Flexible transport

Taxis, and more generally, small & shared vehicles or "personal transport" (including bikes & scooters), are likely to play a bigger role in our transport systems in an increasing variety of ways, including:

• traditional taxis & more efficient & flexible providers (like Uber, GoCatch, DiDi & Ola), for fast point-to-point trips with single or multiple passengers,

• easily-accessed local hired/shared self-driven cars (e.g. Car Next Door or GoGet), to reduce private car costs,

• flexible transport to bridge gaps in traditional fixed-route networks with a more efficient "last mile" connection to/from public transport hubs with high-frequency services,
  e.g. on-demand minibuses / shared-taxis, or compact & electric bikes, scooters & other innovative solutions that can be carried on public transport &/or replace short car trips.

• automated vehicles for more efficient, less congested, convenient and safer traffic management.

To support this, here's a few ideas about taxi pricing and regulation (now mostly or almost achieved/redundant), followed by some thoughts on the regulation of bikes and new "last mile" transport technology such as electric bikes, scooters, boards & more...

1. Taxi reforms, ride-sharing & loyalty pricing

Attached here are my now-redundant ideas to circumvent the self-interested politics that blocked taxi-plate reforms for so long – thankfully no longer needed since Dec. 2015 when the NSW Government legalised competition from Uber & others (which I think can still be collectively referred to as "taxis") – although as with so many things, the resolution with taxis took many more years to finalise than I expected!

With these new technology-enabled providers, it's important to promote ride-sharing, to achieve more efficient use of transport resources, for example by enabling a customer to say they are willing to share a ride with another customer if the resulting increase in their trip time is below a certain tolerance.  The vehicle-dispatching optimisation algorithm can then notify the driver of additional passengers to pick up en-route, and calculate a revised lower fare for all customers (whilst also delivering a net profit gain to the driver and ride-share company).  I'd been advocating this for many years before Uber got onto it in their home base of San Francisco, where 40% of Uber trips were pooled in 2016, which in three months avoided 34 million kms of car trips and 3,800 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

'UberPool' was due to start in Australia in the last few months of 2016, but didn't actually start until April 2018.  I suspect they may have waited to prove their updated "Express Pool" version, which improves efficiency by encouraging customers (via a lower fare) to walk a short distance to/from convenient locations, in order to reduce route deviations for other & prospective ride-sharers.  If that sounds a bit like a bus route (but with more flexibility), I agree — this is car and public transport convergence coming to us right now!

There are some concerns that these on-demand, shared-vehicle services could actually worsen congestion by diverting people from walking & public transport, but although that might be expected initially – given it's easier to outperform these options (and isn't necessarily a bad thing in areas with inefficient, ineffective & poorly-used public transport) – once the scale of shared-taxi services increase, the waiting times will reduce and efficiencies will improve to enable stronger competition with private cars.  It will also take time for people to become accustomed to relying on these services to the point where they are willing to give up car ownership (or at least their second & 3rd household cars).  Recent studies are now confirming that ride-sharing is having a net complementary affect, helping to increase public transport use, especially (& not surprisingly) in areas of larger cities with relatively poor public transport services.  Of course if demand for these services grows enough then they can scale up to "on-demand minibuses" (thus having a more material impact on reducing traffic) and expand trials where it works best, but I wouldn't recommend minibuses initially, especially if it's done by incompetent and inefficient government bureaucracies!

Also for those worried about personal safety when sharing with strangers, I suggest it will be more safe than sharing with a single unknown driver.  The chances of the driver AND a random extra passenger having bad intent are very low (& even better with four people).  There is safety in numbers — this is the same reason people go to the train carriage that already has more people in it at night.

Peak surcharges / off-peak discounts and loyalty pricing (now possible under reforms applying from 1 Nov. 2017!)

The old regime of constrained taxi plates effectively created a large fixed cost that reduced the viability of adding new "peak only" supply (because additional taxis had to operate all day to recover plate leasing costs).  Many of us will remember the resulting impossibility of getting a taxi after a Xmas party before these reforms!  To make things worse, constrained taxi plate supply prevented reform of peak pricing that could otherwise help balance peak supply & demand (because deregulating prices with constrained supply would simply boost plate values, which would come back to cost drivers & customers and make plate reform even harder to embark on — therefore taxi plate & pricing reforms had to occur together).

Thankfully the barriers to peak supply have now been drastically reduced, not just by avoiding artificial taxi-plate costs, but also by enabling people to provide services with their own private cars (as people who are flexible to work only in peak hours need not charge for the fixed costs of car ownership).  Not surprisingly however, after years of constrained taxi supply, the initial arrival of new shared-vehicle services with deregulated prices resulted in instances of super-peak surcharges and "bill shock" for customers; but it is precisely those peak prices that encouraged the subsequent rapid growth in more supply to meet demand, which soon reduced the frequency and extent of high peak prices.

