✊🏙 Is self-driving the new flying car? 🚗 Congestion pricing is coming 🛣 Housing in Vancouver and LA 🏠

Congestion charges are a great way to reduce traffic at peak times and make people really consider the way they commute. It costs money to build and maintain roads — the same as with other transportation — but we’ve long believe the roads should remain free. Changing the way we think about roads will also change the way we use them.

There’s a good case to be made that commercial vehicles, including those operated under the name of the major ride-hailing companies, should be subject to charges for their use of the roads, which are built and maintained with public dollars. São Paulo is pioneering in this policy area.

Vancouver has a approved a new ten-year housing strategy which aims to create “72,000 new homes for renters, families and vulnerable residents,” but it’s unlikely that will be enough to lower prices. The plan also includes a call for a $15 minimum wage, more support for renters, restrictions on property ownership from non-permanent residents, and proposes a number of new taxes on mansions, speculation, and flipping.

However, that doesn’t mean the plan is enough to address the housing crisis. Will Doig outlines how supply isn’t the only factor driving rising housing prices, and Vancouver’s new plan doesn’t contain the measures to rein them in. He looks at the proposal for more upzoning, the mixed results from the foreign buyer’s tax, and a potential ban on property ownership by foreigners, similar to what New Zealand’s new government has done.

A great overview of the history of transportation shifts in Los Angeles, and how the city is now shifting to accommodate the transportation of the future with massive investments in new light rail, subways, and experiments with a number of new technologies. Los Angeles may be beginning to embrace the future, but the author cautions that there are a lot of basics that remain to be addressed.

Along with those transit investments, Los Angeles is also looking to build a lot more housing, yet its existing plans to allow for more housing near transit stops are not adequate. Instead of allowing for significantly more density, the city is trying to preserve industrial land and single-family homes, which will lead to higher housing prices and further gentrification.

Following from the previous article, Portland demonstrates that when poor residents are displaced because of rising housing prices caused by transit improvements, ridership can decline. This is why Los Angeles, with its ambitious transit expansion plans, needs to prioritize (and fund!) truly affordable housing around its transit stops: so existing residents are not forced into less costly areas which, by extension, do not have good transit.

Silicon Valley has successfully convinced us that autonomous vehicles are coming, whether we like it or not, and they will begin their rollout at the beginning of the next decade. But what if they never come? This article reminds us that flying cars have been predicted for decades, but never arrived, and this isn’t even the first time we’ve gotten excited about the prospect of autonomous vehicles.

To be fair, I do think some form of autonomous driving is coming, but whether we can achieve the full autonomy that many tech companies are promising… let’s just say I’m still skeptical.