ITS Monday: Edition 13, 2025

If Australia switched to EVs, we’d be more reliant on China’s car factories – but wean ourselves off foreign oil

Professor Hussein Dia‘s latest piece for The Conversation. “On one level, ending Australia’s dependence on foreign oil makes sense at a time of great geopolitical uncertainty. But on the other, going electric would lead to more reliance on China, now the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs.”

Related iMOVE articles:

• FACTS: A Framework for an Australian Clean Transport Strategy
  
• Electric Vehicles: Info, Projects & Resources
  
• Alternative Fuels: Info, Projects & Resources
• The Conductor Series: The electrification of transport

Related iMOVE projects:

• EV batteries: Repair, refurbish, repurpose, recycle
• Second lives for electric vehicle batteries

• READ THE ARTICLE

Hybrid workers – evidence to support this new mainstream workforce in 2025

The latest piece from the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies‘ Thinking Outside The Box series, and co-written by Professor David Hensher and Dr Edward Wei. In it they “… analyse the current arguments for and against employees returning to the office full-time. They discuss how research supports the hybrid work model, showing no loss of productivity, and how it also contributes to reduced traffic congestion.”

Related iMOVE articles:

• Working from Home: Info, Projects & Resources
• Prospects for Working from Home: Assessing the evidence
• Traffic Congestion: Info, Projects & Resources

Siting and sizing of public–private charging stations impacts on household and electric vehicle fleets

A new academic paper, co-authored by Lin Su, Krishna Murthy Gurumurthy, Kara Kockelman. The abstract:

To facilitate the provision of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCS) in urban areas, this study investigates the benefits of co-locating fleet-owned chargers with public charging stations to enable construction incentives and cord-sharing cost savings. Shared EVCS can serve charging demand from both user types: private (household) EV owners and those managing fleet vehicles – like shared and fully automated EV (SAEV) fleets.

Using POLARIS to simulate all person-travel across the 6-county Austin, Texas region, new EVCS were sited and sized with DC fast-charging (DCFC) plugs to lower operating and construction costs while providing public + private (PP) service across an 81-square-mile core geofence (where 200 SAEVs were active) over 24-hour days. When co-location is permitted, 115 DCFC cords were added to the 23 existing (publicly available) stations to enable SAEVs and household EVs (HHEVs) charging access, within the geofence. Each 250-mile-range SAEV was simulated to travel an average of 330 miles per day, serve over 92 person-trips, and recharge 2.7 times a day (for 2.4 h per session).

The new DCFC plugs were primarily added to public EVCS at shopping centers and schools, and in residential settings along freeways. The average plug served 4.8 EVs per day. Most co-located PP EVCS permitted immediate (no-wait) charging, except for 2 stations along freeways that averaged 8 min of wait time to begin charging. The co-location strategy lowered fleet owners’ initial EVCS construction costs by 12 % (thanks to cord-sharing to avoid cord duplication), while reducing SAEV wait times to just 3.1 min (versus 10.7 min if SAEV managers had to build and operate their own EVCS).

Related iMOVE project:

• Planning for the electrification of the Victorian bus fleet

Trust towards autonomous driving, worthwhile travel time, and new mobility business opportunities

Another new academic paper, this one co-authored by Jingjing Zeng and Zheng Li. The abstract:

When driving autonomous cars, individuals have the opportunity to engage in non-driving activities, resulting in improved well-being. By incorporating trust into the technology acceptance modelling framework, this study extends the understanding of behavioural intention from the adoption of autonomous cars to the allocation of worthwhile travel time.

Within this extended framework, the structural equation model is employed to identify significant paths to time allocation behaviour. Specifically, trust is identified as a crucial determinant of such behavioural intention. Then, we use the hierarchical ordered probit model to analyse the extent of such time allocation, accounting for scaling heterogeneity in self-reported responses.

Our empirical evidence demonstrates the vital role of trust in encouraging the allocation of worthwhile and productive travel time. Based on these results, we present various new mobility business opportunities as well as some policy implications from the perspective of trust.

Related iMOVE articles:

• Autonomous Driving Info, Projects & Resources
  
• Autonomous Driving Technology
• Connected Vehicles: Info, Projects & Resources

Related iMOVE projects:

• C-ITS national harmonisation and pre-deployment research
• Environmental impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles
• Safely deploying automated vehicles on Australian roads

These big cities cut back cars. This is what happened next

“Cities around the world trying to limit driving have faced objections — namely that the measures would limit personal freedom, cost too much, destroy commerce or have negligible effects on air quality.

Now the first data from these experiments in New York, London and Paris is trickling in. They offer some clues about whether cutting speed limits, charging traffic for entering a city center and penalizing drivers of the most polluting cars can reduce congestion and improve air quality, without causing too much disruption.”

Resilience and adaptability triangles in networks

And last but not least, this piece from Professor David Levinson’s The Transportist blog. “When a network faces disruption, understanding its response is crucial. Resilience, reliability, and robustness describe how networks resist, recover from, and even benefit from shocks. Grounded in systems theory and enriched by research across several fields, resilience theory now plays a critical role in everything from cybersecurity to urban planning.”