NYC DOT data mines Uber and Lyft Trips

New York will start clawing in the same kind of data from the ride-hailing companies that have stormed its streets in recent years. If Uber, Lyft, Via, and Juno want to keep operating in the city, they’ll have to provide the TLC with even more finely detailed data than they do now: the date, time, and location of pickups and drop-offs (at least down to the intersection), the vehicle’s license number, the trip mileage, itemized trip fare, route (including whether the vehicle entered traffic-choked Midtown), and how much the driver was paid. The city intends to use all this data to learn more about what’s happening on the streets, and to plan. It will ponder how to beat traffic and improve road safety.

2019-02-05: Massive growth in bikeshare

The rate of the industry’s growth is no joke. The global explosion of shared bikes and scooters in the past few years amounts to the “the fastest technological adoption in history,” as the event’s website noted. And it’s just getting started. “Logarithmic is the way to go with everything” explained Micromobility Conference founder Horace Dediu. He pointed to charts showing the expected rise in adoption of shared electric scooters and their 1-to-3-wheeled brethren. “If you’re not measuring in logarithmic, you’re in the wrong business.” In the meantime, the mini-vehicle gold rush will likely keep beckoning new prospectors. 2 former employees of the traditional docked bikeshare operator Motivate, now both working at 2 new-mobility startups, reminisced about old times maintaining New York City’s hardy CitiBike fleet. They complained that all the sudden interest from software startups was leaving critical hardware overlooked. A former manager pointed to the apparently fragile wheel hubs on a competitor’s shared bike model. “We tried those. They’re just not going to last.”

2019-05-08: The segway was too early but was otherwise correct

This transformation is one that Dean Kamen trumpeted when introducing the Segway in 2001 — the Segway will “sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking” — but the Segway was too early and expensive and now e-scooters and e-bikes are actually set to deliver on that promise

2019-08-12: Tiny cars

Minimobility vehicles will use more energy and road space than scooters, but still much less than full sized cars and transit systems. Expect to see energy numbers perhaps 33%-50%, though it is possible to do even less. Minimobility vehicles will take 50-25% the space on roads of human driven sedans. Many are only 2.5m long and thus fit perpendicular in parallel parking spaces as motorcycles do. That’s cool, but even better is the ability of computer-driven cars to valet park, fitting 5 in the space used by 1 human driven sedan. (You can also fit 10s of small micromobility scooters in a sedan’s parking space.)

2019-08-24: Similarly in LA

Los Angeles will deploy a massive surveillance dragnet targeting the less than menacing threat posed by…bikes and scooters. That’s right, a city-wide, real-time tracking network, a veritable Orwellian surveillance state, targeting the same sort of scooters popular with middle schoolers. In a perplexing technical document posted by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to the open-source software development site GitHub, the city laid-out its vision for an unprecedented tracking system. Buried between technical jargon like “All MDS compatible provider APIs must expose a public GBFS feed…” is a terrifying vision of the future. Under these guidelines, every scooter and bike will need to report the exact GPS coordinates of each device with military precision every 5 seconds. Even worse, the devices will have to report this data in real time.

2022-12-14: More on tiny cars

Why do minicars offer so much societal upside? Let’s walk through the reasons.

To start, they pose far less danger than automobiles to pedestrians and cyclists, whose deaths have been soaring in the US. It’s easy to understand why: If forced to choose, you’d rather be hit by a 500kg golf cart puttering along at 30 kmh than a 3500kg Chevrolet Silverado going 70kmh.

Minicars are better for the planet, too, devouring much less energy and resources for propulsion and manufacture. Their batteries are a fraction of those underpinning electric SUVs and trucks. A Hummer EV’s battery weighs 1500kg, 30x the size of Nimbus’s battery pack. Smaller batteries require less lithium, cobalt and nickel — essential minerals whose shortages have hobbled electric vehicle manufacturing. Even a modest shift toward miniature EVs would free up precious material, catalyzing the transition from fossil fuels.

Minicars also expand mobility access, in two ways. Most obviously, their lower prices put them within reach of those who struggle to afford a full-sized car. But slower minicars, such as golf carts, offer another key advantage. Because most operators don’t need to pedal (or, in some states, possess a driver’s license), they offer mobility to those physically unable to drive a car or ride a bike. That’s an especially valuable capability in a country with soaring numbers of older people.