UPS claims to save a lot of time, fuel, and reduce accidents significantly by avoiding left turns at intersections with no left turn signals. In other words, they circle right until they get where they need to go, and it ends up saving time, energy, and lives. I’m glad to see this – as someone who makes 99% of my own trips on foot, I know vehicles turning left with fast-moving oncoming traffic are incredibly risky for pedestrians. Some people are jerks and have no respect for human life. But during those other 1% of trips where I am the driver, I understand why even well-intentioned, ethical people can put pedestrians at risk – because you are so focused on the cars and making a safe turn you are just not looking for pedestrians. I think most left turns should be eliminated (or left turn signals put in, or pedestrian scrambles, or lights turned off in favor of stop signs) purely on safety grounds, but if doing that wouldn’t even cost drivers any time or money the argument gets even stronger.
Tag Archives: transportation
ride pooling can (maybe) reduce traffic by a lot
Here’s a new study from MIT that says ride sharing and pooling algorithms could theoretically reduce Manhattan rush hour traffic drastically.
On-demand high-capacity ride-sharing via dynamic trip-vehicle assignment
Ride-sharing services are transforming urban mobility by providing timely and convenient transportation to anybody, anywhere, and anytime. These services present enormous potential for positive societal impacts with respect to pollution, energy consumption, congestion, etc. Current mathematical models, however, do not fully address the potential of ride-sharing. Recently, a large-scale study highlighted some of the benefits of car pooling but was limited to static routes with two riders per vehicle (optimally) or three (with heuristics). We present a more general mathematical model for real-time high-capacity ride-sharing that (i) scales to large numbers of passengers and trips and (ii) dynamically generates optimal routes with respect to online demand and vehicle locations. The algorithm starts from a greedy assignment and improves it through a constrained optimization, quickly returning solutions of good quality and converging to the optimal assignment over time. We quantify experimentally the tradeoff between fleet size, capacity, waiting time, travel delay, and operational costs for low- to medium-capacity vehicles, such as taxis and van shuttles. The algorithm is validated with ∼3 million rides extracted from the New York City taxicab public dataset. Our experimental study considers ride-sharing with rider capacity of up to 10 simultaneous passengers per vehicle. The algorithm applies to fleets of autonomous vehicles and also incorporates rebalancing of idling vehicles to areas of high demand. This framework is general and can be used for many real-time multivehicle, multitask assignment problems.
There are plenty of criticisms of this type of study. The major one is that if you make a particular transportation option faster and/or cheaper, economics dictates that people will automatically switch to it from other options over time, eventually making it less fast and/or less cheap until the various modes are balanced again. The study above (based on my quick skim of the abstract) probably took data from one or a few Manhattan rush hours and asked how it could be rerouted in the most efficient possible way. I don’t fault them for doing the study, which is really interesting. The economics and human behavioral feedback loops that happen over longer periods of time just need to be studied too before policy decisions are made based on results like these.
I don’t necessarily want UberPool to be the answer to all our infrastructure problems. I love the idea of subway and above-ground rail and bus rapid transit as much as the next person. But as the opening of the most recent segment of New York subway recently showed us, these projects are taking decades to build in the U.S. and costing enormous amounts of money. Europe and Asia are doing much better than us, so maybe we could learn some lessons from them, but our recent political challenges shed some doubt on the idea that we can improve any time soon. (Europe generally manages to do somewhat better with high-wage union labor, while some Asian countries build extremely cost-effectively by issuing temporary work visas to low-wage labor from developing countries. There are political and moral issues on both ends of this spectrum, obviously, but the point is the U.S. doesn’t do either approach well. Much like our health care system, we spend 2 or 3 or 5 times more than everyone else and get worse results.)
If the criticism of the study I mentioned above is that demand projections made before the new infrastructure options or technologies are in place are not going to be accurate, that criticism certainly applies to a subway system that takes decades to build. The entire population, land use, and employment pattern of the area served could change in that time, not to mention that whatever technology is chosen is almost guaranteed to be obsolete the day operation begins. With the ride-sharing algorithms, even if the projections are wrong at first at least you have a system that should be easy to adapt and tweak over time. I don’t see why public bus systems and bus rapid transit can’t be integrated into a system like this. And if people want a vehicle to themselves for some trips sometimes, the algorithms and pricing schemes should be able to accommodate that. You could even imagine an algorithm managing passenger vehicles, freight and delivery vehicles in urban areas so they are less in conflict with other at various times of day and night. The algorithms could be run by government or non-profit entities if we are really afraid of private control, or private algorithms and entities could be forced to communicate and coordinate with one another.
supersonic jets coming back soon
Virgin has a prototype commercial supersonic jet that it plans to test soon. One thing on my bucket list has always been to take a trans-Atlantic cruise to Europe and then a supersonic jet back.
