Big Week in Taxi and Jitney News

There was lots of stuff the past few weeks about taxis and jitneys. Here are a few links to the action with brief comments below each:

"All-Borough Taxis (Like Yellow, But Green) Hit the Streets" NY Times
(Anyone see one of these out in the wild yet? I will post if I see one in northern Manhattan)

"Ending the Jitney Menace" NJ.com
(There are a lot of calls for jitney reform as an 8-month old was killed with one recently. Sounds like the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration may get involved. See next link.)

"Bayonne Police Have Issued Jitney Buses 200-plus Tickets in Last 18 Months" NJ.com
(However, enforcement doesn't seem to be the problem. The driver that crashed and ultimately caused the death of infant was on the phone at the time, it seems. Perhaps this is a problem specific to jitneys, but I suspect the real problem here is with letting people drive.)

"Taxi hailing apps off to slow start in New York, but could still accelerate" The Verge
(This isn't surprising. The apps will allow taxis to find new markets, not serve existing ones, so it will take time to develop. You don't need an app to find a taxi in Midtown, which is where the Yellows are already. People and drivers in areas where Yellows are not pervasive will ultimately benefit.)


These next links are all about ride-sharing and the legal  and economic challenges that must be overcome. There is a lot here. The status quo is untenable but a fully deregulated environment isn't likely to work, either. I think part of the problem facing cities and planners (and entrepreneurs and others) is that few have a firm understanding of the intent of regulations within the taxi/ride-sharing industry. We've been regulating these services so long that the purpose of regulation is not clear. Regulations don't appear in a vacuum. Somebody wants them, designs them and fights for them. Now, many are fighting to keep what we have while others want to tear them down. It seems that this has caught many planners and regulators off guard, and we need new models of how to think about transport supply and regulation. I actually think the California utility model is promising and can maybe be expanded to bus services and conventional transit agencies.

"City Taxi Systems Struggle with Change" Governing.com

"Taxi drivers sue, claim monopoly" Atlanta Business Chronicle

"Proposal Offered for County to Take Over City's Taxi Regulation" Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Seattle's ride-sharing debate reaches it's boiling point" Crosscut.com

"Sharing economy drives into trouble with ride-sharing arrests" Guardian.com

"In California, They're Not Taxis, They'e "Transportation Network Companies"" WNYC

"California's New Rules Could Change Rideshare Game" NPR

Understanding the Adoption of Electric Cars

If you read the news (I don't recommend it) you often hear conflicting stories. For instance, today Transportation Nation reports that Europeans are slow to warm to electric cars. From the story:

Transportation ministers and industry leaders, speaking last week at the International Transport Forum in Leipzig, Germany, said government subsidies and ever-increasing numbers of charging stations aren’t yet enticement enough to convince European consumers.

Yet the Energy Collective just published a story about how Norwegians love the Nissan Leaf electric car. Why is this so? From the story:

How did they do it? Infrastructure and incentives.

So there you go. Subsidies and infrastructure are not enough, except when they are. Back to the Transportation Nation story:

Another issue hampering EV adoption is standardization. Europe is home to multiple electrical grids, and different EVs have different plugs. Pat O’Doherty, the CEO of Ireland’s Electricity Supply Board, said “I should be able to drive my electric vehicle from Dublin in the future, down through Britain and charge it, down through France and into the South of Spain.” He added that even the technology governing payment systems at public charging stations differs from place to place.
Yamashita later said ruefully “that’s my headache at this moment.”

 The story does note the Norwegian sales, plus a clear explanation of how to goose success:

One bright spot for the Leaf, though, can be found in Norway, where 1,000 of them were sold in six months.
But on a large scale, “it will only work if the customer benefits financially,” said O’Doherty. He said the Nissan Leaf had been selling better in Ireland since Nissan had knocked 5,000 euros off the price.

So now we know.

Steady Progress Toward Autonomous Cars

New Scientist magazine has a nice story about the slow but steady adoption of autonomous cars. There isn't any new news, but the story highlights the incremental adoption of autonomous driving technologies that has already occurred:

Promising improved safety, better fuel-efficiency and freedom from the boredom of long drives, autonomy has been coming piecemeal to our cars for some time - and it has always had its critics. In 1994, on a UK motorway, Jaguar and Lucas Industries demonstrated the safety of adaptive cruise control and automatic lane keeping; both technologies are now commonplace on our roads. The media were not impressed, describing the idea of cars that drive themselves as "madness".

The incremental nature of technological change is an important factor in transport policy, yet too often transport planning chases "revolutions" where brand new (or redeveloped old) technologies will be widely deployed and adopted. As nice as a revolution may sound, that's just not how change actually occurs.

Rather than one day having a brand new model of fully autonomous vehicles, it is most likely that parts of the driving experience will be computerized (for instance fully autonomous freeway driving, just as fully autonomous parking is now commonplace) before the entire experience will be computerized. By encouraging and supporting incremental advances the technological, political and legal issues will have a chance to develop together, and adoption of new and safer technologies will happen faster. Consider what is happening with electric cars as a similar type of issue with deployment of new technologies. Electric cars are just not very popular as few people are adopting the revolutionary powertrains. The Chevy Volt is on hiatus, and Chevy just announced that it will be on hiatus an additional week. George W. Bush's "Freedom Car" and Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Hydrogen Highway" were failures, as was the entire "hydrogen revolution" because the infrastructure and technology isn't there to support widespread adoption, and still aren't. Maybe someday in the future hydrogen will be a standard fuel, but now people tend to really like their hybrids (Toyota is setting sales records with it's Prius models) which are an incremental improvement to what people already use.

All of this is to say don't hold your breath that autonomous vehicle technologies will first appear in a fully, full-time autonomous car, but also don't expect that driverless cars will not become commonplace. Drivers are already ceding some driving to their cars, and over time they will cede more and more until the driver is simply a passenger. Then someday no one will remember that is was ever any different.

UPDATE: Chevy announced that the Volt will go back into production on the original schedule due to strong March sales. Let's hope the strong sales continue!

UPDATE, Part Duex: Adam Ozimek at Modeled Behavior offers an alternative path to autonomous cars where demand for driverless cars comes from particular groups such as the elderly or disabled. This seems more along the lines of incremental shifts in the demographics of demand rather than incremental shifts in technology, as I argued.