ITS Monday: Edition 5, 2020

To get our cities moving again, we need a new kind of urban professional

An excerpt from Professor David Levinson’s new book, The 30-Minute City. In this section of the book, David makes the point that in order to make the 30-minute city a reality, we need ‘Urban Operations’ experts who can straddle the realms of both strategy and tactics’. That, and the introduction of his ‘nihilistic theory of transport and land use: everything is ‘pointless.’

Read more about his book in an article he wrote for us at iMOVE, The 30-minute city: Small decisions for big gains.

After yellow and blue bike failures, councils pin their hopes on red

After earlier non-electric share bikes grabbed headlines in Australian cities for their launching of the new urban sport of caber tossing with bikes, or the hit new pastime ‘If you’re really not Marie Kondo how would you leave a share bike on a street?’, share electric bikes are coming to Melbourne.

They’re the Jump e-bikes, a subsidiary brand of Uber, on whose app the Jump bikes will appear. Will the red bikes put a stop to share bike tossing and hiding? We shall see. Initially 400 of the Jump bikes are headed for the Melbourne CBD, and Yarra and Port Phillip council areas, in a one-year trial, commencing in March. Other Australian cities are expected to follow.

The city in the city: the Norwegian smart city being developed from the ground up

An interview with Rune Eiterjord and Martin Opdal Sandtrøen from Nordland Country Counci, in Norway. Amongst the things discussed are MaaS, data, overcoming legacy systems that are not connected to each other, and whether the approach taken is one that could serve as a template in other places.

Commuters can get paid to take public transport in Auckland – and in most NZ cities soon

Auckland’s looking to incentivise a switch from driving to riding. The Frenzy app is NZ-built, and requires users to watch videos, take quizzes, etc., on their smartphones as they commute. The app is available to use in Auckland now, and will roll out to other places in New Zealand by the end of the month.

The 2028 Olympics has sparked a transportation revamp in LA

If you’ve been to Los Angeles, I think you’d agree that it’s not the easiest place to get around easily. But ahead of it getting the Olympics (again!), it’s looking to change that reality. It has 29 capital projects planned, at a cost of almost $43 billion. Also under consideration, or perhaps more correctly being discussed, is road congestion pricing scheme.

So it’s hoped that its Citius, Altius, Fortius for the Games, and Facilius for transport!

If Market Street was in Australia? Visual comparisons of reclaiming public space

In last week’s ITS Monday we included a story about a section of Market Street in San Francisco going car-free. Josh Brydges, the Locations and Transportation Planner at GoGet Carshare, has overlaid on maps out how such a slice of street would look in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, and Adelaide.