Tag Archives: investment

Manhattan Shows Huge Reduction in Car Crashes After Instituting Congestion Pricing

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New Yorkers are seeing huge quality of life wins from congestion pricing so far, a great sign for people-first transit policy.

Wheels Up

The wins keep coming after Manhattan initiated its congestion toll on cars early this month. Now, the latest data is showing a massive decrease in crash related injuries.

New data from the first 12 days of congestion pricing shows that total injuries below 60th street — the zone where congestion pricing takes effect, charging drivers up to $9 to enter — dropped 51 percent compared to the same period in 2024. Total crashes, meanwhile, dropped 55 percent.

The analysis comes courtesy of outspoken transit advocate Gersh Kuntzman and his team at Streetsblog NYC. He cautions that it's too early to take a victory lap, given that the figures do not account for variations in weather between 2024 and 2025, but they are promising. This is the latest indicator that the congestion pricing is working as intended — kids are getting to school faster, the city is quieter, bridges and tunnels are seeing significantly less traffic, and the air is becoming a bit cleaner. And these are just the knock-on effects of traffic reduction.

The real winners are New York City's public transit riders, whom the congestion toll is meant to directly benefit via station improvements, critical infrastructure repairs, extended bus routes, and a resumption of the much-needed 2nd avenue subway extension project, which had been stalled for years.

In other words, if the good news keeps coming, the initiative could become a compelling proof-of-concept for other areas of New York and more crowded cities around the country.

Cutting Edge

That's in a perfect world, of course. While adding friction for cars is looking like a major win for New York so far, it comes at a time when common-sense transit projects across the country are flailing. Some are way overbudget, outsourced to pie-in-the-sky tech startups, or falling to a busted legislative process.

And that's even if a city ponies up the will to make affordable, car-free transit a priority at all.

Going forward, there's very little evidence that investments in crucial infrastructure will be coming from the federal government — Trump has already cut Biden's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in favor of his Stargate gamble — making state and local policy like the Big Apple's congestion pricing all the more crucial.

While other cities spend taxpayer money to beautify parking lots, New City is leading by example and showing the rest of the country what people-first transit policy can do for their communities. In a country dominated by cars, this rare win for public transit is worth imitating.

More on transit: Leftists Plead With Trump Not to Build High Speed Rail System Connecting America's Major Cities

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Manhattan Shows Huge Reduction in Car Crashes After Instituting Congestion Pricing

Government Test Finds That AI Wildly Underperforms Compared to Human Employees

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A series of blind assessments found that human-written summaries scored significantly better than summaries generated by AI.

Sums It Up

Generative AI is absolutely terrible at summarizing information compared to humans, according to the findings of a trial for the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) spotted by Australian outlet Crikey.

The trial, conducted by Amazon Web Services, was commissioned by the government regulator as a proof of concept for generative AI's capabilities, and in particular its potential to be used in business settings.

That potential, the trial found, is not looking promising.

In a series of blind assessments, the generative AI summaries of real government documents scored a dire 47 percent on aggregate based on the trial's rubric, and were decisively outdone by the human-made summaries, which scored 81 percent.

The findings echo a common theme in reckonings with the current spate of generative AI technology: not only are AI models a poor replacement for human workers, but their awful reliability means it's unclear if they'll have any practical use in the workplace for the majority of organizations.

Signature Shoddiness

The assessment used Meta's open source Llama2-70B, which isn't the newest model out there, but with up to 70 billion parameters, it's certainly a capable one.

The AI model was instructed to summarize documents submitted to a parliamentary inquiry, and specifically to focus on what was related to ASIC, such as where the organization was mentioned, and to include references and page numbers. Alongside the AI, human employees at ASIC were asked to write summaries of their own.

Then five evaluators were asked to assess the human and the AI-generated summaries after reading the original documents. These were done blindly — the summaries were simply labeled A and B — and scorers had no clue that AI was involved at all.

Or at least, they weren't supposed to. At the end, when the assessors had finished up and were told about the true nature of the experiment, three said that they suspected they were looking at AI outputs, which is pretty damning on its own.

Sucks On All Counts

All in all, the AI performed lower on all criteria compared to the human summaries, the report said.

Strike one: the AI model was flat-out incapable of providing the page numbers of where it got its information.

That's something the report notes can be fixed with some tinkering with the AI model. But a more fundamental issue was that it regularly failed to pick up on nuance or context, and often made baffling choices about what to emphasize or highlight.

Beyond that, the AI summaries tended to include irrelevant and redundant information and were generally "waffly" and "wordy."

The upshot: these AI summaries were so bad that the assessors agreed that using them could require more work down the line, because of the amount of fact-checking they require. If that's the case, then the purported upsides of using the technology — cost-cutting and time-saving — are seriously called into question.

More on AI: NaNoWriMo Slammed for Saying That Opposition to AI-Generated Books Is Ableist

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Government Test Finds That AI Wildly Underperforms Compared to Human Employees

Tech Company Lays Off 5,500 Workers to Invest More in AI, Despite Making $10.3 Billion in Profit

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Cisco posted $10.3 billion in profits last year but is still laying off 5,500 workers as part of an effort to invest more into AI.

Pink Slip Season

Despite tech conglomerate Cisco posting $10.3 billion in profits last year, it's still laying off 5,500 workers as part of an effort to invest more in AI, SFGATE reports.

It joins a litany of other companies like Microsoft and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, that have used AI as justification for the mass culling of its workforce.

The layoffs at Cisco came to light in a notice posted with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, affecting seven percent of its staff.

In a short statement, CEO Chuck Robbins used the term "AI" five times, highlighting the company's efforts to keep up in the ongoing AI race.

Earlier this year, Cisco also laid off 4,000 or five percent of it staff, saying that the company wanted to "realign the organization and enable further investment in key priority areas."

In short, companies are no longer hiding their optimism over replacing human labor with AI, an unfortunate reality for those looking to maintain a stable job. But whether this "realignment" will pay off in the long run remains to be seen.

Red Herring

The layoff news helped boost Cisco's stock price on Wednesday, going from $45.04 in the morning to spiking over $48 per share in after-hours trading.

We've already seen similar spikes in the stock prices of other tech companies announcing layoffs.

Cisc's layoffs are also part of another pattern: tech companies saying they are shifting resources to boost their AI efforts and therefore they need to lay off people as part of a restructuring campaign.

While many companies have used AI as a public-facing excuse for their restructuring efforts, experts remain skeptical and think the tech is instead used as a cover.

"Fighting against robots is a nice cover story," University of Oxford economist and data scientist Fabian Stephany told Business Insider earlier this year. "But if you have a closer look, it's often old school, simple economic dynamics like outsourcing or lead management cutting costs to increase salaries in other places."

More on tech layoffs: Microsoft Lays Off 1,500 Workers, Blames "AI Wave"

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Tech Company Lays Off 5,500 Workers to Invest More in AI, Despite Making $10.3 Billion in Profit