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September 23, 2016
How much? How soon? A little realism about automated vehicles
I was asked this week to comment on two visions/proposals for future automated transportation systems, from two different organizations. You can find some of my reactions in coverage by KUOW and the Washington Post, but I thought it would be good to elaborate on my thoughts here and talk about what these two proposals get…
September 8, 2016
Two new articles on electric vehicle charging
A new issue of Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board has just been published and contains two papers by Sustainable Transportation Lab researchers. The papers use different data sources, but both concern the decision of electric vehicle (EV) drivers whether to plug in or not in a given situation. Understanding this decision…
September 7, 2016
A revolution or a job killer?
Ride sourcing services, such as Uber and Lyft, are always willing to reduce the amount they pay to drivers. This hope could soon be achieved to an even greater degree by Uber: Uber announced last month that it would be bringing autonomous Volvo XC90 SUVs to Pittsburgh. In order to supply self-driving services in main…
August 26, 2016
Park your ass in economy class!
Bottom line up front Air travel, especially internationally, generates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, but business class is much worse than economy: Read on for details: Air travel is a big part of most academics’ carbon footprints, and a frequent source of hypocrisy charges for those of us who work on sustainability and climate…
August 4, 2016
Long-term impacts of new mobility services
The Sustainable Transportation Lab is conducting a major study of new mobility services in partnership with the ridesharing company Lyft and BMW’s on-demand carsharing service ReachNow. The objective of the study – being driven by the tenacious leadership of visiting PhD candidate Michiko Namazu – is to identify how new mobility services affect key sustainability…
July 5, 2016
Is the glass half full or half empty for electric drive?
The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The engineer sees a glass that’s twice as large as it needs to be. Recently the New York Times ran a story about how the new vehicle market is shifting away from hybrid and electric vehicles. They report that “This year,…
June 20, 2016
Engineering Discovery Days 2016
Last quarter, Sustainable Transportation Lab grad students participated in the 101st annual Engineering Discovery Days (EDD) at the University of Washington. EDD is a large-scale, two-day STEM outreach event that allows graduate students and professors in the College of Engineering to present their research in creative and interactive ways to K-12th grade students, teachers, and…
June 10, 2016
Seattle from the air (and emissions from aviation)
Last weekend, my family and I went on a scenic flight around Seattle, which Kenmore Air was offering free for kids in honor of their 70th anniversary. Our aircraft was a de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Turbine Otter: The Otter is known for being a capable and versatile float plane, though perhaps a bit of a…
June 8, 2016
Reimagining suburbia for multimodal transportation
Evidence for the ballyhooed urbanization trend in the US generally relies upon data at the metropolitan level, and tends to obscure the fact that most of this growth is occurring in suburban-type areas rather than in dense urban cores.
June 2, 2016
Uber, trust, and price discrimination
On May 17th, NPR interviewed Keith Chen, head of economic research at Uber. Among other things, he discussed some interesting behaviors of users and drivers toward surge pricing. This information has emerged from the large volumes of data that Uber collects. These include: Diminishing impact. When Uber first introduced surge pricing, going from 1x (regular…
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