Month: December 2018

18 Most Popular Transportist Posts of 2018

| David Levinson

These are the most popular posts for 2018. If you missed any of these, go read them now, before the Singularity makes everything obsolete.

  1. 21 Strategies to Solve Congestion * (for second year running, note it was only 10th most popular in the year it was written.)
  2. What Do We Know About the “First Mile/Last Mile” Problem for Transit? * (by David King)
  3. Signalling Inequality (Blog version, adding views of the version on the Conversation: How traffic signals favour cars and discourage walking, would make this #1)
  4. Road Rent – On the Opportunity Cost of Land Used for Roads
  5. How much time is spent at traffic signals?
  6. A Pedestrian Bill of Rights
  7. Why is the Walking Man White?*
  8. Why is Public Transport Use Higher in Australia and What to Do about it? 
  9. An Argument in Favour of Streetcars.
  10. On Academic Compliance Bullsh*t.
  11. Evolution of the Sydney Trams Network
  12. Speed vs. Safety
  13. Five rings, five continents, five Olympic host cities*
  14. Are Australian Vehicles Getting Bigger?
  15. Uber’s Self-Driving Car Killed Someone Today.
  16. On the Four Paths
  17. Is Reducing a Negative Externality a Positive Externality (Or on biking and Vikings)
  18. Observations of Canberra

Those published in earlier years marked with an *.

The most popular post was 2x the second most popular post, 4x the third post, and 7x the fourth post (and 60x the 18th post). So much for a Zipf rule.

 

Previous Years:

Transportist: January 2019

| David Levinson

Welcome to the January 2019 issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow along at the  blog or on Twitter.

Jobs

Posts at the Blog

Posts at WalkSydney

If you care about walking in Sydney, and want to get involved, go here.

Conferences

News

Macromobility:

Transit

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

Waymo
Tesla

Neither Tesla, Nor Waymo   

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

Mesomobility:

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

Micromobility:

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

 

Curbs and Kerbs

 

Land Use

Intercity Trains

Aviation and Space

Funding and Finance and Governance

Science

Fantasy

Professoring

Publishing

Research & Data

Papers by Us

 

Books by Others

New organisations

Books

Safety Theatre | WalkSydney

| David Levinson

I posted a piece on WalkSydney: Safety Theatre.

What do the following things have in common:

Bicycling in Amsterdam is safer than Sydney, yet there are no helmets in sight. Instead there are separated bikelanes and a better culture, as well as safety-in-neighbors.

 

  • Bike Helmets
  • Sharrows
  • Marked Crosswalks
  • Fining Pedestrians

They are designed to make people feel safer than they are. The natural reaction is a misjudgment of actual risk due to risk compensation. The result is that people don’t behave safely enough, which makes it more dangerous.

In contrast, when people feel less safe, they behave in a safer way, which improves safety compared to normal behaviour in the same circumstances.

For instance in the controversial case of bike helmets, I am not saying if you are dropped on your head, wearing a helmet doesn’t reduce the chance of your head splitting open. I am saying it increases the likelihood of being dropped on your head. The total risk of your head being split open is the product of these two factors:

P(HeadSplitOpen)=P(DroppedOnHead)*P(HeadSplitOpen|DroppedOnHead).

Helmets are associated both with P(HeadSplitOpen|DroppedOnHead) decreasing and P(DroppedOnHead) increasing. How this nets out is an empirical question, whose answer varies depending on context.

…

Recently Published: Accessibility and the journey to work through the lens of equity

| David Levinson

Recently published

Access Equity and the Journey to Work, context map
Access Equity and the Journey to Work, context map

Inequality in transport provision is an area of growing concern among transport professionals, as it results in low-income individuals travelling at lower speeds while covering smaller distances. Accessibility, the ease of reaching destinations, may hold the key in correcting these inequalities through providing a means to evaluate land use and transport interventions. This article examines the relationship between accessibility and commute duration for low-income individuals compared to the higher-income, in three major Canadian metropolitan regions, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver using separate multilevel mixed effects statistical models for car and public transport commuters. Accessibility measures are generated for jobs and workers both at the origin (home) and the destination (place of work) to account for the impact of competing labor and firms. Our models show that the impacts of accessibility on commute duration are present and in many cases stronger for low-income individuals than for higher income groups. The results suggest that low-income individuals have more to gain (in terms of reduced commute time) from increased accessibility to low-income jobs at the origin and to workers at the destination. Similarly, they also have more to lose from increased accessibility to low-income workers at the origin and to low-income jobs at the destination, which are proxies for increased competition. Policies targeting improvements in accessibility to jobs, especially low-income ones, by car and public transport while managing the presence of competition can serve to bridge the inequality gap that exists in commuting behavior.

