👨🏾💻Su$tainable Mobility: The (Controversial) Software Standards that Drive Sustainable Mobility
👨🏾💻Su$tainable Mobility: The (Controversial) Software Standards that Drive Sustainable Mobility
Vol 42
This bi-weekly newsletter aims to separate the signal from the noise for making money in sustainable transportation: Electrification, mode shift, active and public transit, and mobility aggregation, across both people and goods movement.
The Deep Dive this issue: The (Controversial) Software Standards that Drive Sustainable Mobility. How can we harness all of the 0s and 1s to help achieve our goals, including trying to get people in cities out of private cars and into the multi-modal trip economy instead? And how can we do it while keeping stakeholders feeling like the process is fair?
QUICK HITS: Notable news from the last 2 weeks
🏔️ Nasvhille and Anchorage, Alaska eliminated parking minimums. It’s officially a trend in American cities now.
🏛️ Washington, DC finally got a metro line to Dulles airport. It took 60 years from airport opening to get a metro line there.
✈️ Following Israel’s lead, Maastricht airport is now looking to ban certain Boeing 747s on environmental concerns. Aircraft manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus aren’t moving fast enough, giving startups a chance to succeed in the same way that Tesla displaced legacy car companies.
🛞 In Toulouse, over 90 SUVs had their tires slashed as part of an anti-SUV campaign. A European activist group called Tyre Extinguishers claimed credit for Toulouse as well as a similar effort in Hanover.
⛔️ In Brussels, plans for more car-free streets are generating pushback. Just because something is inevitable doesn’t make it easy.
👕 In Paris, Volta Trucks is partnering with Cake e-mopeds to create mobile mini-depots for H&M deliveries. An excellent idea in theory, but the devil is in the details on unit economics and disruptions to others using the street.
🚲 In New York City, property managers are moving to ban e-bikes over fire concerns. This failure is driven by insufficient safety regulations; we should want as many (safe!) e-bikes as possible in as many apartment buildings as possible.
🚲 US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg shared his thoughts on improving transportation in US cities. There’s nothing radical in any of the policies he’s talking about here, but his predecessor Elaine Chao certainly wouldn’t have been so bullish about active transit. The Secretary subsequently poured cold water on the idea of an e-bike tax credit, at least for now.
🚁 The US FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) has issued its notice of proposed rule-making on “flying taxis.” NPR claims this is the supposed birth year of George Jetson, so this tracks.
🇪🇺 The European Union moved one step closer to requiring environmental reporting from major companies. The EU approach is more ambitious than what the US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering.
🤖 Waymo showed off its 2nd custom-designed driverless car, this time in partnership with China’s Geely. Geely continues its relentless march toward global auto powerhouse.
🪓 Nuro laid off 20% of its staff. Autonomous delivery still has a way to go to reach the big leagues.
🤥 eBay banned the sale of automotive aftermarket devices that aim to defeat emissions controls. This sort of unauthorized aftermarket modification becomes infinitely harder in software-defined EV.
😡 A UK woman successfully blocked bike parking on the street in front of her house. It’s wild that homeowners in multiple countries get a say on what happens on the public right of way.
🐌 VW paused its Tesla-challenging Trinity plant. Few things in life are as constant as VW’s ability to let infighting slow itself down.
🐥 A new study from friends of the newsletter at Urban Freight Lab shows that digitally providing curb availability information to delivery drivers reduces cruising for parking time by 27.9%, and cruising distance by 12.4%. That adds up to a lot of avoided emissions.
🍳 Shared mobility operator Bird issued a “going concern” notification. Rival Lime isn’t publicly traded so it’s unclear whether they’re doing any better.
💣 Several news items reinforced the message of last issue’s Deep Dive, notably:
North Carolina residents are grappling with the environmental impact that lithium mining might involve.
Canada continues its march toward becoming a battery powerhouse. The US military may fund mining projects in Canada.
Carmaker BYD is pausing the spinoff of its chip unit.
STARTUP WATCH: Sustainable mobility startups (generally pre-seed or seed) to keep an eye on
⚓️ CargoKite (Germany): Small wind-powered cargo ships for ocean transport
🧪 HiT Nano (New Jersey, USA): Cathode production technology
🖖 Go Eve (United Kingdom): EV charging via DC smart splitters
🚚 Orca Mobility (Washington, USA): Autonomous delivery truck manufacturer
👩💻 Voltaage (France): Fleet electrification software
FUNDING: Capital raises from startups previously featured in Startup Watch
Princeton NuEnergy (Vol 24) raised $12M via a grant from the US Dept of Energy
Angoka (Vol 28) raised 2.4M GBP from 24 Haymarket and others
BasiGo (Vol 32) raised $6.6M from Trucks VC, Keiki Capital, My Climate Journey Collective, and others
DEEP DIVE: The (Controversial) Software Standards that Drive Sustainable Mobility
I’m a car nut, but four years ago I become a car-free resident of Los Angeles. By choice.
While the overall process has been worthwhile, it hasn’t been without challenges. The hardest part, by far, has been trying to gather accurate, timely, predictable, intuitive information about my multi-modal transportation options and then seamlessly executing them.
In many ways, this is the overarching aim of sustainable people movement in cities: finding a way to weave together a coherent “trip economy” in a way that lets people comfortably give up car ownership. Research bears this out. For example, a University of Texas study from 2006, for example, analyzed how “travel time reliability is an important variable in commute mode choice decisions.”
For so many of the applications that are trying to improve mobility, the challenge has included a lack of software standards that allows the various inputs in mobility to talk to each other. It’s sheer chaos if Google wants data in one format and the Atlanta metro operator wants the same data in a totally different format.
Over the last several years, we have moved from a system without data standards to one where each sub-domain has broadly deployed data standards, each with some degree of controversy.
Michael Lim, cofounder of traffic software startup Xtelligent* notes, “Transparency, fairness, and inclusivity during the development process and consideration for incentives and business model alignment tend to be really important. There have been some heavy-handed regulation-driven standards recently. I think it's suboptimal and likely neither long-term sustainable nor easily scalable.”
For example, the Mobility Data Specification (MDS) from Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) started with controversy. After years of feeling besieged by ridehail companies and scooter operators, cities banded together in 2019 under the OMF banner to create a set of data standards that mobility operators would have to comply with. It launched with 17 municipal partners and has subsequently doubled its membership.
Still, the fundamental promise of software standards is that interoperability dramatically improves innovation and choice. According to Jordan Justus, CEO and co-founder of smart curb management startup Automotus*, “Mobility standards inevitably help streamline operations and displace stagnant providers, but we’re also seeing somewhat of a breeding ground for companies who are using data standards as a Trojan horse to provide solutions that still subject cities to vendor lock-in and don’t innovate”.
With so many mobility standards recently being hashed out, we’re about to see the application layer of sustainable mobility boom, even if arguing continues about whether the standards are indeed transparent, fair, and inclusive.
*Xtelligent and Automotus were both incubated by my employer Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI)