WalkSydney

We launched WalkSydney.org this month. It’s a local organisation aimed at promoting walking. I have put up several posts on the site (others have as well). While the details are Sydney-based, the logic is sadly universal. If you want to make Sydney a better place to walk (scoot, stride, perambulate, and so on), you should join. We are bike-friendly, unlike some other Australian pedestrian ‘advocacy’ groups. You can follow on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as well.

• WalkSydney – Taking Sydney in Stride
• Map Monday: Isochrones and the Thirty-Minute City
• The Double-Cross: Missing Pedestrian Crossings
• The Alexandria – Moore Park Disconnector (reprinted in Foreground)
• Sydney’s Refugee Crisis

Posts

• How more development can lead to less travel: Examples
• The End of Traffic and the Future of Access (Free) #OpenAccess
• Transport Accessibility Manual Working Group (TRB Monday 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM – Marriott Marquis, Mint (M4))

News

Macromobility:

Transit

• Australian light rail systems and lessons for New Zealand – Neil Douglas
• Alexandria – Missing out on the metro – JedSetter
• Contactless payments on Opal – TfNSW

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

• The $800M Robo Taxi That Could Beat Uber Zoox is on the verge of transforming the entire transportation industry by creating self-driving robots that will become the ride-shares of the future. – YouTube
• Toyota partnership to pilot autonomous vehicle transportation system Self-driving cars to ferry passengers to fuel-cell bus network in Japanese city asia.nikkei.com       
   

Electric Vehicles [and Renewable Energy]

• The first electrified road of the world just open in Sweden ! youtube.com

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

• Why GM is selling Opel to PSA  – autonews
• GM to kill Chevrolet Volt, Cruze, Impala as Americans ditch passenger cars – tennesseean
• The Latest: GM to slash 14,700 jobs in North America – AP News

• Some problems with Sydney traffic signals – walksydney.org
• Nissan to sack chairman Carlos Ghosn over ‘serious misconduct’ – as it happened – The Guardian
• Asset Recycling – Bob Poole
• Know before you go: Surprising insights from analyzing prices of 260 tollways –  Kenny Durrell (Coord)
• No Pelosi-Trump Infrastructure Deal, Please – Alon Levy

Mesomobility:

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

• Lyft is launching a rider loyalty program in December – TechCrunch
• Uber introduces an Amazon Prime-style monthly subscription service $14.99 a month for flat, heavily discounted fares – theverge.com
• Uber Revenue Slows as Quarterly Loss Surges to $1.1 Billion – Bloomberg

Micromobility:

Human-Powered Vehicles/Bikes/Pedestrians/Scooters/eBikes/Last-Mile/First-Mile/etc

• The shy geek behind Hellobike – the latecomer that battled for survival in China’s bike sharing – SCMP
•  Love them or loathe them, there’s another share-bike operator in town (Lime) – SMH
• Los Angeles Inks New Data-Sharing Agreement With Scooter and Bikeshare Companies “This is the way we must work together to meet the challenges of tomorrow,” said Seleta Reynolds, the LADOT’s general manager. routefifty.com
• A defense of jaywalking. – Slate
• Two minutes too long before crossing? Push to shorten pedestrian wait  – SMH
• Older pedestrians are dying on our roads Calling for ‘shared responsibility’ ignores the fact that some people can’t help being impaired or distracted. mnn.com

Technology History

• Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck – The Atlantic

Intercity Trains

• Bullet-train land acquisitions are moving so slowly a judge hearing the cases calls it a ‘lifetime.’ – latimes

Aviation and Space

• NASA’s InSight Mars explorer lands safely on the Red Planet – WaPo

​Maritime and Ferries

• Walking and waterborne public transport – Robin Sandell

Research & Data

Papers by Us

• Jie Huang, David Levinson, Jiaoe Wang, Jiangping Zhou, and Zi-jia Wang (2018) Tracking job and housing dynamics with smartcard data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [doi]  (Open Access)

Residential locations, the jobs–housing relationship, and commuting patterns are key elements to understand urban spatial structure and how city dwellers live. Their successive interaction is important for various fields including urban planning, transport, intraurban migration studies, and social science. However, understanding of the long-term trajectories of workplace and home location, and the resulting commuting patterns, is still limited due to lack of year-to-year data tracking individual behavior. With a 7-y transit smartcard dataset, this paper traces individual trajectories of residences and workplaces. Based on in-metro travel times before and after job and/or home moves, we find that 45 min is an inflection point where the behavioral preference changes. Commuters whose travel time exceeds the point prefer to shorten commutes via moves, while others with shorter commutes tend to increase travel time for better jobs and/or residences. Moreover, we capture four mobility groups: home mover, job hopper, job-and-residence switcher, and stayer. This paper studies how these groups trade off travel time and housing expenditure with their job and housing patterns. Stayers with high job and housing stability tend to be home (apartment unit) owners subject to middle- to high-income groups. Home movers work at places similar to stayers, while they may upgrade from tenancy to ownership. Switchers increase commute time as well as housing expenditure via job and home moves, as they pay for better residences and work farther from home. Job hoppers mainly reside in the suburbs, suffer from long commutes, change jobs frequently, and are likely to be low-income migrants.

by Others

• People resort to violence because their moral codes demand it – Tage Rai | Aeon Essays
• King and Saldarriaga (2018) Measuring changes in taxi trips near infill development and issues for curbside management of for-hire vehicles. “Curb space should be considered “wetlands” of urban systems, a poorly understood, yet key, component that connects the flows of traffic and activities in the built environment.”

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)