67: Micromobility Infrastructure - challenges and opportunities with The Transportist, Professor David Levinson

This week Oliver interviews David Levinson, professor at the University of Sydney and popular blogger at transportist.org. David is not new to the world of talking about transport and disruptive innovation, having joined Horace on Asymcar many years ago. He brings a tempered view to the benefits and challenges of micromobility, including around infrastructure and the decision making timeframes that it typically has. Specifically, we dig into: - David’s background and research into toll roads, travel behaviour and urban form. - Whether David considers micromobilty a substantial new innovation in transport. - Constraints around deployment of larger vehicle fleets. - The challenges around parking, NIMBY-ism and political will in reallocating street space. - Comparable histories of new vehicle technologies making it into cities. - The intersection of political capital/structures and the likelihood of rollouts of specific transport infrastructure - The fundamental challenges with micromobility infrastructure - heft, vehicle density and decision-making timeframes - Examples of cities that have more proactively built infrastructure for micromobility, and historical examples of how companies have garnered community support to lobby for new infrastructure. It’s a great episode, if nothing else because it lays out the challenges/opportunities to widespread adoption of micromobility in sober terms.