Mobility Matters Daily #162 - Streetview, the Northern Line, and Road Pricing
Also, carbon pricing as an amazing idea
Good day my good friend.
You may have got the impression from this newsletter that I love the coast. You should love it to. If this picture article from the BBC doesn’t convince you that the sea is wonderful, you just don’t have your sea legs yet.
Anyway, here are today’s links curated especially for you.
James
Will Streetview replace the site visit?
No. You can move onto the next article if you want. But the research done by the National University of Singapore into using Streetview to assess the bikeability of streets is more interesting.
In a straight comparison with the standard method (sending someone out and surveying for themselves), applying computer vision to Streetview performs well. But there are significant issues with data quality of Streetview data, particularly for data used to train the systems on what constitutes a good quality street for cycling.
London’s got a brand new line
There is a new line on the London Underground map. Yesterday, the first trains ran on the extension of the Northern Line from Kennington to Battersea Power Station via Nine Elms. Knowing several people who have worked tirelessly on this project, seeing something like this open is probably a great relief to them!
This is the first change to the Underground network since the Jubilee Line was extended in the late 1990s, so its been a long time coming. But the impact of this extension is more profound than linking a new development to the Tube network. This could mean that long-desired plans to split the Northern Line in two could come to fruition.
How to road price for a small city
Its been a while since I’ve covered road pricing. So seeing this research that applies road user charging to a small city - Uppsala in Sweden - was a welcome change. The summary states that…
A rough cost–benefit analysis shows that the introduction of congestion charges in Uppsala is welfare improving if the operating costs of congestion charges are proportional to city population size. In the main scenarios, optimal congestion charges and parking fees reduce the number of car trips by 10% and 7%, respectively.
Yes, it is a (very) rough cost-benefit analysis. But the exploration of welfare gains highlights the variations to be expected in a small city, such as the importance of parking charges as revenue for the public sector, and the presence of employer-owned parking. Its an interesting addition to the road pricing debate.
Something interesting
Related to road pricing is the concept of carbon pricing. This article by Our World in Data makes a compelling case for carbon pricing.
If you do nothing else today, do this…
I’ll be talking Gen Z at TaaS Technology Live. You should sign up.