Category: Mobility

• 10 years of contactless payments on London’s public transport

  

  I was having coffee this week with a self-described luddite and, after we ordered our coffees, he surprised me by pulling out his iPhone and initiating ApplePay. Knowing him and his general views on technology, I said, “I’m surprised that you of all people are now using ApplePay.” To which he responded, “I can’t believe it took me this long to start using it. It’s so convenient! I now barely ever pull out my wallet.” Yup, it is very convenient.

  It also just so happens that this month marks the 10 year anniversary of contactless payments on London’s public transport network. This meaning payment via a bank or credit card, and not via an Oyster card. In fact, part of the reason why London did this was because bus drivers were struggling with both having to give change and having to deal with people who didn’t have enough funds on their Oyster cards.

  So Transport for London (TfL) decided to spend £11 million, design and code the entire thing in-house, and then roll it out across the network starting in 2012. Apparently, adoption started off relatively slowly. At the end of 2013, only about 6 million journeys were made using contactless payments — this is against an initial projection of 25 million. But fast forward to today, and around 70% of all bus journeys are now contactless.

  What is also interesting about this is that TfL now licenses their contactless technology to other cities around the world. Here is a £15 million deal that was announced in 2016, which suggests that they could be generating a fairly respectable return on their initial investment. But aside from this, contactless payments are an obviously good way to onboard people onto public transport. There’s no special card. No lining up at a ticket kiosk. And yes, you can even use your phone.

  Photo by Tomas Anton Escobar on Unsplash

  2022.12.21

• Density is good

  When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, we know this:

  Households in denser neighborhoods close to city centers tend to be responsible for fewer planet-warming greenhouse gases, on average, than households in the rest of the country. Residents in these areas typically drive less because jobs and stores are nearby and they can more easily walk, bike or take public transit. And they’re more likely to live in smaller homes or apartments that require less energy to heat and cool.

  We also know this:

  Consider housing. For decades in the United States, the majority of new homes have been built in the suburbs and, increasingly, exurbs, where climate footprints are larger. As a result, for many people today, it is often easier and cheaper to find a home in a high-emissions community than a lower-emissions one.

  An important caveat to these points is that if you use consumption-based carbon accounting — that is, you consider all of the goods and services that people tend to consume — then other things like income also play a major factor. Wealthy households, for example, tend to fly more frequently, and that is bad for emissions.

  But even with this more accurate accounting, the two biggest contributors to a household’s carbon footprint still tend to be housing and driving. And that’s why when you look at emission maps, like these over here, the urban core still usually performs the best. Density, it turns out, is hard to beat.

  2022.12.13

• On-street EV charging stations are the next street light

  On-street electric vehicle charging points are starting to roll out across Toronto. Here is one that I came across this morning in the Junction on Annette Street. The stations are from Flo.

  At its core, this is, of course, a great thing. Ubiquitous charging points are a critical component of overall EV adoption. But at the same time, it was a good reminder that (1) above-grade electrical wires are ugly (this is the typical Toronto approach) and that (2) on-street EV charging is a design challenge that is going to need to be solved.

  In the above example, the charging stations were mounted to an existing electrical pole and two bright yellow bollards were installed on either side to make sure nobody smashes into said charging stations while they’re parking and/or trying to watch TikTok videos on their phone.

  But what happens when nearly everyone has an EV? There are only so many electrical poles, so we will need to move on to standalone stations at some point, and that is obviously already being done. But if we’re going to have charging points practically everywhere, how should they work and what should they look like?

  I am sure that lots of very smart people are already thinking about this. But as someone who is not directly involved in this space, it feels like we need to think about these in a similar way to street lights. Because they are going to be just as ubiquitous, if not more so. That means there is a strong cause for making them both functional and beautiful.

  In fact, this feels like a real city branding opportunity.

  2022.12.08

• Cruise expands autonomous taxi service in San Francisco

  Cruise, which I wrote about earlier this year, has just announced that its autonomous taxi service will soon be available to the general public 24 hours a day, across all of San Francisco. Initially the service was only available between 11PM and 5AM (when traffic volumes are lower), and in certain parts of the city. It was also free to use. In total, the company now has about 300 AVs operating across San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix. And it has been charging for rides since June of this year.

  If you’re curious about what it’s like to ride in one of these, check out the above video.

  2022.12.06

• Micromobility ridership in the US from 2010 to 2021

  

  The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) has just published this report on shared micro mobility in the US from 2010 to 2021. And it’s a good look at how this space has evolved over the years. According to the report, the first modern North American bike share system was installed in Montréal in 2009 and the first in the US was in 2010. Though a quick Google search has Washington DC claiming this title in 2008.

  Whatever the case may be, bike share ridership started somewhere around 321k per year in the US and trip volume is now close to 50 million per year. Electric scooters also joined the mix in 2018, and 2019 was a banner year for this mode of transportation. The report suggests this was due to cheap VC money subsidizing these rides. Electric scooters have seen their average trip cost 2x between 2018 ($3.50) and 2021 ($7), despite the average trip distance remaining more or less flat (1.3 to 1.2 miles).

  Naturally, the pandemic was bad for shared mobility. But it is interesting to see how much this space has rebounded and how resilient it seems to be. Prior to the pandemic, bike share usage had clear morning and evening peaks, coinciding with people commuting to work. Since then, we have seen a shift to both a wider range of trips (i.e. to do things like get groceries) and more trips throughout the day.

