Blog Post

Jarrett Walker, author of "Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich our Communities and Lives," writes about the costs and benefits of microtransit on his blog, "Human Transit". Walker is skeptical of Microtransit. He argues that it is spacially, economically, and fiscally inefficient and should only be used in very rare and specific cases.

“The introduction of driverless cars could affect how much money cities collect in parking, traffic citations, traffic cameras, towing fees, gasoline taxes, licensing, registration and other revenues.”

Mobile robotics are traditionally designed using complex and expensive hardware, however now there is growing demand for low-cost solutions that are more specific to the given application.

This resource includes a comprehensive overview of several types of shared mobility. The key modes reviewed include: car sharing, peer-to-peer carsharing, bike sharing, carpooling/ride sharing, and ride hailing.

There has been a shift in car buyer demographics over the past several years. Younger generations that were previously most likely to be car buyers often don’t have the need or financial means to own a car.

Portland announced an expansion of its Transportation wallet, now offering the pass to people who live or work in the NW parking district. The pass is intended to encourage walking, taking transit, and bicycling, and to address parking demand and congestion in dense areas of Portland.

Various cities across England and Germany have completely abolished parking minimums.

The growth of e-commerce in the past led to a decrease in brick-and-mortar retail presence, but it appears as if the tides are changing in favor of re-investing in the physical retail market. The line between online and physical commerce is beginning to blur, and companies such as Amazon aim to combine their strategies to expand in both markets.

Despite national averages of shrinking transit ridership, seven United States cities have seen increased ridership. These cities have seen growth because of their efforts to improve or expand their bus services.

This is an organization that advocates to end parking minimums in cities and towns. Included is an interactive map showing progress being made to remove parking minimums.

“Parking is expensive. We can break these costs down into two categories. One is the explicit fiscal costs of parking, to the provider and to the public. The other is the implicit opportunity cost of parking, which occupies land that could have been put to another beneficial use, and/or is often built at the expense of another beneficial activity.”

On June 13, 2018 Waymo's early rider program hit the one year mark. This article written by Waymo includes some interesting statistics about how the program and who participated.

Blog post about AV deployment timelines self-predicted by 11 top auto manufacturers.

This blog talks about how the autonomous vehicles will change the built environment such as street design, parking infrastructure, public space, etc. It also mentions how different modes can be integrated with the change of built environment.

The storm clouds of sprawl addiction had been gathering for years, but it took the Meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession to make it clear just how damaging that addiction had been to the health of cities across the US and abroad. Sprawl has two really big things going for it, but three even bigger things now going against it which are poised to turn the tide against the pattern of sprawl.

As we build new developments, are we still short on parking? Parking minimums have created endless hot, asphalt deserts in our developments and now cities are working to reverse these laws.

Chinese companies are going all-out on unmanned systems for delivery logistics. A fleet of new autonomous cargo drones, robotic trucks, and quadcopters are private-sector developments that are making China a future world leader in robotics.

This info-graph and write-up display the costs that parking spaces incur and how they are bundled into our lives.

This article is a review of Adonia Lugo's book: "Bicycle / Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance". The book talks about issues of race and class in bicycle culture. It is a call to refocus bicycle-planning beyond physical infrastructure to include human-infrastructure that centers on the stories and identities that shape how, where, when, and why we travel.

Cyclists, particularly women, face risks. Separation of cyclists from vehicular traffic reduces encroachments and can address the well-founded concerns women have about safety. Other counties and municipalities can learn from the plans being implemented in Hennepin County and Minneapolis and do more to encourage and protect cyclists—especially women and girls.

This article briefly outline the success of upgrades made to a bus line in the Twin Cities. So far ridership has increased 30%.

New data from the US EPA on power plant greenhouse gas emissions are in, and electric vehicles (EV) in the US are even cleaner than they were before. The climate change emissions created by driving on electricity depend on where you live, but on average, an EV driving on electricity in the U.S. today is equivalent to a conventional gasoline car that gets 80 MPG, up from 73 MPG in our 2017 update.

Using data from the recently released American Community Survey, this report examines population change in the 51 metropolitan areas with 1 million or more population, and focuses on the change in population in close-in neighborhoods, those places within 3 miles of the center of each metropolitan area’s primary central business district.

