Transportation
Your Transit Directions Just Got a Little Bit Better
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) just convened a group of data experts to improve the information we use to make choices about how we travel. Imagine you are visiting a city for the first time and you want to go downtown. If you pull out your smartphone and punch a destination…
How Safe Are Self-Driving Cars?
On Tuesday, Waymo (formerly called Google’s Self Driving Car program) announced a bold new step in the deployment of electric automated mobility services that will eventually reduce CO2 emissions by almost a gigaton per year and help limit global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees. Hundreds of Arizonans…
Rate-Design Best Practices for Public Electric-Vehicle Chargers
Public direct current fast chargers (DCFC) are anticipated to play an important role in accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles (EV) and in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. However, utility demand charges—special charges based on the peak rate of electricity consumption in a month, which are applied in addition to the…
With Weaker Fuel Economy Standards, Everyone Loses, Including U.S. Automakers
On Wednesday [March 15, 2017] in Detroit, beneath a vast American flag, President Trump answered 17 automakers’ call to reopen the Mid-Term Review of the 2022–25 “CAFE” automotive efficiency standards. On his fourth day in office, he’d expedited approvals for two oil…
Austin, Texas, Poised to Be Commercial Hub for “New Mobility”
With 13 of the world’s 14 largest automakers publicly committed to delivering autonomous vehicles to the market, we can confidently say that the mobility system of the future is no longer just a concept. In fact, the commercial deployment of these self-driving vehicles is imminent, with 12 of the world’s…