Month: August 2019

Transportist: September 2019

| David Levinson

Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers.  As always you can follow along at the  transportist.org or on Twitter.

Transportist (the blog)

WalkSydney

Transport Findings

Media

Conferences

Papers by Us

News

Research by Others

Books

Designing and Evolving the 30-Minute City at the National Roads and Traffic Expo in Melbourne

| David Levinson

I am presenting at the National Roads and Traffic Expo in Melbourne on September 18 at 15:30 about Designing and Evolving the 30-Minute City. It’s free to attend (registration required). If you’re in Melbourne, and want to meet up, let me know.

https://blackbox.feathr.co/v1/creatives/5cf7ec7da7926c00118d60ee/render/

Comments on the National Cities Performance Framework Dashboard

| David Levinson

Hao Wu and I wrote the following for Foreground: New infrastructure performance measures for Australian cities questioned:

The federal government has updated the National Cities Performance Framework Dashboard. The infrastructure performance indicators seek to measure infrastructure and investment needs but how helpful are they? What do the new measures mean for our understanding of urban transport and happiness?

The only reason to move anywhere is to be near something, far from something, or possess something. Location is about proximity. People make location decisions all the time, from whether to move from North America to Australia, to whether to go to the mall by car or bus, to whether to stand near this or that person at a reception, or even whether to sit on the chair or the couch. Businesses do likewise, from deciding where to build a factory and where to locate a store, to which shelf to put the Pepsi to maximize profits.

The underlying logic of all these decisions is the same, despite the difference in scale, timeframe, motivation, and mode of travel. People and organizations will pay a premium to be in locations with higher accessibility to the things (people, opportunities) they care about, to save time (spend less cost in travel), and to be more productive (earn more), all else being equal.

The number of jobs reachable within 30 minutes is perhaps the most widely used proxy for urban accessibility. This number is a measure for cities for several reasons. First, the `number of jobs’ is a surrogate for `urban opportunities’. People work at their jobs, and job locations are places of interaction that provide service either directly or indirectly to customers. Next, being `reachable’ is a function of land use (i.e. how close and dense things are), as well as how fast people can move using different modes of transport. Finally, `30 minutes’ is a typical one-way travel time budget, and the national average for commuters in Australia is 33 minutes.

The Australian Government should be applauded for their efforts in benchmarking cities in terms of transport performance in the recent National Cities Performance Framework. While we are delighted to see the government include this 30-minute access to jobs benchmark  for the first time, we have significant concerns about how the framework applies it.

Car-access-infrastructure-performance-table

First we have trouble with the actual numbers within the framework, as they differ widely from what we and others have computed. The morning peak car access measurement appears dubious. The city-level access is measured by first sub-dividing the city into zones, then averaging the access to jobs from each zone to produce the city-level averages. If the car access measurements from the Australian government framework were correct, then Sydney and Melbourne would have become perhaps the world’s most accessible automobile cities for their sizes, based on our assessment of eight Australian cities. The framework uses data from the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE) that calculates average automobile access to jobs in Sydney at more than twice the number of our own calculation, and higher than even the most accessible suburbs based on a report prepared for the Committee for Sydney.

auto_world

Second, we have trouble with some of the metrics the report uses. Interpreting access as valuable, measured purely by the `proportion of jobs accessible’ within 30 minutes is misleading. Obviously small cities will find all residents can reach their small number of jobs, but in large cities they can’t. This means little. The nominal value of jobs accessible explains land value, commute duration, mode choice, and many other socio-economic variables. A higher percentage of local jobs reachable doesn’t translate these cities into economically more attractive places. The use of `proportion of jobs’ penalizes cities that are larger, but with more jobs present. As we can see from the report, larger cities have an inversely smaller proportion of jobs reachable; this makes the `proportion of jobs accessible’ an uninformative indicator. The reason people are in large cities is not to reach a percentage of jobs, but to reach actual jobs.

Third, a fully fledged access measure would include the number of jobs accessible by walking, biking, and public transport, as well as by car. While the framework measures the proportion of journeys made to work by public and active transport, there are no measures of the number of jobs that are actually accessible by these modes. For example, our study finds that Melbourne has better car access to jobs than Sydney, but Sydney has better transit access. This information cannot be found within the BITRE framework, which distorts the accessibility picture. Active modes of transport are a vital part of urbanity. Measuring pedestrian access sheds light on the convenience of city centres, and bike access outperforms public transport in many cases, which supports arguments for infrastructure such as protected bike lanes to improve biking safety and rider comfort. It is disappointing that only access by automobile is included in this report, despite the high public transport mode share in major Australian cities.

The initiative by the Australian government to include accessibility measures is very much appreciated. In fact, very few governments in the world have computed access to jobs measured nationally. We look forward to BITRE updating their numbers with input from experienced analysts as Australia progresses toward better performance measures of the land use and transport infrastructure of our cities.

