Chicago's El, Chinese Batteries, Mobile Surveillance, and Farmville
Off-Ramps for 1 May 2025
Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight four interesting pieces (or sets of short pieces) that I think you will enjoy reading. Please enjoy these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.
Future issues of Off-Ramps will not be paywalled and will remain available to all readers. That said, given that the paywall will rise next week, I will use today’s Off-Ramps to highlight updates to past full-length articles. Many of the latter will shortly become Premium Content and reserved for paying subscribers, so if you want to retain access to the full archive, I encourage you to pledge today.
Endless Emergencies in Chicago and Montreal
Two recent pieces—one from Chicago Magazine, the other from the Montreal Gazette—paint a portrait of public transit in North America that we’ve seen before: services beset by crisis, denied reform, and slowly abandoned.
Chicago’s problem is one of erosion, with the city’s famous elevated train suffering a familiar set of problems. These include pandemic-induced ridership collapse that has not recovered; worsening crime, and perceptions of crime; and inability to keep the schedule.
Meanwhile, Montreal’s failure is sharper and more political: a tramway promised to the city’s southwest, part of Mayor Plante’s Pink Line vision, has been dropped by Quebec’s government in favor of road spending and economic triage. In 2019, Montreal permitted the province to redirect federal transit dollars earmarked for the city to Quebec City, with the promise that Montreal’s tram would come next. It didn’t. I am comfortable calling this a ‘betrayal’ and Montrealers are within their rights to seethe.
In isolation, these stories might seem like local problems, but take them together, and we can see they are only the latest expressions of the Endless Emergency. The experience of each city shows what happens when the operator of the system has to depend on external funding to expand, or even to operate. In cases like this, budget shortfalls become existential threats, improved service becomes a ‘frill’, and even moderate dysfunction metastasizes.
In Chicago’s case, there are glimmers of hope, with talk of reorganizing transit delivery in metro Chicago (as the locals call it, ‘Chicagoland’) into a new agency that would integrate service and invest in automation, notably automated braking and customer direction. Arrayed against such a move are familiar suspects: transit unions who preferred balkanized delivery, the better to feather their own nests; and tech bros who rightly welcome the robotaxi but wrongly think it will supplant higher-order transit.
Montreal, however, is on its own, at the mercy of a distant and hostile government that fails to understand the jurisdiction’s unique character (Anglophone Canadians will find this a deliciously bitter irony).
One day, I hope, a North American transit agency, and its parent governments, will recognize the grip of circumstances and take action, showing a way out of the trap we all are in. Until then, the emergency will continue, without end.
Chinese Batteries Clear the Last Hurdle
China's Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) has demonstrated a new electric-vehicle (EV) battery that can deliver more than 500 km of range from just a five-minute charge. This (ahem) great leap forward outdoes Tesla by a wide margin: that firm’s Superchargers need three times as long to deliver less range (15 minutes for 320 km).
This development matters for a few reasons.
Firstly, this is not merely an incremental improvement. Five-minute charging smashes the final advantage that gasoline-powered (ICE) cars had, which was the ability to ‘refuel’ quickly. Five-minute charging offers gas-station levels of convenience and speed, while maintaining all the advantages of EVs, namely less maintenance and lower lifecycle costs. The final psychological barrier to EV adoption has been broken.
Or at least it will be. Like a Supercharger, such speeds depend on “compatible megawatt-level charging stations”, meaning significant infrastructure investment will be required to make such chargers ubiquitous. But it is now only a matter of time.
Secondly, it makes the obvious Chinese advantage in EV manufacture all the more stark. Earlier this year, in my analysis of the Glasgow Declaration's fourth anniversary, I concluded that the EV transition—which the industrial nations of the world hope to complete by 2035—was going well… but it caught Western nations in a vise, trapped between the imperative to address climate change and the desire to defend their automaking industries from Chinese competition. CATL's announcement makes the dilemma more obvious; China's technological advantage is only growing. While Western manufacturers struggle with the expensive balancing act of maintaining legacy ICE production while investing in electrification, Chinese battery makers are one-upping each other so quickly that new breakthroughs arrive before the market has digested the previous one.
Thirdly, it demonstrates that the one weapon the West has been using against Chinese manufacturing—tariffs—are impotent. Even before President Trump’s recent trade war against China, both Canada and Europe were imposing tariffs of as high as 100% on Chinese EVs. The obvious superiority of those EVs, both in terms of cost and now, clearly, technical as well, means that no amount of tariff protection can be enough to keep them out. And in foreign markets where there are no tariffs because there is no industry to protect (like Australia) Chinese competition will sweep American, European, and Japanese players aside.