Whilst peak surcharges may be unpopular, the corollary – off-peak discounts – are of course quite different (!), and can potentially boost off-peak demand (& total revenue) and improve the supply-demand balance in off-peak times and similarly in lower-demand locations (e.g. reducing previously long waiting times in outer suburbs, even at "peak" times of the day).  More generally, there is much potential to improve taxi industry efficiency by applying the same innovation and optimisation of flexible & varied approaches to pricing that has been employed by the mobile phone industry.

Peak pricing is critical to optimally manage supply and demand, but nevertheless, the initial experience of "bill shock" showed how important price certainty can be for many customers.  One option to address this would be to offer contracts where customers could pay for price certainty, e.g. a monthly fee or small premium on all fares in order to get a guaranteed fare before they travel (though still with pre-defined peak and off-peak rates).  Another similar approach would be to offer customer accounts with monthly access fees that reduce the level of peak hour surcharge (as per the pricing ideas that I first suggested in my 2001 paper, "Strategies for growth in public transport").

Loyalty pricing schemes may also boost demand and could promote more commercial competition between taxi/shared-vehicle operators by providing a means of differentiating their service (as opposed to the historic taxi industry that was essentially atomised into thousands of individual competing drivers).  For example, regular users could choose to pay a fixed monthly amount to their preferred operator in order to get a certain % discount on peak &/or off-peak rates (depending on the price plan they choose, as with mobile phone companies).  Such pricing schemes could be implemented with smartcards (like the NSW Opal card) or smartphone technology and be sold as optional pricing plans integrated with similarly varied public transport pricing packages.  The combination of operator branding and smartcard/phone ticketing would mean even 'hail-&-ride' services and fares no longer have to be substantially regulated (as they have historically been, for customer protection).  Uber's major US competitor, Lyft, sees its future as being very much based on such subscription price plans.  I thought Uber may be avoiding them because this pricing model would require the business to accept some demand risk and pay drivers as employees, which is a categorisation they have been fighting against in court, but Uber are also now rolling-out subscription plans (and they seem to be taking on revenue risk anyway with Uber-Pool, for which I think drivers get paid the same rate per trip, regardless of how many customers they carry).

2. Bikes, boards & batteries

Another area overdue for policy reform is the restrictive regulation of bikes, electric scooters & similar technology, which, like taxis, can also assist the "last mile" to/from longer public transport routes and/or replace short car trips (perhaps materially in congested cities where half of car trips are shorter than 3 miles).

Cycle regulations

We should start by scrapping nanny-state mandatory cycle helmet laws (as a number of US States have done in recent years), which are being used to victimise poor people with a dramatic and continual increase in outrageous fines that are 80% higher than for a car driving in a bike lane!  Certainly helmets should be voluntary for adults off-road or in bike lanes – which is the position now advocated by the Australian Bicycle Network – and preferably also for e-bikes limited to <25kph and on all roads at or under 50kph (which I'm inclined to think should be simplified to a consistent 45kph, although lower could be better, because complicated signage, especially when it's full of text that distracts drivers from the road, is dangerous).

These helmet laws inconvenience & penalise innocent riders rather than the car drivers who endanger them (next we'll be forcing pedestrians to wear armour, instead of regulating the vehicles that are increasingly killing them (in the US)!), and although helmets may help in the event of an accident, there's little evidence mandatory helmets actually reduce injuries overall because they can increase the risk of accidents by encouraging dangerous riding & driving.

Also by curtailing the joy & convenience of riding, helmets (& fines) materially reduce bike use (potentially by 25% according to a Dutch survey) and thus push people into more dangerous, costly, less healthy and environmentally damaging cars (except for the fanatics who ride dangerously and give cycling a bad name).  After Australia made helmets compulsory, the number of children riding to school reduced by 30%, while in New Zealand total bike trips halved after helmets were made mandatory.  And since the risks of a bike accident are actually very low (about the same as walking), at a society level, the loss of health benefits from less cycling vastly outweigh any gain from improved safety.

A review of a range of research studies by Dr Richard Keatinge for the Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation concludes,

"Bicycle helmets have strangled children and may deter cycling. They have no scientifically demonstrated useful effect on head injuries.

There is fair evidence that the introduction of helmet laws have deterred cycle use, undermining its health and other benefits.

There is no good evidence that they reduce the overall number of head injuries, or deaths, suffered by cyclists.

A number of reviews have systematically omitted the best evidence and have come to erroneous conclusions as a result."

Of course these research findings will be contested by some, but civil liberties should not be constrained unless there is clear & compelling evidence to do so, which there doesn't seem to be.

Having said that, I'm still reticent about scrapping mandatory helmets for children, who are more exposed to peer pressure.  Better options for them could be something compact like this collapsible baseball-cap helmet (developed through crowd-funding in 2018 and planned for delivery in 2019 although apparently still not doing so in April 2021), or this inflatable helmet under development.

