Posts

• Why is Public Transport Use Higher in Australia than America
• Road Rent – On the Opportunity Cost of Land Used for Roads
• Are Australian Vehicles Getting Bigger?
• Signalling inequity – How traffic signals distribute time to favour the car and delay the pedestrian. An edited version of this appeared on The Conversation June 11, 2018 and was picked up by The Guardian.
  • Chart of the Day: 1929 Signal Schedule and Traffic Flow Diagram – streets.mn
  • Making Traffic Signals Fair for Pedestrians – Streetsblog

Jobs

• Post-Doc: Transportation Justice / Transportation Planning / Emerging Technologies – University of Toronto
• The Urban Transportation Center (UTC) at the University of Illinois at Chicago is seeking to hire a postdoc with excellent communication skills to work on transportation policy issues, transit planning and performance measures, and mobility solutions including autonomous/connected vehicles.  Requirements include a doctorate in civil engineering, urban planning or public policy. The selected candidate will also be required to work with graduate research assistants and assist the UTC director in pursuing external grant opportunities. The appointment will begin in the Fall of 2018. There will be no teaching requirement. Interested candidates should send a letter of interest and CV to the attention of Dr. Kazuya Kawamura at kazuya@uic.edu with the subject line “UTC postdoc”.
• Product Manager @ Coord 

Contests and Scholarships

• Lendlease Bradfield Urbanisation Scholarship: ($10000) Are you a 1st or 2nd year student with a big vision for Sydney?
• Calling all “outside the box” thinkers! Do you have the next brilliant idea to help solve or improve a current transportation policy or system management challenge? Submit a 2,000 word proposal, PowerPoint presentation, video or other media form outlining your creative ideas — and you could win $10,000! Visit http://outsidethebox.gmu.edu/ for submission guidelines.

Calls

• ADD30 the TRB standing committee on transport and Land Development, together with WSTLUR, has issued a call for papers for next TRB meeting titled – Accessibility for Policy and Practice. More details could be seen in this link  https://annualmeeting.mytrb.org/CallForPapers/Details/634

News

• New Statesman – Issue on Transport
  https://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/transport_32pp_8june.pdf

Automated, Autonomous, Driverless, and Self-Driving Vehicles, and Semi-Autonomous Systems

• Phoenix will no longer be Phoenix if Waymo’s driverless-car experiment succeeds – Technology Review
• Don’t watch TV while safety driving – Brad Templeton
•  At 30kph, this will be the fastest driverless vehicle to hit Australia’s roads – ABC

Shared Vehicles/Ride-sharing/Ride-hailing/Taxis/Car Sharing

• As yet another ridesharing platform launches in Australia, how does this all end? – The Conversation
• Google Maps removes Uber integration – ArsTechnica
• China’s Didi Chuxing continues its international expansion with Australia launch – TechCrunch
• Toyota to invest $1B in Ride-Hailing App Grab – City AM

Electric Vehicles [and Renewable Energy]

• Zero emission garbage trucks cleaning up bin day – Arena
• Solar Has Overtaken Gas and Wind as Biggest Source of New U.S. Power – Bloomberg
• Free Power From Freeways? China Is Testing Roads Paved With Solar Panels – NY Times

Human Powered Vehicles/Bikes/Pedestrians/Scooters/eBikes/etc

• City of Sydney plans to ‘thin out’ to finish cycling grid – SMH
• Why the ‘distracted pedestrian’ is a myth – Curbed
• Walkers over cars: Council proposes drastic changes to make CBD more pedestrian friendly – The Age
  • Andrews, Guy give thumbs down to Capp’s ‘ridiculous’ CBD traffic plan – TheAge
• What can we learn from oBike’s demise? – Crikey
  • Oh no, oBikes are leaving Melbourne! But this doesn’t mean bike sharing schemes are dead – The Conversation
  • Yellow oBikes leaving Melbourne in wake of crackdown – The Age
  • oBike is closing its dock-less bike-sharing service in Singapore – TechCrunch
• Scooter startup Bird is seeking a $2 billion valuation VCs have never before participated in such a rapid and rocketing price spike. axios.com       [I am clearly doing something wrong]
• The Scooter Economy Scooters are everywhere, and the use case is amazing.   stratechery.com
• The Information: Sources: Lyft has agreed to acquire Motivate, a startup behind services like Ford GoBike in SF and Citi Bike in NY, likely for $250M – TechMeme

