Clearing out the Chart Attic - Part 2
A few more factoids of more or less interest. Probably less.
We’ll start with… EV politics (sigh)
Some days I think every decision in America is becoming a political one. Eventually, people will probably choose which sidewalk to use based on whether it is on the left or the right side of the street. Anyway, politics has come to EVs now, and not just on the supply side (e.g., government policies) but on the demand side:
I do remember, a few years back, when some conservatives were pro-EV, as they would help reduce any future dependency on foreign oil. I guess those days are gone. No further comment.
Next topic, almost as controversial: traffic
There is an enormous debate raging around the world about traffic and congestion, including the environmental and economic costs of spending hours idling in traffic. Academics and policy experts have spent decades and longer on this topic, so it is pointless for me to try to engage in this debate here. But I do follow it, and found this fascinating (at least to me) recently-released (August 2023) study: “The fast, the slow, and the congested: Urban transportation in rich and poor countries,” by Prottoy A. Akbar et al. This team of four scholars assembled a database of vehicle travel speeds in over 1,200 cities in 152 countries, in a brave attempt to quantify the degree of congestion in each (so that policy makers would know just how much of a problem they are facing). I will call out some key findings here, but you really should read the paper, because it is full of many more insights.
First, vehicular1 speed is highly correlated with wealth. GDP per capita goes up with travel speed - or you can argue, travel speed goes up with GDP per capita:
In fact, 19 of the top 20 fastest-moving cities in the world are in the USA (the other one is in Canada), and whereas the 20 slowest are all in developing economies (e.g. Bangladesh, Nigeria, India, etc.) To sum it all up, the authors assert that “Covering the same unit of distance takes about twice as long in a very poor relative to a very rich country.”
And, in my opinion (the authors are coy about the direction of causality between speed and wealth) this is crucial to economic development, as time spent moving about is time stolen from doing more productive things, like serving customers in a restaurant or building airplane parts in a factory.
Second, and here is where things get very contrarian, precisely how do American cities ensure their high travel speed? From the authors (emphasis added):
“We find that cities in richer countries are faster primarily because they have more major roads, and secondarily because their road networks spread over larger urban areas. … Through the lens of our model, higher income per capita leads to more tax revenues, housing consumption, and demand for travel. Consequently, cities in richer countries spend more on fast roads and span larger urban areas…”
Thus - and this runs so counter to the thinking of most urban planners - economies may benefit from building both more roads and from allowing even more sprawl, because these two things work together to reduce the drag on economic achievement that slow travel speeds represent.
Two final points: 1. again, read the paper, as I am sure I have to some extent garbled the results; and 2. no, I am not personally a big fan of the conclusion I just drew (again, the authors avoid drawing causal links). I like less-car-and-bus-intensive walkable cities, in terms of the pleasant lifestyles they offer. But when it comes to generating the economic activity required to lift humans to a higher standard of living, this paper presents evidence which I take to argue that the sprawl of Dallas-Fort Worth may be superior to the compact charm of Boston, and certainly is better than the massive gridlock of Dhaka.2
And now, News You Can Use, maybe
This is on the topic of driver distraction. We all know that driving safely requires careful attention to the task, and that therefore it is important to avoid distractions: no slurping instant ramen while steering with your knees, for example. And car and tech companies have made great efforts to reduce the distraction burden of various in-car activities. We now have, for example, voice-responsive navigation systems (“State your destination”) and in-car audio systems that let you speak on your phone with someone, while not actually fiddling with the phone.
