Dec 20, 2021

Mobility & Transportation - Issue #62

Issue #62 — View online — Suggest a link

Mobility & Transportation

Insight into all things transportation and mobility, covering driverless vehicles, trends in public transportation, the rise of cycling, ride- and car-share, smart city developments, ITS, and more.

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I’d like to wish you a safe and happy holiday season {{first_name}}. As we head into the holidays, consider ordering a meal or two from a local restaurant – one of the best ways to support a local business. If ordering direct from the restaurant, that order might be fulfilled from a Lyft driver. Ordering something from Skip-the-Dishes? It might be coming from one of their “dark” stores rather than a convenience store. Walking out to catch a bus? Check Transit app – if the bus has been cancelled, it will now show crossed out. And soon, residents in the Greater Toronto area may be able to board a quiet electric GO bus. These stories and more below. Stay safe, be joyful!

2021 Times Person of the year Elon Musk

A few short years ago, Musk was roundly mocked as a crazy con artist on the verge of going broke. Now this shy South African with Asperger’s syndrome, who escaped a brutal childhood and overcame personal tragedy, bends governments and industry to the force of his ambition.

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Tech + government

'Start with the Problem': LA Metro Has Advice for Tech Companies Trying to Partner with the City

L.A. Metro Chief Innovation Officer Joshua Schank has some advice for private sector companies looking to partner with Metro: “Don’t start with the technology. Start with a problem you’re trying to solve.”

Schank emphasized the benefits of public/ private partnership. Private sector companies not only bring technology and innovation, they also take on some of the risk of investing in new transit infrastructure and services.

One example of such a partnership is Metro Micro, a micro-transit service offering on-demand shared rides to users within a fixed zone for $1 per ride. The project came about through an unsolicited proposal from private sector partner RideCo.

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Mobile Apps

Lyft Picks Up Restaurant Delivery

Lyft is now joining the ranks of DoorDash, Skip-the-Dishes and Uber Eats – well, sort of. They have announced a new partnership with Olo, a company that helps restaurants use their own online ordering platform by partnering them behind the scenes with drivers from other services.

Justin Paris, head of Lyft Delivery, clarified that his company wasn’t looking to be a direct competitor to Uber Eats with its own ordering app, but instead simply wanted to open up revenue opportunities for their drivers and themselves.

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Via's personal ride-hailing will shut down next week

Via is shutting down its ride-hailing operations, currently in New York and Washington, DC, after December 20th. After that, the company will shift its attention to mass transit systems. The company isn’t shy about its reasoning: its public transportation business is more successful, growing quickly, and it’s a more reliable revenue stream thanks to long-term contracts.

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SkipTheDishes building its own ‘dark stores’ across Canada to expand home delivery business

By mid-2022, SkipTheDishes is planning to build 38 “dark stores” – another name for retail locations that fill e-commerce orders only. It has already launched four such locations under the name Skip Express Lane, buying its own inventory to deliver items such as milk and eggs, pantry staples and snacks.

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Transit now shows Cancelled Departures

Transit (app) is helping agencies communicate our unfortunate new reality by highlighting cancelled trips with a ~~strikethrough~~ so riders don’t show up early for a cancelled bus. Their friends at St. Louis Metro were so excited for this new feature that they wrote a blog post about it for their riders.

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Autonomous Vehicles

Self-driving trucks are using Uber Freight to haul goods

Aurora is using the Uber Freight brokerage platform, which connects truck drivers with shippers that need cargo delivered, to haul freight for customers between Dallas and Houston. They always have two safety operators on board.

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Electric Vehicles

Arrival unveils its roomy rideshare Car prototype designed with Uber ahead of testing next year

This past May, Arrival announced a new partnership with Uber to to design and develop a purpose-built EV specifically for rideshare drivers. Arrival has now unveiled the cars design, featuring a panoramic roof and passenger legroom greater than a Rolls Royce.

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GO Transit is charging ahead with an electric-powered bus pilot

For the first time, Metrolinx is testing two zero-emission battery electric double-decker GO buses. While electric busses are nothing new, what’s unique is that GO bus is a regional bus service, connecting universities, malls and other locations at municipalities across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area – most electric bus pilot projects elsewhere have been with local buses that travel much shorter distances before they can come back to the garage for charging. As a cherry on top, these new vehicles will allow for more storage for passengers to use, and feature USB charging for mobile phones.

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Public Policy

Minimum parking, maximum rent: Let’s cut tenants a break by ending parking minimums

In a wrongheaded effort to keep on-street parking super-easy, most U.S. cities require developers to build more car spaces than they otherwise would. The problem is that somebody has to pay for all that extra parking, and it’s very expensive. So, developers pass along the cost in the form of higher rent to tenants.

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Techstars Startup Digest Mobility & Transportation is curated by:

Sanathan Kassiedass
sanathan.kassiedass@startupdigestmail.com

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