Human Driven Vehicles, Signs, Signals, Sensors, and Markings, and Roads

• Portland Deploys Data-Tracking Traffic Sensors to Save Lives – Next City
• These Smarter Stoplights Could Be Lifesavers – Governing
• Domino’s Is Fixing America’s Crappy Roads For Pizza Safety And That’s Pretty Embarrassing – Jalopnik
  • “There’s only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery.” Stephenson “Snow Crash”

Transit

• Massachusetts Sandbags the North-South Rail Link – Pedestrian Observations (Alon Levy)
• The real benefits of real-time transit data – Sidewalk Talk –  A Sidewalk Talk Q&A with researcher Candace Brakewood – Eric Jaffe
•  When is a Dedicated Bus Lane Not a Dedicated Bus Lane? – CityLab

Ferries/Ports/Maritime/Canals

• What happened to Sydney’s grand plans for a canal from Botany Bay to Sydney Harbour? – ABC

​Land Use

• How an Ambitious Minnesota Eco-Project Became a Density Battleground – CityLab
• The Cities That Never Existed What if the urban visions of famous architects and planners had actually been built?  – Darran Anderson – The Atlantic
• Is Chongqing’s ‘horizontal skyscraper’ the answer to overcrowded cities? – The Guardian

Justice/Equity

• Another tale of two cities: access to jobs divides Sydney along the ‘latte line’ – The Conversation
• White supremacy playbook: the law is for you, not for me – Lisa Schweitzer
•  Trump’s bid for Sydney casino 30 years ago rejected due to ‘mafia connections’ – The Guardian

Fantasy

• The Boring Company’s Chicago project seems awfully cheap for something so big – The Verge
• The strange tale of the hovertrain, the British hyperloop of the 1970s – Wired

Kerbs and Sidewalks

• Smart Highways – ‘Watch the Kerb’ – Neil Herron
  https://flickread.com/edition/html/5b03da28d6fff#50
• This new map demystifies NYC curb rules – Curbed
• As scooters, bikes, and transit startups flood the streets, cities need to control the curb – Curbed

Retail, Freight, and Logistics

• Where Have America’s Truck Drivers Gone?  – Virginia Postrel @ Bloomberg
• Arizona law gives delivery robots same rights as pedestrians – but they must abide by same rules – Fox Mews

Technology

• The Future of Identity in the Mobility Market – Jacob Baskin
• LinkedIn debuts Your Commute, navigation and maps to evaluate jobs based on how far they are – TechCrunch

Technology History

• Confessions of a Disk Cracker: the secrets of 4am. – Paleotronic Magazine

Research & Data

• University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory (2018) Access Across America: Transit 2017
• Tang, W., and Levinson, D. (2018) An empirical study of the deviation between actual and shortest travel time paths. ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems . 144 (8) [doi]
• Shaping Conversations about Transit with Interactive Isochrone Mapping – Anson Stewart
• Aim for cities of all sizes to give everyone a fair go – Somwrita Sarkar at The Conversation
• Traffic is complex, but modelling using deceptively simple rules can help unravel what’s going on  The Coverversation
• Nature’s traffic engineers have come up with many simple but effective solutions – The Conversation
• Berkeley Open Sources Largest Self-Driving Dataset  analyticsvidhya.com
• Fed up with always being in the slow queue? That’s why queues are being ‘designed out’ – The Conversation
• Growing cities face challenges of keeping the masses moving up, down and across – The Conversation

Books

• Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus (2018) by David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.
• Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. (2018) By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen.
• Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport (2016) by David Levinson.
• The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape. (2017) By David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.
• The Transportation Experience: Second Edition Garrison, William and Levinson, David (2014)