A huge congratulations to @philipthalis on his well-deserved award.
Philip is undeniably both one of Australia's most respected architects and a tireless advocate for good urban design.
More importantly, he's not afraid to speak up publicly against bad state government planning decisions, as he did with Barangaroo, even when there's a personal cost.
Do you like learning about high quality, novel, interesting research on relationships between #mobility and #landuse from authors all over the world? If so, give the independent, peer-reviewed, open access #Journal of #Transport and Land Use a follow: @JTLU
So despite climate change, Australia's federal government has just committed an extra $3.25 billion into building a toll road and a 20-lane freeway widening.
"Pouring an extra $3.25 billion worth of federal funds into Melbourne’s North East Link is a good use of taxpayer money, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has insisted, despite the project’s cost doubling just a few months ago.
...
"The North East Link – which includes 6½ kilometres of tunnels – will stretch from Bulleen to Greensborough. It will widen the Eastern Freeway by up to 20 lanes.
"Allan revealed in December that the 10-kilometre toll road had more than doubled in cost since it was first announced.
"The toll road was initially budgeted at $10 billion and reassessed in 2019 at $15 billion. But the government revealed last year that the updated cost estimate was $26 billion."
Elon Musk once promised Tesla vehicles would have insanely high resale value because they’d all be robotaxis. Owners must be pissed he keeps gutting the value of vehicles they paid much more for a few years back.
Regarding Bloomberg's report of Tesla's market share in China…
"In China, Tesla’s market share shrank to around 6.7% in the fourth quarter of 2023, from 10.5% in the first three months of the year, according to Bloomberg calculations based on China’s Passenger Car Association data."
Elon Musk never wanted to build the low-cost car, according to Walter Isaacson. He wanted the design team to focus on the robotaxi, but they eventually convinced him to do both. Now he’s overruled them again.
If the board really cares about Tesla, they’d use this to oust Musk.
Even if Tesla could make them (they can't), robot taxis as a replacement for private care ownership is a pipedream if you don't first do something with the transportation patterns.
As long as the main driver for private transportation by car is commuting to work, a taxi fleet is going to need about the same number of cars as we've do today with private ownership.
It wold just add traffic: a robot taxi can't just wait in your driveway till the next day.
Kara Swisher in “Burn Book”: Travis Kalanick was so evil because he wanted to replace drivers with AI in 2014 — and I didn’t say anything about my objection at the time.
Kara Swisher, March 2024: “People are the problem with driving” and they should all be replaced. 🫠
@parismarx
No, I think you’re slightly off on this one. She’s saying ‘“People are the problem with driving” and they should all be replaced.’ in both these quotes based on her belief lives will be saved. In the first, she’s critical only of Kalanick’s monetary rather than humanitarian goal. I don’t see a “gotcha” between these quotes.
However, she IS an overly credulous numpty for thinking AVs are anywhere near to being safer than humans now or in the near future.
@parismarx If you’ve got a magic wand to restructure our built environment to grant American suburbs the climates and density to bike and bus everywhere, I’ll happily chip in to the gofundme for you to use it!
In the meantime, I have never seen a Waymo run a stop sign while I’ve seen several human cars run one just during this coffee. Waymos have caused exactly one injury, so minor the cyclist rode off; in a period in SF where dozens have been killed and hundreds more hospitalized.
@CelloMomOnCars I'm not an expert in that field, but I made a quick search and found the FOI request about the Young Persons’ (Under 22s) Free Bus Travel Scheme.
Thanks!
So 15 million free bus rides in Edinburgh from Feb 2022 - May 2023, or 15 months, so that's 1 million young-rider trips per month, roughly 10% of the total trips.
But that started in early 2022 so the 17% increase in 2023 is real, and very good news.