Transport Findings -> Findings

2020-10-202020-10-22 | David Levinson

An announcement from FindingsPress:

October 19, 2020 AEST

You may have noticed that Transport Findings has become Findings. We believe the core idea of open access, peer-reviewed, short form research articles that is central to Findings has applications well beyond the transport domain, and we don’t want to limit ourselves (or you). We could have started a lot of small journals, but it is more cost effective, and probably also more beneficial, to keep everything under one journal name, with multiple sections and editors.
So everything we have published to date is in the section Transport Findings, as will undoubtedly be many future papers. But we are pleased to announce that we have opened up a new section Urban Findings, edited by Somwrita Sarkar, which will be launching soon. Urban Findings welcomes submissions following the Findings model of short, to-the-point research findings in the broad field of urbanism. You can see the Editorial Board here:
So at this time we are about Findings in the domains of Transport and Urbanism, because those are the practical limits of our current expertise, but we see no reason in principle that there should not be other sections.
If you have ideas about a topic area that you would both like to see articles for, and are willing to edit, please let us know. Editors of the new section would have to help recruit an editorial board, solicit articles, find reviewers, and, of course, make editorial decisions.
Unfortunately, we can only pay you in social capital, but those rewards are enormous, you will be helping assemble the knowledge of humanity, brick-by-brick, finding-by-finding.

Roderick Distinguished International Webinar: Jennifer Whyte from Imperial College London on `Infrastructure projects and digital delivery.’

2020-10-14 | David Levinson

The University of Sydney’s First Roderick Distinguished International Webinar is scheduled on Thursday, 19 November 2020, from 6-7pm via Zoom.

In this webinar, we will hear from Prof. Jennifer Whyte from Imperial College London. The talk will focus on Infrastructure projects and digital delivery.

Please CLICK HERE to register at your earliest convenience.

Speaker
Prof. Jennifer Whyte is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London, and holds the Royal Academy of Engineering and Laing O’Rourke Chair in Systems Integration. Her research is on the delivery of major infrastructure projects, and on the integration of systems, modular and digital delivery strategies. As a member of Construction Leadership Council in the UK, she has strong links to industry and policy, giving advice based on her research. She has been visiting faculty at Stanford and is Director of the Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation at Imperial College London. She is the incoming Head of the School of Project Management and Director of the John Grill Institute at the University of Sydney.

Title: Infrastructure projects and digital delivery
The talk will focus on how is the delivery of major infrastructure projects transformed by pervasive use of digital technologies and digital information? This lecture will explore how the practices of delivering infrastructure are changing, arguing for the need for focus on systems integration and the realization of value from projects. It draws on research on London megaproject, Heathrow Terminals, London 2012 Olympics, Crossrail, Tideway, High Speed 2.

Transportist: October 2020

2020-10-062020-10-03 | 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.

The New Normal

While VMT in the US is back to normal, public transport levels are not.

It will be a while before, if ever, that public transport returns to the pre-virus normal, even in places like Sydney which were not nearly as severely hit as China, the US, and Europe.

There are several reasons public transport demand will remain low, and these changes are perhaps permanent:

more people work from home at least a few days a week, especially CBD office workers who would otherwise be packed both onto trains and into hot-desked offices.
people are instructed to avoid trains and buses to ensure distancing, which people who can will voluntarily do anyway.
unemployment rates are higher than previously.

Substitutes like walking and biking are likely to pick up some of the slack for those who work in the CBD, though more needs to be done to facilitate safe bicycling in and around Sydney (and most other English speaking cities), in particular following the lead of other global cities in instituting a much larger network of separated and protected bike lanes.

Research

Cui, Mengying, and Levinson, D. (2020) Internal and External Costs of Motor Vehicle Pollution. Transportation Research Record. [doi]On-road emissions, a dominant source of urban air pollution, damage human health. Emissions increase air pollution intake (and damage health) of travelers (internal costs), and of non-travelers (external costs). This research constructs a framework modeling the microscopic production of emission cost from the vehicle and link level and applies it to a metropolitan road network. It uses project-level Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) simulations to model link-specific on-road emissions, and then employs the RLINE dispersion model to estimate on- and off-road concentrations of pollutants from vehicles. The internal and external emission costs are measured accordingly by counting the health damage costs of travelers and gen- eral population because of exposure. The framework is applied to the Minneapolis-St. Paul (Twin Cities) Metropolitan Area as a proof-of-concept. The estimates show that highways have higher emission concentrations because of higher traffic flow, but that the internal and external emission costs per vehicle kilometer traveled are lower. The emission costs that commuters impose on others greatly exceeds that which they bear. This modeling process is replicable for planners and practitioners assessing emission costs in other regions.

Walk Sydney

After a year at the helm, in a peaceful and planned transition of power involving neither vote fraud nor Supreme Court intervention, I transitioned from being President to being an ordinary Committee member of WalkSydney this month. Good luck to our new President Barnaby Bennett.

Transport Findings

Hassanvand, Mina. 2020. “Long-Distance Person Travel: A Cluster-Based Approach.” Findings, September.
Roy, Avipsa, Daniel Fuller, Kevin Stanley, and Trisalyn Nelson. 2020. “Classifying Transport Mode from Global Positioning Systems and Accelerometer Data: A Machine Learning Approach.” Findings, September. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.14520.
Zimny-Schmitt, Daniel, and Joshua Sperling. 2020. “Quantifying Airport Employee Commuting and Related Energy Use: A Comparison of Six US Airports.” Findings, September. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.16663.
Fischer, Jaimy, Trisalyn Nelson, and Meghan Winters. 2020. “Comparing Spatial Associations of Commuting versus Recreational Ridership Captured by the Strava Fitness App.” Findings, September. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.16710.
Aldred, Rachel, and Anna Goodman. 2020. “Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Car Use, and Active Travel: Evidence from the People and Places Survey of Outer London Active Travel Interventions.” Findings, September. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.17128.
Chen, Peng, and Jihao Deng. 2020. “Integrating Affordable Housing with Transit: Where Are the Transit Deserts?” Findings, September. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.17244.