This article examines the burgeoning future of electric buses and the possible impacts it may have on society.

This article provides 12 rules on how to prepare the change that AVs bring to the city, include data, street design, transit, traffic management, suburban development, etc.

This article summarizes the history of how Level of Service (LOS) became tied to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the motivations for the current shift away from LOS toward Vehicles Miles Traveled (VMT) as an environmental review point for new construction projects.

Retail in the U.S. is going through some hardships. There is too much and the shopping trip is the same each time you go. Millennial's are putting retail into a head spin wanting more, quicker and for better prices with less hassle. For these retailer sot keep up with the wants and needs of it's customer base, they're going to have to make some changes.

It seems that drones are the future of delivery. Now, there's evidence that this outcome could have a positive effect on our energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions.

Chicago’s pilot electronic-scooter program is proving to be a hit with low-income residents who have few transit choices in their far-flung neighborhoods.

This article discusses the changes that will be necessary once AVs hit our streets. The changes in insurance policies, jobs, land use, etc. will change our societal norms.

This article discusses about the cost of AV per mile compared to SOVs and looks into AV peak demand and surge pricing.

JD.com is an example of what companies may look like in the future of automation. This article talks about how their company, shipping 200,000 orders a day, operates in this new age.

As private mobility services such as car-sharing, ridehailing, and micromobility have rapidly expanded in cities, the public sector has historically had limited access to data on how these vehicles are changing travel patterns and the movement of people. Populus has launched a platform to change that.

Cities that turn to technology companies to save their transit systems are bound to be disappointed by the outcome. This article looks at Pinellas County, Fla., whose transit authority was the first in the country to supplement its bus service with taxpayer-subsidized rides from Uber in February, 2016.

With so much transportation funding going toward highways, it’s tempting to support any transit investment as a step in the right direction. But not all transit investments will produce service that helps people get where they need to go. To make transit a useful travel option that people want to ride, says TransitCenter, there are three basic goals that officials and advocates should strive for: speed, frequency and reliability, walkability and accessibility.

In the 1960s, countercultural icon Timothy Leary popularized the phrase, "turn on, tune in, drop out," to describe the idea of using LSD and other psychedelic drugs to detach from society and achieve a higher level of thinking. Later in his life, he argued that the personal computer was the "LSD of the 1990s"—at that time having no inkling how much automation and augmented reality would play in our society, or how autonomous vehicles might change the way we connect with others. Might automated vehicles (AVs) be one of the ways that humans "tune in, turn on" and disconnect for the next few decades?

Depending on how you look view transportation, bikes and scooters are the key to future, clean urban mobility or a sideshow that distracts from maintaining mobility across large metropolis. But the basic problem – the reason we’re having a hyper-emotional discussion about these transportation modes on both sides – is that we’re not framing the issue right.

This article is specifically about flexible transit, AKA microtransit, offered as part of a publicly-funded transit network. There may be all kinds of private-sector markets — paid for by institutions or by riders at market-rate fares — which are not my subject here. The question here is what kind of service taxpayers should pay for.

As more people make the shift to sustainable mobility options like e-scooters, cities are evolving their transportation infrastructure to combat car dominance and to allow human-scaled modes to thrive. In addition to creating dedicated spaces for people to ride shared micro-mobility devices, this transition also includes creating space for them to park when not in use. To explore how cities should think about parking and micro-mobility, Bird sat down for a conversation with parking expert Donald Shoup.

This article highlights the disaster that could be the continuation of everyone thinking they need their own car for each trip they take and how we need to get serious about expanding the sharing economy.

The article outlines the scope of the emerging transportation technologies and how far they can go. It doesn't have to be just about the autonomous cars and how they interact and react with our communities, but how we can work on preparing the rest of the environment to also interact with them.

This blog post summarizes a larger article written by University of Michigan faculty member Saif Benjaafar's research on smart technology. It specifically focuses on his analysis of ride-sharing companies.

With an estimated 1,600 bikeshare systems and more than 18 million shared bikes in urban centers worldwide, bikesharing has gone mainstream. On July 16, 2019 users in 24 cities in 16 countries can use Google Maps to both locate bikesharing stations and see exactly how many bikes are available at a station in real-time.