  To download a full copy of the report, click here.

  2022.12.03

• French people like electric scooters

  Toronto doesn’t like electric scooters. Something about them being dangerous. But here are some interesting statistics for France, which has apparently become the leading scooter market in Europe:

  • The Fédération des Professionnels de la Micromobilité (FPMM) — yes, this exists — estimates that there are about 2.5 million regular scooter users in France.
  • In 2021, about 900,000 units were sold in the country, which represents a 42% increase compared to 2020.
  • Sales directly to users is outstripping the revenue from self-service operators such as Lime, Bird, Dott, and Voi. Current annual estimates are in the range of €310 million and €40 million, respectively.
  • About 50% of scooter sales are happening at grocery stores, compared to 30% at other retailers, and 20% online. (This is kind of interesting. I wonder if people are impulse buying while shopping for food.)

  I am a big fan of electric scooters. And all of this suggests to me that scooter adoption is likely to continue, that we are going to need to start thinking more about how best to incorporate them into our cities, and that eventually Toronto will have to stop being so conservative.

  2022.11.30

• How Sydneysiders got to work in 2021

  I’m not sure how much you can actually glean from this Australian Bureau of Statistics data (taken from this recent New Geography article):

  

  The data was collected on August 20, 2021 and, at that time, there were still a number of pandemic lockdowns in place. But consider the fact that during the last census (2016), Sydney’s “work @ home” share was only 4.9% and that its transit share was 26.2%.

  Where Sydney is sitting today is obviously somewhere between where it was in 2016 and where it was in 2021. Who knows where exactly things stabilize — that is largely unknowable — but at least I got to use “Sydneysider” in a blog post title.

  2022.11.28

• Are multi-way boulevards at least part of the answer?

  This short video by City Beautiful makes the case for multi-way boulevards. The way to generally think about a multi-way boulevard is that it is a really big street that has been subdivided into areas that move cars relatively quickly and into areas that are a bit more conducive to calmer traffic and doing things like cycling and walking. More specifically, they are streets that have local access lanes on either side.

  And in this video, it is proposed as a possible fix for two kinds of situations: (1) as a solution for what to do when you take down an elevated highway and (2) as a solution for retrofitting suburban arterial roads. I thought this would be a good video to share given that I can think of an elevated highway that should come down and because I have written before about how challenging it can be to change streets after they’ve been built. They tend to be pretty sticky.

  But beyond this, it’s also a good primer on how suburban transportation approaches are highly effective at making cities that you can’t walk around in.

  2022.11.17

• Bikes and property in Paris

  I have been reading Fred Wilson’s blog for over a decade now (and he has been blogging for almost two decades). A lot of the time it is about venture capital and tech, but similar to what I do here, it can be about almost anything. Today he wrote about the two weeks that he just spent in Paris with his wife (the Gotham Gal). And the post covers everything from real estate to relationship advice. But here are two points that will be particularly relevant to what we usually talk about around here:

  • Paris has done an excellent job of prioritizing cycling and building a ton of new lanes over the last number of years. We know this. But another good point that Fred makes is that Paris has allowed competition in their micro-mobility ecosystem. It started with Velib, but now you can also use Dott and Lime. The last time I was in Paris I used Lime bikes and scooters, mostly because I already had the app and because they were everywhere. Competition is good and Toronto should probably allow the same. Our bike share system — specifically the mobile app — is incredibly cumbersome to use, and the last time I checked most of the e-bikes were consistently out of service. Let’s see if someone else can do a better job. We should, of course, also add scooters to the mix while we’re at it.
  • Next, Fred describes Paris’ real estate market as being more “stable.” And by this he means that, for whatever reason, values and rents seem to be more moderated. This has some benefits. Restaurants and other retail businesses seem to stick around for decades, whereas according to Fred, “it’s hard to find a shopping street in Manhattan that doesn’t have multiple vacant stores”. I’m not exactly sure why this is the case in Paris (assuming it is). I don’t believe that they have any sort of vacant store tax. Though they do have a tax on unoccupied homes. Maybe this is just what happens when you’re a little less capitalistic. (This is me deliberately avoiding the term socialism.)

  If any of you have more insight into the real estate market in Paris, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  2022.11.13

• Walking is good for creative thinking

  Here is an excellent reason for why you may want to spend more time walking:

  People have noted that walking seems to have a special relation to creativity. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1889) wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” (Aphorism 34). The current research puts such observations on solid footing. Four studies demonstrate that walking increases creative ideation. The effect is not simply due to the increased perceptual stimulation of moving through an environment, but rather it is due to walking. Whether one is outdoors or on a treadmill, walking improves the generation of novel yet appropriate ideas, and the effect even extends to when people sit down to do their creative work shortly after.

  The results were a bit inconclusive as to whether outdoor walking is better than other forms of walking, so for now we will just say that walking — in general — is good for creative thinking. But where my mind immediately goes is: Does this finding scale up?

  In other words, if you were to take two different cities — City A where everybody, for the most part drives, and City B where everybody, for the most part, walks — could you find any evidence that City B was on average more creative than City A?

  I guess one way you could measure this is through patents. And if you were to look at patents per capita in the US, you’d likely find cities like Princeton (NJ), Redmond (WA), and cities in Silicon Valley near the top of the list. I’m not sure there’s an obvious correlation here.

  But it is kind of interesting to think about a possible relationship between urban form and creativity.

  2022.11.11