Midweek Takes #30.2

"We asked 17 smart people to predict the future of transportation in 2023." The email must be in my spam folder...wait, yes, here it is.

I, too, have asked 17 people a similar question: What does a successful future look like? The people I’ve spoken to have fed me technical and non-technical answers and waxed poetic on far-reaching policy and cautious optimism. There’s always the nagging sense that there’s a but coming, we can have our micromobility options but, not without dozens of policy changes at the local, state, and Federal levels. We can increase safety protocols on our rights-of-way, but we must discourage automobile sales—yes, even, AVs and EVs. Speaking of AVs, we’ll have a multi-dimensional autonomous system in our cities and on our highways, but it’s just so far away or it’s just so expensive or we’re not ready to give up our streets to the metal death machines, no matter how efficient they are.¹

Overwhelmingly, people use…