The evidence may also need to be separately considered for high-powered scooters & other new compact personal transport devices (see below), especially those with small wheels (which may be more prone to accidents than conventional bikes), and especially also if a large number of accidents affect other street users &/or impose material costs on publicly-funded health services (possibly without any offsetting environmental benefit).  Research on electric scooter use in 2018 conducted by the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) found an injury rate of 14.3 per 100,000 trips, with 45% being head injuries.  A 2020 International Transport Forum study claims that "e-scooter riders do not face significantly higher risk of road traffic death or injury than cyclists", but this seems to conflict with US & Danish research reporting 2-8 times higher rates of head injuries.  A more recent article (from July 2021) on improved safe scooter design is here.

Helmet laws also kill the economics of bike rental — oBike rental lost nearly half its helmets in Melbourne in its first 2-3 months, and anecdotally, Sydney looks even worse.  What they need is a mechanism to rigidly attach and lock a helmet (at least for youths under 16, if they're required to wear one) at the front of the bike or behind the saddle out of the way for adult riders who don't want to wear one.

With Sydney's cycling-unfriendly heat & hills (favouring electric bikes), it won't take much to send these low-revenue businesses broke (many of which are currently loss-making), as demonstrated by prior failures even in cycle-friendly Copenhagen and the recent bankruptcy of one of China's biggest bike-share businesses.  And if they all go bust & leave Australia (as most have done in late 2018, not least due to bike-parking constraints), others will be much less likely to put up more finance for such businesses here again.

As for bike lane regulations, one problem is that some reckless cyclists seem to take a bike lane as a licence to ride at maximum speed with scant concern for pedestrians sharing the same path (or an adjacent lane on the same path, as is common in Sydney (e.g. on Victoria Road by the Bridge hotel), which pedestrians may easily stray from & collide with the cyclist).  This is an example of the effect discussed here, where excessive regulation causes people to stop thinking and behaving with common sense, caution and consideration, because they think it must be safe if they're operating within the rules, whereas removing those rules causes people to act more cautiously.  

For bikes, I think in many cases this approach – removing formal bike lanes – may be the best approach, e.g. by simply signing that "slow and cautious cycling" is allowed on the footpath.

Compact & electric bikes & boards

With companies like Lyft & Uber integrating bike & electric scooter rentals with public transport in their ride-sharing/taxi apps, there's a growing need for regulatory reform to support the strong demand from commuters for lightweight and compact products that offer fast, traffic-beating flexibility, either for their full trip where public transport is poor, or for the "last mile" between home/office and conventional public transport routes.  There's lots of innovation in this area as new electric & light-weight material technologies are enabling the development of an increasingly wide range of high-performing solutions, although the various designs below go through a series of logical iterations that I think conclude in favour of motorised but otherwise fairly conventional folding bikes & kick-scooters...

Folding electric scooters that weigh under 10kg (or 7.6kg for this small-wheeled carbon-fibre model) can just about be carried onto public transport, but the problem with "kick-scooters" is that if you make the wheels bigger and add suspension for safety on uneven surfaces, and also have to add more powerful motors and batteries to make up for having no pedal power, then the weight can quickly exceed that of a lightweight bike.

For those with balance, there are also many conventional-looking electric skateboards (a kick-scooter without handlebars) with speeds of 40-50 km/h and ranges of 50+ km, such as Evolve Skateboard's 9kg "Bamboo GTX", (for US$1779 in 2017), which has an ability to climb hills of 25 degrees.  Alternatively, this 2-wheel, 6kg electric skateboard claims 19kph, max 150kg load, 15° grade climb & 29km range (3-4hr charge), with a 400W motor, regenerative braking and front & rear lights, all for US$359, if it ever makes it to production (which seems unlikely; in comparison, "Boosted" – now "Teamed up with Evolve" – also offered a board with regenerative braking and 22mph/35kph speed, 25%/14° grade climb and up to 12 mile/19km range, but it was over US$1,500).

Also under development & seeking production funding are various kinds of electric rollerblades/in-line skates, or these folding, 6kg, electric strap-on roller-skates with a 24km range and speed up to 24kph/15mph (which is faster than average traffic speeds on many of Sydney's congested roads).

You might think it looks daft (because it does!), but I'm not the only one to have thought along these lines, because shown below are similar things I've subsequently discovered being ridden by The Monkees (in this video of their beautiful song, "I wanna be free"), plus a cheap (aiming for US149 in 2017), light-weight kit design called "Bellcycle" that can be assembled in various configurations (& at 9kg is slightly lighter than the 9.5kg seat-less "Halfbike"), and also the electric-only (no pedal power) "Yike Bike", which costs a mere US$5,000 for the 15.4kg 3-wheel model-V, or almost $8,000 for an 11.4kg carbon-fibre 2-wheel model-C:

And finally there's the bizarre-looking "Impossible" 5kg folding electric-only bike (without peddles), which seems to have evolved to the 8.6kg Smacircle and promises to fold into a back-pack: