Mobility Matters Daily #175 - E-bikes and cyber risks
A quickie to end the week
Good day my good friend.
Off riding the rails again today, heading towards that-there London to see friends and have good times. You wouldn’t think there is a pandemic on, would you?
Here are today’s links, especially curated for you.
James
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E-bikes get more people cycling
E-bikes do, unfortunately, seem to get some cycle snobs’ backs up. But there is now emerging evidence from the Netherlands and Belgium1 that indicates that more people riding e-bikes means more people riding bikes. This confirms some earlier work from Norway and also from the Netherlands that indicated the same.
This is no shock, really. E-bikes are a bicycle that encourages people to start cycling by tackling a known barrier. That riding a bicycle is tiring, especially if you haven’t done it for a while. So let’s welcome them with open arms!
A new framework is proposed for modelling cyber risks with autonomous vehicles
This article has only just come to my attention, and it is good. Having previously undertaken research on cyber security and transport, to see someone develop, test, and deploy a whole risk framework for autonomous vehicles is amazing to see, and to see it working using GPS data even more so.
If you want a quick primer on the whole cyber security issue in transport, I highly recommend this ENISA report as a great starting point. In fact, all transport planners should swot up on this, as it will be a bigger part of our work in the future.
Random things
Here are some random things that I found across the Internet that you may find interesting.
Cruise plans to have ‘tens of thousands’ of Origin AVs on roads in coming years (TechCrunch)
Visible change: Why the future of electrification is defined by transparency, data and digitalisation (City Monitor)
Cargo-ship congestion is bringing more dirty air to Southern California (Grist)
What Alan Krueger taught the world about the minimum wage, education, and inequality (Vox)
Trade-linked shipping CO2 emissions (Nature)
Interesting things
Tom Scott does excellent videos on British oddities. Here, he shows examples of 3 completely random crossings of the Manchester Ship Canal. All in place because of an Act of Parliament and that its just too much bother to remove them. I love this country sometimes.
If you do nothing else today, do this…
Something for the weekend, but visit Atlas Obscura. It has map of the weird and wonderful attractions near you and I love it. Apparently, the Whipsnade Lion that is near me was created as a warning for low flying aircraft.
The abstract is free, but you may need to pay to access the article