Feb 24, 2022

Mobility & Transportation - Issue #63

Issue #63 — 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.

Hello friend!!

Hope you’ve been well - looking forward to sharing some highlights of what I’ve been reading lately.

Those of you who live in Ontario can now renew your license plate without having to pull out your credit card, thanks to a new promise from the Ontario government. And those of you who live in Wales will soon be able to drive on a road made of recycled diapers. RideCo snags $20 million in funding to modernize transit, and Ford sinks $20 billion into modernizing the nations greatest selling vehicle to being all-electric.

Have an article you’d like to share with our readers, just let me know!

Micro-transit

RideCo raises CDN$20M with Series A round

Waterloo-based RideCo Inc. has announced a Series A raise of CDN$20 million that will help the company further develop its rideshare transit software, enhance customer support and enter new markets. Their launches in 2021 are signaling an industry shift that shows us what transit is going to look like in coming years.

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Microtransit Programs Promise On-Demand Transportation For All

Vermont - a tiny state, with a population of just over 600,000 people - spends almost 10 times as much on transit, per capita, as the average U.S. state with a heavy rural population. It’s now poised to study the feasibility of on-demand buses in 12 communities across the state.

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RideKC introduces new mobile Flex app

Kansas City Regional Transit (RideKC) has launched a new mobile app powered by Spare Labs to allow customers book Flex trips. Flex vehicles pick up riders wherever they are and take them where they want to go within the boundaries of a zone, however the multiple zones meet in the middle, enabling easy transfer to other zones.

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TNCs

Uber and Lyft are finally starting to look like different companies

Uber and Lyft showed sharp differences between their two business models in the fourth-quarter earnings reports, a sign that the two companies may be less similar than they seem. Uber is global, while Lyft only operates in North America. Uber dominates ride-sharing, taking in roughly 70 percent of US riders spending. Their side-hustles differ though. Uber’s main side hustle is delivery. Lyft, meanwhile, has a small business-to-business delivery operation but has no plans on trying to tackle consumer delivery. What Lyft has that Uber doesn’t, though, is a thriving micromobility business. Lyft claims to be the largest electric bike operator in North America.

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In the auto world

Ingenious road safety poster is a hit online

We see plenty of brilliant print ads, and the best examples are often designed to make the viewer double-take. That’s certainly the case with this brilliant road safety ad, which, at first glance, makes absolutely no sense. Which is exactly the point.

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Ontario scraps licence plate sticker renewal fees, offers refunds

The Ontario government has announced it is ending licence plate renewal fees and sticker fees and will refund the cost of stickers purchased over the past two years. It’s welcome news for my wallet, I’ll be better able to afford my Amazon Prime membership now. It’s also a great decision if the government has been looking at license plate renewal as a rather blunt instrument to curb congestion. To recover the $1 billion loss, may I suggest looking at road user charging? That would also help with all those EV drivers who are free-loading on our roads without paying a gas tax ;-)

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Reorganizing for Shift to Electric Cars, Spending Up to $20 Billion

Ford’s F150 has been the best-selling vehicle in North America for 39 years in a row! They have recently launched an electric version - the Lightning, and are now on a spending spree dumping $10-$20billion over the next 5-10 years into converting existing factories to build EVs. They’ve also copped a former Apple and Tesla exec to lead the charge (no pun intended).

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BlackBerry: out with the smartphone, in with a car that anticipates your next move

BlackBerry made headlines for two reasons recently: they announced that ALL BlackBerry devices are officially end of life, and will stop (reliably) working as of Jan 4th, 2022. Also, if you’re not aware, BlackBerry is in the market developing software for auto makers. At CES last week they gave a demo of their Ivy platform with cool features such as: adjusting your route to a nearer charging station because a traffic jam has drained power, turning down the music because facial recognition sensed that the kids have fallen asleep in the back, and adjusting the house temp and turning on the porch light when you return home.

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A highway paved with recycled diapers may change the cloth vs. disposables debate

In the United States, about 50 million diapers are being stuffed into Diaper Genies each day, for a total of more than 18 billion a year. The majority of those end up in landfills, where even the ones billed as biodegradable can take years to break down. A pilot project in Wales is testing a road built with recycled plastic from diapers – and no, it does not smell like you-know-what.

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Bike Share

How Toronto’s Bike Share ridership kicked into high gear during COVID-19

Bike Share Toronto logged an all-time high of 3.57 million trips in 2021. That was up 23 per cent from the year before, which was also a record. The system’s pandemic success is due to: a major expansion completed in 2020 that took it to 625 stations and 6,850 bikes, new cycling infrastructure, and Torontonian’s reluctance to get on crowded transit vehicles during the pandemic.

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Transit planning & funding

FCM, Big City Mayors applaud federal investment in public transit

On February 17, Canada’s federal minister of finance announced that Ottawa will introduce legislation to invest up to $750 million to support municipalities that are facing transit operating shortfalls. This one-time payment would help cities maintain service levels despite the decrease in ridership that’s resulted from the pandemic.

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The Busway that Ottawa Abandoned

Ottawa’s former Greenboro Busway is a case study of ambitious plans that were never fully realized. The story offers a valuable lesson for transport and urban planners: creating plans without community support – no matter how thoughtful – is a treacherous path.

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Transit Unplugged TVEpisode 2: Nashville WeGo Public Transit

In this episode, TUTV takes you behind the scenes with the CEO of WeGo Public Transit, Stephen Bland, and the senior leadership team. We discuss their projects to expand and improve mobility services to this American entertainment and employment hub.

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Techstars Startup Digest Mobility & Transportation is curated by:

Sanathan Kassiedass
sanathan.kassiedass@startupdigestmail.com

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