ITS Monday: Edition 36, 2020

Wellington councils continue push for congestion charging

Let’s begin this week with the controversial topic of congestion charging. This push isn’t happening here, but in New Zealand. ‘It’s either the missing piece of the complex Wellington transport puzzle, or a pie-in-the-sky idea that will do nothing but overload the public transport network and tax the poor.’

Professor David Hensher has written for us on this topic several articles, including Road pricing reform: a thorny issue.

Uber introduces new public transport feature in world-first for Sydney

Uber. You heard of it? Sydneysiders are the first in the world to trial a new feature, called Uber and Transit. Allow me to give a better name for Australia, Uber and Public Transport. It throw public transport as another way to get from A to B from within the Uber app. It will be rolled out into the app later this month.

Coronavirus: How the working from home revolution will reshape Australia

This article is based on some research from the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies (ITLS) at the University of Sydney, and its work to ‘… shed light on how drastically our work and commuting habits have changed, and what sort of transport infrastructure will be needed post-pandemic.’

ITLS is in fact working on an iMOVE project right in this area, Working from Home: Revising metro strategic transport models.

WFH(ome)? How WFC(afe) may be a part of the post corona workplace change

Staying with working from home, and the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies (ITLS) this is by PhD student, James Bushell. Will WfC be part of the ‘new normal’ alongside working from home and working from the office? Was it before?

Transport for London offer ‘first trip for free’ deal to lure Londoners back into the city centre – as Britons continue to ignore Boris’s back to work drive

Firstly, apologies. I generally don’t like linking to the Daily Mail. But here we are. This is a pandemic-related tale from London that will be a concern the whole world over. How do we make public transport an option people will return to use for their commute (assuming we return to commuting in any large way!) rather than hop in a car?

Rush hour traffic in London soars by 25% in a week

And directly related to the article above, here’s another side to what’s happening in London as more people venture back into the world of commuting, based on some recent traffic data.

What Australia can learn from bicycle-friendly cities overseas

Unusually for ITS Monday, this is a light week for stories on active transport. But in this, we have one at least. It’s from The Conversation, and is written by Pablo Guillen and Miguel Loyola of the University of Sydney, and Ursa Komac of Western Sydney University. ‘But even if the new cycleways stay in place after the COVID-19 crisis, we’ll still be far from being as bicycle-friendly as Copenhagen or Amsterdam, over in Europe.’

Making the business case for inclusive infrastructure

Actually, this one too is about active transport. It’s from ‘friend of iMOVE’ Mott MacDonald (its Australia Practice Leader for Transport Planning, Kate Mackay has worked with us at conferences and webinars), repositions what perhaps should be front of mind when planning new infrastructure. The author of this piece is Kerry Scott, Mott MacDonald’s global practice leader for social outcomes.

Lidar is finally becoming a real business

Finally, we delve in businessland, and the business of lidar. ‘For years, the lidar business has had a lot of hype but not a lot of hard numbers. Dozens of lidar startups have touted their impressive technology, but until recently it wasn’t clear who, if anyone, was actually gaining traction with customers.’