Measuring Full Cost Accessibility by Auto

| David Levinson

NewFrameworkFCAPaper.pngRecently published:

Traditionally accessibility has been analyzed from the perspective of the mean or expected travel time, which fails to capture the full cost, especially the external cost, of travel. The full cost accessibility (FCA) framework, proposed by Cui and Levinson (2018b), provides a theoretical basis to fill the gap, that combines temporal, monetary, and non-monetary internal and external travel costs into accessibility evaluations, considering the time cost, crash cost, emission cost, and monetary cost. This paper extends the FCA framework and measures the full cost accessibility by auto for the Minneapolis – St. Paul Metropolitan area, demonstrating the practicality of the FCA framework on real networks.

 

Note: This paper is a sequel to

And extends it by developing rigorous measures for the cost components using real data.

The State of Transport Education in Australia

| David Levinson

I presented last week at a Transport Australia Society session on “The State of Transport Education”. The talk was two parts, the first about my take on where university education in transport is, and the second about the programs at the University of Sydney that aim to remedy the problems.

The state of transport education in Australia is getting better. New and revitalised transport engineering programs at the University level in Australia where none were before (e.g. the University of Sydney, UNSW, UTS). We have seen an import of major academics internationally, because Australia can’t find home grown candidates at the professorial level. Overall there has been a transition from pavements and geometric design to a broader inter-disciplinary outlook.

I use the Japanese Ikigai framework to discuss the field.

ikigai

It is my perception that most transport engineering students lack love for the field, and have difficulty ascertaining and aligning with what the world needs, but are reasonably good at what they get paid for, have figured out how to get paid. This puts them in the southwest corner of the graphic, “Profession”. Planners in contrast are more likely found in the northeast corner “Mission”, at the intersection of what the world loves and what the world needs. Business students are in the southeast “Vocation”, and advocates in the northwest, “Passion”.  What we would like are whole students, transport(ation)ists, in a state of Ikigai.

We hope our new interdisciplinary Masters program will help students find a fusion of vocation, profession, mission, and passion that will live with them through their careers.

The details of the new Masters Degree are summarised in this attached Master of Transport Flyer, (feel free to share) the specific units (units=courses in American English) are listed below:

Core

ITLS

CIVL

PLAN/ARCH

ITLS5100
Transport and Infrastructure Foundations

CIVL5702
Traffic Engineering

ARCH9100
Introduction to Urban Design

ITLS5200
Quantitative Logistics and Transport

CIVL5703
Transport Policy, Planning and Deployment

PLAN9064
Land Use and Infrastructure Planning

ITLS 6102 Strategic Transport Planning

CIVL5704
Transport Analytics

PLANXXXX

Capstone

Electives

ITLS

CIVL

PLAN/ARCH

ITLS6103
Sustainable Transport Policy

CIVL5701
Transport Networks

PLAN9063
Strategic Planning and Design

ITLS6301
City and Port Logistics

CIVL9704
Transport Informatics

PLAN9075
Urban Data and Science of Cities

ITLS6500
Decision Making on Mega Projects

CSYS5010: Introduction to Complex Systems

PLAN9073
GIS Based Planning Policy and Analysis

ITLS6107
Applied GIS and Spatial Data Analytics

CSYS5020: Interdependent Civil Systems

…

We also have an undergraduate “major” (major=minor to those from the US).

Transport Engineering Undergraduate Major

Year 2 Year 3 Year 4
CIVL 2700 Introduction to Transport CIVL3704 Transport Informatics CIVL5701
Transport Networks
CIVL5702
Traffic Engineering
CIVL5703
Transport Policy, Planning and Deployment
CIVL5704
Transport Analytics

 

 

Transportist: August 2019

| David Levinson

Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers.  As always you can follow along at the  transportist.org or on Twitter.

Access Across Australia

  • Access Across Australia (article in The Conversation) (full report)

Transportist (the blog)

WalkSydney

  • There are many new posts on the site, from the organisation where I now preside. You should check WalkSydneyout, and if you are in Greater Sydney, you should join.

Transport Findings

Media

Conferences

  • I attended COTA International Conference of Transport Professionalsin Nanjing (and a pre-conference in Beijing). It’s a good event, and obviously, there is a lot of action in transport in China. I presented on the End of Traffic and the Future of Access, and a General Theory of Access.

Papers by Us

  • Carrion, Carlos and David Levinson (2019) Overestimation and underestimation of travel time on commute trips: GPS vs. self- reporting. Urban Science. 3(3), 70 [doi]
  • Cui, Mengying and Levinson, D. (2019) Primal and Dual Access. Geographical Analysis.  (accepted and in press) [doi]

News

Research by Others

Books