Along for the Ride #272
greetings from .... california ☀️
Heya friends, happy Friday!
I secretly flew to California last weekend and surprised my friends at dinner on Saturday night (20/10 recommend surprising loved ones whenever you get the chance). I then proceeded to spend the entire weekend bopping through the new park (Sunset Dunes!) that we campaigned and advocated for. It’s safe to say I teared up just being there, especially as this week would have also been my friend Hansel’s 40th birthday. I wish more than anything that they were here to see this corner of the world; I just know they would have been out there everyday helping to paint and build art installations to bring the park to life.
It’s bittersweet to embrace this new park and miss the person who made it mean so much to me personally. This weekend my friends and I are placing a plaque to remember Hansel on one of the new perches in the park overlooking the beach and it feels like a splinter straight to the heart. I’m so happy that there will be a permanent reminder of Hansel, and if you ever get the chance to visit, I hope you’ll get to sit on Hansel’s perch and have a moment of joy and awe overlooking the park that they helped make possible.
There will be no newsletter next week (I’m at a bachelorette party weekend, hence my travels back to America). But for now… some news ❤️
The Congress for New Urbanism has a list of nine freeways in the US that are reaching the end of their “functional life” and provides recommendations for how each could be re-designed to better address climate change, support local economies, and improve safety.
America’s highway trust fund has been dead for a long time
I knew so little about the highway trust fund before reading this (went to planning school in Canada / the UK so it wasn’t really covered), and am fascinated to learn about how the program has been struggling along side 2008 and costing American tax payers hundreds of billions of dollars along the way.
Waymo brings more AVs to Texas
Currently it seems the company is only driving around collecting data in San Antonio and Houston, but I’d bet some good monies that testing and deployment won’t be long off.
WeRide expands to Saudi Arabia
Chinese company WeRide has begun testing its robotaxi fleet in Saudi, with a focus on cities like Riyadh and AlUla (this seems like an odd one to call out becuase it’s essentially an ancient city with a population of 60k…. so make sure you read the press release with many grains of salt). WeRide is planning a commercial rollout and wider operations across Saudi Arabia later this year, likely in partnership with Uber.
Elon Muck’s boulevard of broken dreams
Wired has a piece on the patterns of Muck’s broken promises; it covers 19 years of broken promises starting in 2006 (I appreciate the pettiness, I really do), covering everything from the hyper loop to Full Self Driving.
Ahead of Tesla’s June robotaxi launch in Austin, Muck has confirmed that the company has been testing their AVs without drivers for “days”. You literally could not pay me to sit in what is likely to be a roving death trap (Reuters). Especially as a car in FSD mode just went viral for “veering off a country road, crashing into some fencing, and flipping onto its roof” (Futurism).
Zoox issues recall after San Francisco crash
“Zoox issued a second software update to improve how its vehicles track nearby pedestrians and prevent movement when someone is close…”
Always fun when they rebrand a fleet wide recall as a software update.
Emotional responses crucial to attitudes about self-driving cars
“This cross-sectional study sampled 323 U.S. adults from an online panel. The result showed that [perceived usefulness] was explained by the safety, transportation functions, societal impact, epistemic value, and emotional value of autonomous vehicles. [Ease of use] was explained by complexity, observability, and desire for trial. In the path model, knowledge showed a negative relationship with [perceived usefulness] but a positive one with [ease of use].”
Are US cities building housing in walkable neighbourhoods?
“Across the United States, much of the housing found in lower-VMT neighborhoods was built before 1940 (Figure 2). Sprawling, car-oriented development patterns were more prevalent between 1971 and 2010, with most housing built in low-density neighborhoods, leading to continued higher VMT today. Between 2011 and 2019, however, the average VMT of new housing dropped, as development in higher-VMT neighborhoods declined by 59 percent relative to 2001–2010.”
“After reviewing the videos from 1980 and 2010 across the four sites, we found that in 2010 pedestrians were walking faster than in the 1980s by an average of about 15%. We also found that the time that people spent lingering in these public spaces had declined by half."
I scouted no jobs this week because I am in California, but I hope folks are hanging in there and I promise to return with this section soon!
My 11 hour flight saw me watching Conclave, Juror #2 and A Complete Unknown essentially in one sitting and while they were all very different, I’d recommend each. Juror #2 was a surprise for me, while A Complete Unknown made me realize what an absolute dive Bob Dylan was lol.
My sweet friend Tookie welcomed me back to San Francisco with girl scout cookies and this book of poetry that is all about poems for hoping again, which is just the sweetest? Some of my favourite things to do around the city including bopping about on BayWheels, grabbing anything from Hook Fish, and just soaking up the sun wherever it is shining.
That’s all from me. Have a beautiful weekend friends.
Sarah
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