The manufacturing team for Branson’s Virgin Galactic company is working with Boom Supersonic to test a prototype next year of a passenger plane that can fly at Mach 2.2, more than twice the speed of a typical commercial jet…
Instead of spending seven hours and paying up to $5,500 for a flight from New York to London on a Boeing 747, travelers can spend about $2,500 for a three-hour flight to cross the Atlantic on a supersonic jet, according to Boom.
solar panel roads
According to Bloomberg, the technology to build roads and parking lots out of solar panels is coming along fast. This could be a big breakthrough considering the sheer amount of area that would be available. As solar panels get closer to being cost-competitive with fossil fuels, the time will come when space to install them is the limiting factor. This could open up enormous new areas compared to only having rooftops available. I can also imagine the possibilities for roads and parking lots being able to fund their own maintenance and repairs, then generate additional revenues for cities, states, and private entities on top of that. This could really be a game-changing technology.
September 2016 in Review
3 most frightening stories
- The U.S. and Russia may have blundered into a proxy war in Syria. And on a loosely related war-and-peace note, Curtis LeMay was a crazy bastard.
- The ecological footprint situation is not looking too promising: “from 1993 to 2009…while the human population has increased by 23% and the world economy has grown 153%, the human footprint has increased by just 9%. Still, 75% the planet’s land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely intense, widespread and rapidly intensifying in places with high biodiversity.” Meanwhile, as of 2002 “we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green material) produced on Earth each year (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001). We consume 35% of the productivity of the oceanic shelf (Pauly and Christensen 1995), and we use 60% of freshwater run-off (Postel et al. 1996). The unprecedented escalation in both human population and consumption in the 20th century has resulted in environmental crises never before encountered in the history of humankind and the world (McNeill 2000). E. O. Wilson (2002) claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if every human consumed at the level of the average US inhabitant.” And finally, 30% of African elephants have been lost in the last 7 years.
- Car accidents are the leading cause of death for children ages 5 to 24. The obsession with car seats may not be saving all that many lives, while keeping children out of cars as much as possible would be 100% guaranteed to save lives. And one thing that would be guaranteed to help us create more walkable neighborhoods and therefore save children’s lives: getting rid of minimum parking requirements in cities once and for all. And yet you don’t hear this debate being framed in moral terms.
3 most hopeful stories
- The FDA is finally banning antibacterial soap.
- An MIT professor thinks he has found an effective anti-aging pill.
- There is still hope for fusion power.
3 most interesting stories
- Monsanto is trying to help honeybees (which seems good) by monkeying with RNA (which seems a little frightening). Yes, biotech is coming.
- Some people think teaching algebra to children may actually be bad. Writing still seems to be good.
- There have been a number of attempts to identify and classify the basic types of literary plots.
Ford
Ford seems to be waking up to the possibilities of self-driving cars and integrated multi-modal transportation.
The century-old automaker will buy San Francisco shuttle startup Chariot and expand its services nationally and internationally. Ford also will team up with New York bike-sharing firm Motivate to bring its services to more cities throughout the Bay Area, with the goal of providing 7,000 bikes in the region by the end of 2018, up from the current 700. Riders will be able to access those bikes, as well as shuttles from Chariot, through an online service called FordPass.
“We’re taking a look at the whole ecosystem of moving people around,” Fields said in an interview Friday.
Better late than never. I was wondering if any of the Detroit companies would wake up and join forces with the tech industry, rather than just continuing to fade into irrelevance and obsolescence until one day they are gone and nobody cares. Are GM and Chrysler going to follow or are they just hoping for a government bailout every once in awhile?
parking benefit districts
This article explains why eliminating minimum parking requirements is such a good idea, and suggests the idea of parking benefit districts as a way to get past misguided political and neighborhood opposition.
Eliminating existing requirements currently on the books in almost every city, namely that housing builders install lots of off-street parking spaces, is a key strategy for housing affordability. Most people wouldn’t guess it, but parking requirements (or “quotas”) raise the rent—and not just by a little, but by a lot. Here’s a full rundown of how they do so, but some major ways include:
- Parking quotas raise the cost of building housing, especially inexpensive housing, and they suppress the number of apartments and houses that can fit on a lot—often by a quarter to a half.
- Parking quotas block adaptive reuse of old buildings, such as vacant warehouses, to housing.
- Parking quotas disperse housing by suppressing housing units per city block, which exacerbates sprawl and therefore distances traveled, which makes transit less practical and driving more common. And driving is expensive.
I’m all for it. The only concern I can think of is that neighborhoods with higher-cost parking (likely to be more desirable, richer, less diverse neighborhoods in most cities) would get greater benefits than other neighborhoods. So it seems like maybe a portion of it could stay in the neighborhood, and a portion could be shared across all neighborhoods in a city or even metro area that agree to the policy.
This is both a great example of progressive policy innovation, and a market-based way of aligning peoples’ economic incentives with the best policies. So it should be able to gain support across the political spectrum. But the article also talks about how bureaucrats at existing transit agencies can be an obstacle to this sort of policy (as they can to other good ideas like flexible bus routes). This is sad. In my ideal world, there would be a single agency in charge of getting people from point A to point B and using space in the most efficient, safest and healthiest ways, open to innovation and stakeholder input.