The good news is that the 2035 timeline established in Glasgow seems more reasonable all the time, meaning humanity will make progress on climate change. The bad news is that it in a post-Glasgow economy, only Chinese firms will meaningfully participate in automaking.
Public Surveillance on Canadian Roads
Last year, in my article “The Case for Public Surveillance”, I made the case that our confused attitudes toward surveillance technology have led to incoherent implementations; neither broad enough to make everyone safe, nor governed enough to be overseen properly. Two recent developments here in Canada illustrate that the problem remains unresolved.
Firstly, Canada has become the world's first country to mandate external camera systems on school buses, requiring “perimeter visibility systems” by November 2027. These systems will provide drivers with real-time 360-degree visibility of their buses. The potential safety benefits are clear; drivers will know if any children, or aggressive or distracted drivers, are near the bus, and can proceed appropriately.
Simultaneously, Toronto police have deployed Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) in 600 patrol cars, creating what one detective calls “an unblinking electronic eye on the road”. The system scans plates (even on vehicles traveling as fast as 225 kph!), cross-references them against databases of vehicles related to criminal investigation, and immediately alerts officers to matches.
The tension I explored between surveillance's utility and legitimacy positively sings here. Police describe ALPR as a “game-changer” for their work, comparable to the shift from typewriters to computers; the school bus initiative emerged from a task force explicitly seeking technologies to enhance safety. In other words, both explicitly ground themselves in the safety advantages they will bring.
Yet both systems are being deployed (or have been deployed) with minimal public debate about appropriate usage boundaries, data retention policies, or oversight mechanisms. The articles in question fail to even raise these as matters of concern; the closest we get is fear that bus drivers will watch their camera feeds rather than the road.
So what I called our worst-case world persists. As I wrote: “we have, simultaneously, too much surveillance for a society committed to privacy and liberty, and too little for a society committed to public safety and order”. We continue to deploy sophisticated, and in some cases AI-enhanced, surveillance systems, but without discussion, without oversight, and without policy. That failure is only mitigated by our other failure, which is that we deploy them piecemeal. We lack both the comprehensiveness we need to obtain their full value, and the care we need to prevent their misuse.
Digital Farming
A farm in Sonoma County had 27 tractor driver positions open and posted the positions on various job boards. The farm didn’t get a single applicant for weeks. A few weeks later, the owners onboarded an autonomous tractor system for the farm and updated the job listing to say they were looking for an agtech operator position. In the preferred qualifications they listed “video game experience.” The applications came rolling in.
, “Farmville: the Autonomous Future of Agriculture”
It remains true that the future is here but unevenly distributed. The latest example, provided by friend of Changing Lanes Rob Tracinski, is that you can’t buy a wholly-automated private vehicle, and you can only use a robotaxi if you live in a handful of Sunbelt cities, but you may be able to buy a fully-automated tractor by next year.
Rob notes that the average American farmer is now 58 years old, and increasingly has no successor, with younger generations exiting the countryside en masse for urban opportunity. Add to this the Trump Administration’s ongoing crackdown on immigrant workers, and you have unprecedented labour pressure on American farms, forcing some to leave their produce to rot in the fields for want of people to harvest it.
Where labour is expensive or scarce, labour-saving technology arises. Rob describes, on the one side, GPS-tracked ear tags for cattle and virtual ‘invisible fences’ that replace barbed wire as the emerging “Internet of Cows”. On the other, he tells us about machine-vision systems that can distinguish “pixels that have weeds from pixels that don't”, allowing for precise, targeted application of herbicides.
But most appealing to me, of course, are the automated tractors. Today, these are more ADAS than ADS: the tractors have a host of systems that help it operate with machine-like precision and care, but still require human oversight. Further, they are rolling out slowly, handling plowing and tilling rather than harvesting. (Mistakes in the former tasks can be repaired, but the latter cannot… and would be costly.)
But wholly-automated tractors, without cabs for human operators, and that can handle every aspect of a crop’s lifecycle, are coming soon. By Rob’s account, they are only a few years away.
I have argued before that vehicle automation is usually thought of as a tool for robotaxis or private cars, and that this view is too limited. I’m grateful to Rob for providing another example of where ‘self-driving’ technology will make the world a better place, and one that supports my long-standing view: “that which can be automated, should be”.