I do believe that you will like this newsletter, Frodo Baggins

Good day my good friend.

After yesterday’s sojourn into the world of the Spending Review, its back to the usual nonsense today. Something I’d never thought I’d say is that I am currently listening to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s views on how to save the planet, and it is a most refreshing listen.

Anyway, here are today’s stories curated for you. Enjoy.

James

Thank you for becoming a paid subscriber. Remember to check out this week’s in-depth article on autonomous vehicle legislation and policy globally.

The importance of seeing policy in the round

Like many people, I was (and still am) appalled at the UK Government’s plan to lower Air Passenger Duty (APD) on domestic flights. But this series of Tweets by Helen Miller at the Institute for Fiscal Studies made me think about this policy in another way. To put what she says simply, domestic flights will be part of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme. As more people will be flying this will increase the demand, and consequently the price, for emissions permits. This will then result in other sectors cutting back on emissions to avoid paying the higher price. Therefore, emissions will not increase overall.

I’m still think the APD reduction is a bad climate policy, but its a useful reminder that systems act in funny ways. It is easy to see systems as things where actions can be targeted, but forget that feedback loops occur in unexpected ways that we often don’t see. That is why we need to remind ourselves to see policy issues from several angles, and not just our own.

Optimal solutions for mixing autonomous and non-autonomous vehicle traffic are still inconclusive

A thorny question around autonomous vehicles (AVs) is how do we effectively manage the transition to an AV fleet without current traffic systems falling over. There has been research into the technological capability of various levels of drivers assistance (conclusion: its feasible and consumers may be willing to accept it), but not much into the highways implications.

An exploratory study by Chakraborty et al has investigated the implications of providing AV-only lane on freeways. Their practical conclusion in their words is

…the AV-lane allocation problem proposed in this study develops a short term (e.g., morning peak hour) resource allocation strategy and requires minimal infrastructural setup to convert candidate regular lanes to AV-exclusive lanes. This infrastructural setup might include only a variable message sign board fixed at the entrance of each candidate regular lane to inform the road users whether a candidate lane is an AV-exclusive lane or not.

Simply, their methodological approach, despite its flaws, shows promise in terms of identifying a strategy to manage mixed AV and non-AV traffic on a freeway. The solution is effectively a Smart Motorway. This needs more research, as this is largely a theoretical exercise and doesn’t cover matters such as junctions and doesn’t include any sensitivity analysis on the results. But its useful to see work in this field being done.

The principles of data privacy and how it will power the future of mobility

The New Urban Mobility Alliance (NUMO) has published some guiding principles for sharing individuals mobility data. The data that you produce on how you get around is among the most personally identifiable. Vianova explored this issue in the context of GDPR, effectively concluding that so long as you as an organisation have GDPR-compliant processes in place, you should be ok, but that best practice is still emerging. The latter conclusion definitely being a sound assessment.

For what its worth, I think that something is missing in NUMO’s principles under We will uphold the rights of individuals to privacy in their movements. Something like this:

People will have the ultimate authority over their own data and how it is used. It cannot be used without their express, informed consent, which can be withdrawn at any time for any reason without objection or question. Cities and companies must have systems in place to enable this to happen.

Random things

Here are some random things that I found whilst crawling the Internet.

• Autonomous vehicles need ethics so they can break road rules (E&T Magazine)

• Bengaluru will need 22,000 electric vehicle charging stations to feed public transport by 2031 (Indian Express)

• How motorbikes can push-start e-mobility (ESI Africa)

• Bolt to expand EV option in South Africa (TechCrunch)

Interesting things

This one is a bit of fun, and shows the travels of the Fellowship of the Ring from the Lord of the Rings books.

If you do nothing else today, do this

Explore the Innovation Transformation Map produced by the World Economic Forum. It gives a good overview of who is doing what in terms of actually innovating.