Editor's Blog - December 2019
Sustainable Transport?
Graeme Pattison sent in the following note:
Good news: $Lyft ONLY lost $463.5 Million this quarter - OR approximately the cost of 16 Arterial Rapid Bus Lines. $Uber ONLY lost $656 Million last quarter - OR approximately the cost of 23 Arterial Rapid Bus Lines.
I heard a senior academic say that this is sustainable as people keep feeding these company funds. Perhaps Uber and Lyft and their supporters may be betting on a windfall when (if) autonomy comes in, or from being able to sell data, or developing new services as they have done with Uber Eats.
It seems that they are fast approaching the time when the good things need to start to happen.
Don’t just ask people how they might use autonomous vehicles
The future of ride hailing services might depend on more than just efforts at business profitability if governments can manage to extract the much-needed community values or at least reduce the negative impacts of new services.
At the recent ITE President’s Dinner in Melbourne, John Reid noted a comment from the Autonomous Vehicle Summit held in Sydney. One participant had said
“We are doing a lot of high-level theorising, but we need to involve more practical people in analysing the results of our trials”.
In an article in Jalonik titled “Zombie Miles And Napa Weekends: How A Week With Chauffeurs Showed The Major Flaw In Our Self-Driving Car Future” spoke of how many initial articles about autonomous vehicles where in the form of “Techno-utopian” suggestions that traffic will be miraculously reduced. Rather than just ask people how they would use autonomous vehicles they did an interesting experiment: they hired chauffeurs to be available to drive people around simulating an autonomous vehicle situation. You didn’t even have to be in the car. For example, the chauffeur could bring the kids to soccer practice and back or drive a friend home and then return to the house.
The survey was not perfect but the results “The subjects increased how many miles their cars covered by a collective 83 percent when they had the chauffeur versus the week prior” must surely make us sit up and take notice.
1982 movie Bladerunner – Fiction or prophecy
Interesting article in Mashable about how accurate the predictions in the 1982 movie Bladerunner which was about a dystopian world in 2019. The writer saw these features the main prediction:
1. Harsh climatic conditions
2. Overdependence on technology
3. A new form of slavery
4. In-your-face advertising
5. Colonising planets
6. Flying cars
The only thing we don’t have is flying cars nearly as much as they predicted!!
Urban and Suburban Lifestyles Are More Similar Than You’d Think
This newsletter has reported in the past about how our perceptions of transport demand is distorted by misconceptions about who is traveling where and why.
Now some research from America challenges the traditional thinking about the difference between people living in the inner city and those in the suburbs.
Eric A. Morris, who teaches urban planning at Clemson University looked at the amounts of time that urbanites and suburbanites respectively devote to 18 daily activities. Both the composition of their activities and the amount of time they devote to them are remarkably similar.
The biggest difference is in time spent traveling, mainly comprising commuting to and from work. But here, the results are counterintuitive.
The reality is that city dwellers devote substantially more time to travel than suburbanites. In fact, residents of the six large, dense, and dynamic cities (including Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco), spend 15% more time on travel. This could reflect high traffic congestion or long transit rides in these metros.
Warnings for mobile speed cameras
I did some talk-back radio on the ABC recently on the subject of advanced warnings to motorists of speed cameras.
Most states in Australia do not give advanced warnings to drivers that they are approaching a speed camera. But NSW does, now, but maybe not for long.
The NSW government is considering scrapping speed camera warning signs.
This was a recommendation from a recent Auditor-General’s report.
But the report also was critical of major aspects of how the mobile camera program was being managed.
The key issue is that locations should be selected randomly so that the public believes they could be caught anywhere.
But while in 2012 it was announced that the program would be operating at about 2,500 locations. There are currently only around 940 that are approved and suitable.
Some sites are being used frequently. Sixty (60) locations were visited more than 500 times in the last five years, eight visited more than a thousand times, and one visited nearly 1800 (1,768) times.
Dozens of top roles spilled in shake-up of NSW transport bureaucracy
As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, NSW's main transport agency has begun a major reshuffle of its senior ranks by spilling dozens of positions as it enters the final stages of folding Roads and Maritime Services into its new divisions and dissolving the standalone roads agency.
The impact of the reorganisation is rippling through agencies under the control of Transport for NSW, including Sydney Trains, whose chief executive Howard Collins will be seconded to a role overseeing "integrated transport services" for Greater Sydney.