TransportLab at TRB Schedule

| David Levinson

The University of Sydney’s TransportLab will be at a number of sessions at the January 2019 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington. In addition to myself, we will be represented by Mengying Cui and Hao Wu. If you want to meet up, email me, or track me down at a poster session.

Name and Paper ID

 Session ID Session Name Date Time Place

Street Rights and Livability: Ethical Frameworks to Guide Planning, Design, and Engineering

19-03097

 1130 Incorporating Equity in Pedestrian Planning and Policy Mon 1/14/2019 8:00 AM- 9:45 AM Salon C, Convention Center
Transport Accessibility Manual Working Group Transport Accessibility Manual Working Group Mon 1/14/2019 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM Mint (M4), Marriott Marquis

Safety in Numbers for Bicyclists and Motorists at Urban Intersections: A Two-part Model of Crashes

19-04592

 1478 Cycling Safety and Comfort Tue 1/15/2019 10:15 AM- 12:00 PM 102B, Convention Center

I only get some satisfaction: Introducing satisfaction into measures of accessibility

19-03141

 1518 Accessibility for Policy and Practice Tue 1/15/2019 1:30 PM- 3:15 PM 140B, Convention Center

Disparity of Access: Variations in Transit Service by Race, Ethnicity, Income, and Auto Availability

19-04967

 1518 Accessibility for Policy and Practice Tue 1/15/2019 1:30 PM- 3:15 PM 140B, Convention Center

Optimum Stop Spacing for Accessibility

19-01191

 1636 Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Tue 1/15/2019 3:45 PM- 5:30 PM Hall A, Convention Center

Stationless in Sydney: The Rise and Decline of Bikesharing in Australia.

19-00574

 1499 Bicycle Transportation Research Wed 1/16/2019 10:15 AM- 12:00 PM Hall A, Convention Center

Network Measures of Polycentricity

19-01399

 1776 Transportation Issues and Solutions in Major Cities Wed 1/16/2019 2:30 PM- 4:00 PM Hall A, Convention Center

Link-based Full Cost Analysis of Travel

19-01978

 1775 Novel Uses of Economic Analysis in Decision Making Wed 1/16/2019 2:30 PM- 4:00 PM Hall A, Convention Center

Access to Destinations Data

| David Levinson

Many years ago, we completed a project called Access to Destinations. The data from the project has been sitting on my hard drive for many years. I am happy that some of it is now preserved for posterity and open science by the University of Minnesota Data Conservancy. See:

 

Unfortunately, due to small methodological changes, these data are not directly comparable with more recent outputs, and the 1995 – 2005 data are really not directly comparable with the 2010 data either. It nevertheless might be interesting for selected applications.

Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport. (Free)

| David Levinson

I am pleased to announce that you can now download a PDF version of Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport from the University of Sydney eScholarship Repository. (Free)

Title: Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport
Authors: Levinson, David M.
Keywords: spontaneous order

 planning

 traffic

 transportation engineering

 urban design
Issue Date: Sep-2017
Publisher: Network Design Lab
Citation: Levinson, David (2018) Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport. Network Design Lab.
Abstract: The idea of the ‘spontaneous city,’ one that serves needs and wants in real-time, is a theme running through both the title and the text. How can we design cities and their networks that enable people to do what they want, when they want? What do we do everyday that hinders our freedom?
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/18973
ISBN: 9781389588099

SPONTANEOUS ACCESS: REFLEXIONS ON DESIGNING CITIES AND TRANSPORT by David Levinson

SPONTANEOUS ACCESS: REFLEXIONS ON DESIGNING CITIES AND TRANSPORT by David Levinson

If you want other versions, including paper, please go here.