Mobility Matters Daily #92 - Mapping and user acceptance
A short update today, but it has an interesting correlation in it
Good morning friend.
It is very much a traditional English summer day as I write this. Sun, team, scones and cream, and an English batting collapse in the cricket. Sorry, but I am keeping this short today due to some very pressing personal matters. But this does not affect the quality, I assure you!
A huge transport planning challenge is that we haven’t mapped the world yet
Recent news about WhereIsMyTransport raising $22m in funding for mapping transport in developing cities interested me not in their pitch deck (spoiler: value in emerging markets, data, personalised transport), but in how we often take the basics for granted. Organisations such as Transport for Cairo have similarly seen a challenge in simply mapping current transport networks to use as the basis for transport planning decisions.
Even the likes of OpenStreetMap, one of the largest collaborative projects in history, is finding it hard to map the world in granular, and at scale. This is a massive challenge for the deployment of technologies such as autonomous vehicles, and can only be solved in a very old fashioned way. By people physically mapping highways, routes, and services. Perhaps this should be our mobility grand challenge for the next 10 years?
Sometimes, we don’t understand what users will actually accept
This research article by Riccardo Curtale, Feixiong Liao, and Peter van der Waerden on user acceptance in shared electric vehicle trials surprised me somewhat. Their survey of users indicated that even during COVID-19, the cleanliness of vehicles only had an indirect impact on usage of these vehicles. For one simple reason - people trust that the cars will be cleaned.
Having worked on an e-scooter trial project during the pandemic where cleanliness was front and centre, this amazed me. Have we got attitudes to cleanliness on transport wrong, and how it will affect people’s choices in the future? Don’t get me wrong, it is still important that public transport is clean to reduce the spread, but are users more accepting than we think?
Stat of the Day
Okay, so this one is a bit of fun. The always amusing Spurious Correlations website came up with this great, and transport-relevant, one today. Could Norwegian oil cause American drivers to drive into trains? Of course not, but if you want some fun at lunchtime, I highly recommend visiting their website.
Data source: Spurious Correlations