POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, I talk more about TfL’s potential countdown to disaster, and then we speak to transport consultant Jon Worth all about his epic rail journey from northern Finland to southern Portugal – and what it tells us about the state of European rail integration. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!
Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-irregular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen lately. Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve sent one of these out – writing extremely long pieces about buses and picking fights with media entrepreneurs is surprisingly time-consuming. I’ll try to get back into a more regular cadence as soon as I can.
Anyway, though, let me make it up to you with some super fun links. As this time I’m featuring:
Why driverless cars are a progressive cause
A damning indictment of the non-serious political class
How Labour should frame the push for ‘re-industrialisation’
Why the AI national security crisis is almost here thanks to a scary new development
A cool dataviz showing why your bus was late yesterday
The truth about how Mamdani is actually an abundance-pilled centrist dad.
Why Ukraine blowing up Russian data centres DIDN’T cause bot traffic to fall
And an adorable map of London you won’t want to miss
Now let’s get started!
Driverless cars are a progressive cause (me)
However, safety is not the only prize from autonomy. The invention of this technology is a huge opportunity for social justice in terms of mobility. Too much of our society is designed around car ownership, which puts everyone without a driving licence and access to a vehicle at a disadvantage, and this disproportionately impacts the young, poor, elderly and disabled. Autonomous vehicles are an opportunity to narrow this inequality.
How? The most important implication of autonomy is that it can dramatically reduce the cost of mobility. The most expensive part of running a vehicle service, whether private taxis or public buses, is paying for the human driving it. If we can remove them, suddenly it transforms the economics of transport, and enables services to serve more places, more regularly.
I was very excited last week to be asked to write again for the progressive journal Arguably. This time I made the explicitly progressive case for autonomous vehicles, so I’m looking forward to hoards of angry taxi drivers blockading my house.