week in Hamilton, a small(er) city outside of Toronto. Hamilton is home to Canadian band The Arkells, which is really only known in Canada based on rules that state Canadian radio must play a certain percentage of Canadian music (much of the larger entertainment industry has similar thresholds). So here’s a link to my favourite Arkells song that you’ve probably never heard because it is only popular in Canada. Yes it is so cheesy, but also feels just like home, eh.
If you like canadian-cheesy music, 11:11 is also *chefs kiss*
Fun facts I learned about Hamilton this week: it is home to Canada’s first stop light (!) and first Tim Hortons (!).
That’s all from me. Have a beautiful weekend friends.
Sarah