But do these systems actually help reduce distraction? A paper by D Strayer et al. "Assessing Cognitive Distraction in the Automobile,” argues that they don’t, or at least not by much. The assessment method was to use three studies in which drivers completed eight common in-vehicle tasks. Various subjective and physiological measures were collected and integrated into a cognitive distraction scale. Here are the results, summarized:
Sorry for the extreme nerdiness of this chart, but bear with me, as it is important. The higher up an activity goes, the more it distracts from the key task of driving. There are 7 typical tasks measured, and an eighth sort of “control” task, OSPAN, which is a nasty assignment requiring the driver to simultaneously perform math and memorization tasks, and was created by researchers to represent a maximally-distracting activity. (Do Not Try This At Home!) The other seven are:
Single: just driving
Radio: driving and listening to the radio
Book: driving and listening to an audio book
Passenger: driving and having a conversation with a passenger
Hand-held: driving and talking on a handheld phone
Hands-Free: driving and talking on a hands-free cell phone
Speech-to-Text: driving and dictating to a speech-to-text e-mail system
One can see the cognitive load climbing as the tasks get more complex. But here’s the interesting part: hand’s-free and hand-held phone use were about equally distracting, and a pure text-to-speech system was even more distracting.3 This runs somewhat counter to accepted wisdom, that it is the fiddling with the physical phone that is a major source of distraction. It turns out that it is the thinking portion of the task, the figuring out what to say, the listening to what has been said, etc., that causes the distraction. The actual physical interaction is of course a problem, but the most-distracting task involved no physical work at all. While I am no safety expert and none of this post should be considered any kind of expert advice, I am persuaded that I am perhaps kidding myself by thinking I am safer when using hand’s-free devices in the car: this may not be the case.
Finally, the ultimate in mobility services
All right, let’s close on a lighter note. You’ve heard of micromobility, which we used to call “riding a bike,” but which is a new term invented to cover the wider range of (usually) single-person wheeled vehicles that have multiplied on our roads lately. Scooters, unicycles, powered wheelchairs, ebikes, cargo bikes, skateboards, even pogo sticks.4 These things have really blossomed in the era following the launch of ride-share and ride-hail outfits such as Lyft and Uber. Following in those firms’ footsteps, we’ve seen companies launch rented docked bikes, rented dockless bikes, rented scooters, and more. Now, there is a clear trend here, towards shrinking size. We’ve always had rental cars, where I have the whole thing to myself. Then we got ridehail (aka “a taxi,” though Uber absolutely hates it when you call them a taxi company), where there are at least two people sharing the vehicle. Then bikes (1, maybe 2 people), much smaller than cars. Then scooters, even smaller: 1 person. (Especially the electric unicycles like onewheel.com.) I have finally gotten out ahead of this trend, and am proud to present to my lucky reader(s) the ultimate evolution of tech-enabled mobility services:
I figure a minimum market cap of $100 billion, since last I checked there were 7.7 billion people on the planet, so probably at least 7 billion pairs of feet?5 Contact me if interested, I am accepting initial investments of as little as $1 million.6
Specifically, road vehicles: the authors include buses and cars and trucks, but their database excludes railway vehicles like trains and subways.
Here’s the twenty fastest and slowest cities, for the record. Note that many of the fast US cities are leading here in part due to economic decline. For example, Flint’s main roads were likely mostly laid out when its population was much higher (1960: 200,000; today: 75,000), and empty roads are fast roads. Thus the authors point out that their results are robust when comparing countries to countries (richer countries have faster traffic than poor ones) but not when comparing cities to cities within countries (richer cities in the USA tend to be slower). But the overall thesis stands: countries that have built numerous, large, sprawling road networks are better off than those that have not.
Note that actually dialing the phone was not part of the task: “These tasks allowed the driver to have his or her eyes on the road and hands on the wheel (except when he or she was holding the cell phone).” The call was initiated by a researcher riding in the car, so all the driver had to do was drive and talk, though in the case of the hand-held phone, also hold (but not dial or look at) the phone.
You think I am kidding? Um, no: https://cangoroo.tech/
I am considering a reverse-BOGO pricing model: the first shoe is free, but you have to pay to get the second one.
Obviously now I am kidding. Do NOT send me money! (Did I do that right, SEC?)