August 2016 in Review
3 most frightening stories
- There may be an accelerating feedback loop where forests stressed by climate change absorb less carbon, leading to more climate change, and so on. Biomass burning in Indonesia was particularly bad this year. Meanwhile, a new model suggests that fairly modest climate change may have led to the collapse of the Mayan civilization.
- A former U.S. secretary of defense thinks the risk of nuclear war is higher now than during the cold war. The Republic Party platform appears to be outright in favor of nuclear weapons, while the Democratic Party platform includes a tepid commitment to maybe “reducing reliance” and spending on nuclear weapons. Jeffrey Sachs says the Syria War has become essentially a U.S.-Russia proxy war.
- “Earth Overshoot Day” arrived on August 8, 5 days earlier than last year. Humans may have essentially depleted the natural capital of North America at this point.
3 most hopeful stories
- There is new technology for tracking energy use in our homes.
- There is new technology for mapping street trees.
- There is new financial technology out there that may disrupt the traditional financial industry. Meanwhile, ride sharing has torpedoed the traditional taxi industry, with the value of Philadelphia taxi medallions dropping from a peak of $545,000 in July 2014 to $50,000 in March 2015.
3 most interesting stories
- Bokashi is a system that essentially pickles your compost.
- There is an unlikely but plausible scenario where Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, could become President of the United States this fall. Speaking of implausible scenarios, I learned that RIchard Nixon made a serious attempt to pass a basic income bill in 1969.
- Here is a short video explaining the Fermi Paradox, which asks why there are no aliens. Meanwhile Russian astronomers are saying there might be aliens.
more on taxi medallions
The value of a Philadelphia taxi medallion has plunged from a peak of $545,000 in July 2014 to $50,000 in March 2015. That’s a pretty shocking collapse in less than a year, and it’s pretty much all due to UberX.
Since coming to Philadelphia without regulatory approval in October 2014, Uber has pulled the safety net out from under taxi drivers and claimed their place in the city. In the Philadelphia metro area, Uber says, it now has more than 12,000 active drivers – who have taken a ride in the last 28 days – and more than half a million active riders who have used the app in the last three months. In July, Uber pledged $2.5 million to expand its service in the suburbs and subsidize surge pricing, those times when prices jump for passengers in high-demand areas. This came after SEPTA announced that a third of its Regional Rail cars would be off the tracks for the summer due to fatigue cracks in a beam and the need for emergency repairs.
For a while, the PPA tried to keep Uber at bay, refusing to legalize UberX, which allows drivers to use their own cars and personal insurance to shuttle passengers.
But in July, with the Democratic National Convention bringing in 50,000 visitors and SEPTA’s Regional Rail line in turmoil, the PPA conceded to Uber. It agreed to legalize UberX as long as the company paid $350,000 – rather than the millions in fines it had initially slapped on the company – when the state legislature comes back in session and passes regulatory legislation.
As a person who chooses to live without a car, Uber X has made my life a lot better. Taxis were an okay way to get around the busiest part of the city, and to get from the busy part of the city to the airport and back. But they were never a good way to get from a less busy part of the city back to the busy part. I got stranded many times in out-of-the-way places and/or in bad weather, when I would call for a taxi and be told by a surly dispatcher that none were available, or even after being dispatched they just never showed up. Add to that the payment hassles where you had to try to keep small change in your wallet because they often wouldn’t change a 20 and were unable or unwilling to take credit cards. Miscommunications and misunderstandings about where you wanted to go. With UberX, all of this is almost 100% solved.
Now, I will say that some taxi drivers are wonderful people. They work long hours under risky conditions. Many lift heavy luggage and are kind to children, the elderly and disabled. The problems I mention above are not the drivers’ fault for the most part. By limiting the supply of medallions, the government has produced an artificial shortage of transportation. There just weren’t enough taxis to go around, so they stayed in the busy areas where they had a better shot at making a profit and the underserved neighborhoods stayed underserved. The dispatching companies made sure it was hard on the drivers – they had to pay to lease a car for their shift, then fill it up with gas, then try to pick up enough fares to break even, and then enough to make a living. When they are honking at me or trying to run me over in a crosswalk, I try to remember that they are the victims of perverse incentives in a broken system.
So I really don’t feel too bad for the dispatching companies. They could have improved their service, or one of them could have invented UberX. But they didn’t, they just assumed nothing would ever change and they were creatively destroyed. I don’t feel too bad for the drivers who used to lease cars from the taxi companies, because they can just switch to Uber (at least until the cars start driving themselves in a couple years, I don’t think driving any vehicle is a good long-term career choice for any human at this point). I do feel sorry though for the independent driver who saved and borrowed to buy their own taxi medallion at a high price, only to find that it is now worthless and they are in debt. Although I dislike almost everything about the industry, there was an understanding that it was an industry regulated by law, and the rule of law is supposed to apply to everyone equally. I can understand some affected people feeling like the law suddenly is not being enforced evenly on all parties, and they are left holding the bag. It seems like they might have some legal recourse against the regulatory agency that chose not to enforce the law.