The states and feds are quickly rewriting the rules of the road, looking to accommodate driverless trucks, taxis and delivery bots. Just this week, the FMCSA unveiled new safety regs for robo-trucks, while California pumped out a juicy incentive to get more electric rigs on the roads. With that in mind (and all the details below,) we’ll have plenty to discuss at the Urban Autonomy Summit — Austin, convening next Wednesday, October 14th.
We’ve got an amazing group of speakers, representing industry leaders like Avride, Autolane, TaskUs, The Ride Platform, Gridwise, LPRI, Voltera, CharterUp, Bot Auto, PlusAI, Empiric Earth and more, plus TX-based regulators, media, investors and more. We still have a few spots left — apply to attend now!
HOT INDUSTRY NEWS & GOSSIP
New trucks, new rules: Looks like the rules of the road are a-changin’, in response to the coming wave of driverless trucks. Classically, when a truck breaks down, the driver is required to place warning lights / reflecting triangles / flares on the road behind the vehicle, to alert motorists. Well, what if there’s nobody in that broken down truck? The FMCSA just granted Aurora a five year exemption to the rule, allowing the robotrucker to instead flash amber warning beacons on its vehicles. A previous request for this exemption was denied, but new research finds the method to be safe.
Now that’s what I call a pedestrianized street! London is permanently pedestrianizing Oxford Street, its premiere downtown shopping district. A one kilometer long trial starts October 26, with permanent build outs starting in 2027, allowing the boulevard to “host world-class events, from sport to culture and fashion, as well as exciting new retail and leisure experiences.” The new designs are quite fetching — no ugly plastic bollards here — and you can also peruse how the road has looked over the decades.
Stuck in a never-ending roundabout? With gas prices still high, General Motors is promising drivers that hybrid vehicles are coming, with a company veep noting “we’re not tone deaf to our customers.” The company used to offer acclaimed plug-in hybrids like the Volt, but that car was cancelled in 2019. I’d bet good money whatever GM unveils now will also meet an unceremonious demise a few years later. Meanwhile, Lucid and Tesla are both struggling with falling sales, proving it takes more than just fuel efficiency to sell an auto these days.
Slow off the line… You’d think with gas and diesel prices so high, electric trucks would be flying off the lot. But many carriers are wary of making the switch, daunted by higher up-front costs and concerns about charging (sounds a lot like electric cars a few years back.) SCAQMD and SoCal ports are hoping to jump-start adoption by offering electric truck operators $60 per terminal visit, up to $36k per year.
Field of dreams: I waste a lot of ink kvetching about America’s inability to build public transit at reasonable costs. Well over in Illinois, an extension to Greater St. Louis’ light rail system just came in at $154 million for 5.2 miles of track — a truly thrifty $29.6M per mile! But take a look at the project details and the route it traverses, and you might find that running through empty fields to a secondary airport with a single carrier is perhaps not the wisest place these transit dollars could have been spent.
I’m walkin’ here! Vision Zero stats are going the wrong way in many places, but evidently not in the Big Apple! Kudos to NYCDOT on bringing pedestrian and traffic fatalities to all time lows.
Which way, commuter rail operator? Stung by depressed ridership and budget cuts from its supporting county agencies, Metrolink is raising fares by 27%, while staring down huge cuts to service; the number of trains on weekends could fall by 40%. Commuter rail operators are stuck in a tricky place: both Metrolink and Caltrain have seen weekend ridership best pre-covid numbers, while weekday ridership languishes thanks to fewer folks heading to their offices. But overall, more people still ride on weekdays, so when you have to cut… which one do you choose?
Metro seeks bikeshare operators: LA Metro just issued an RFI to radically transform its bike share operations, after its earlier attempt to take its current system out to bid got bogged down in politics. The document is full of juicy statistics: Gross cost per ride is $33.17, likely driven by poor utilization, since outside of downtown the system’s docks are too sparse to make it useful for most trips. Also interesting, the average bike share users’s median household income is $62,500, compared with $22,814 for rail riders and just $15,762 for bus users. Oof!
News catered to my interests: Uber just plopped down $2.3 billion to buy ezCater, the country’s largest catering platform. ezCater has 140,000 restaurants on board, and is popular for office lunches and event catering; last year it did $2.5B+ in gross bookings. Lately we’ve seen both Uber and DoorDash turn to big acquisitions — Delivery Hero, Deliveroo, Grubhub Campus, etc — to keep top-line growth humming.
Modern Delivery, quick hits: Ease Logistics deploys Einride autonomous trucks in Ohio. Class 8 truck orders fall 9.5%. Amazon launches new China to U.S. air freight options. Walmart debuts one-hour express pickup. Feds to study changes to truck driver split-sleep requirements. Shipt names Raj Kapoor as new CEO. Uber partners with Sur la table. Instacart Canada adds Costco, integrates with Just Eat Takeaway’s Skip. Alameda Belt Line looks to take over LA port rail. San Jose unveils PDD rules. Avride and Sodexo scale college deployments.
A few good links: MyMonthlyCar helps dealers turn inventory into monthly rentals. Baseball players love riding scooters. Looks like ridehail drivers follow classic 80/20 split. Vingroup and Alstom bring train assembly to Vietnam. RobCo hits $1B val. Seattle seeks ideas to cut light rail construction costs. Aerosonic wins lawsuit with Joby over trade secret theft. NHTSA looks to finally fix car headlight glare. New NYC subway gates cut fare evasion by 35%. Jaguar unveils new EVs; they’re strange, but at least they’re sedans! Tariff war ensnares Bombardier’s Can-Am Spyder. Cheers to our friends at Bloom for raising $3.6M for a domestic manufacturing marketplace. EU’s CEF receives €3B in funding requests for new transport infra. U.S. cuts federal transit funding, while proposing to route more transit funds to areas with higher birth rates.
See you next week!
- Jonah Bliss & The Curbivore Crew