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. 

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So in personal news, we bought real estate, moving to Arncliffe, so I am now again a transit commuter (for the first time since 2006-07 in London). The trains are now Standing Room Only in rush hour (near 8 am), with the seat restrictions (but are fine 60 minutes earlier). Mask compliance is pretty high (>90%), despite zero community transmission in Australia, because they are mandated no doubt. I am sure if they were not mandated, the use level would be much lower.

Transportist Posts

• Observations of Arncliffe.
• Access as a Performance Indicator in a Work-from-Home world.

WalkSydney

• When will your Council set a 30 km/h limit in your neighbourhood?
• Walking infrastructure steps up … Community wants a pedestrian crossing …When Council’s Local Traffic Committee (an advisory committee process involving both local council and state government) considered the matter, the pedestrian crossing was rejected because it didn’t comply with the warrant. The issue was then referred to the Regional Traffic Committee and was again rejected because it didn’t comply with the warrant – a document drafted decades ago. Subsequently, Parramatta Council wrote to the NSW Minister for Transport and the Minister responded to say “no”. Council staff then requested a meeting with the Minister and met with TfNSW staff where they were informed that the NSW warrant for pedestrian crossings was written for State roads (known as Classified roads) – these are major arterial roads such as the James Ruse Drive, Parramatta Rd, Cumberland Hwy, Pacific Hwy and Victoria Rd. Parramatta Council was informed that the NSW warrant does not apply to local streets (about 85 percent of the street network) and councils have the discretion to install pedestrian crossings by referring to the other national guides.

Talks 

• I will be presenting “at” Kyoto University on March 2, 2021 on The End of Traffic and the Future of Access.

Findings

Urban Findings is launching soon. We are plotting Energy Findings now. If you are interested, let me know.

• Brown, Anne, Nicholas J. Klein, and Calvin Thigpen. 2021. “Can You Park Your Scooter There? Why Scooter Riders Mispark and What to Do about It.” Findings, February. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.19537.
• Kapatsila, Bogdan, and Emily Grise. 2021. “Public Transit Riders’ Perceptions and Experience of Safety: COVID-19 Lessons from Edmonton.” Findings, February. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.19046.
• Goodman, Anna, and Rachel Aldred. 2021. “The Impact of Introducing a Low Traffic Neighbourhood on Street Crime, in Waltham Forest, London.” Findings, February. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.19414.
• Lin, Bo, Timothy C. Y. Chan, and Shoshanna Saxe. 2021. “The Impact of COVID-19 Cycling Infrastructure on Low-Stress Cycling Accessibility: A Case Study in the City of Toronto.” Findings, February. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.19069.
• Kaufman, Benjamin. 2021. “COVID-19 Impacts On-Demand Ridership in New South Wales: Regional Services More Stable than Urban Counterparts.” Findings, February. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.18979.
• Harris, M. Anne, and Michael Branion-Calles. 2021. “Changes in Commute Mode Attributed to COVID-19 Risk in Canadian National Survey Data.” Findings, February. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.19088.

Research by Others

• “Road safety. Technical solutions to a behavioural and technological problem with a scientific approach” (authors: Pasquale Colonna, Nicola Berloco, Paolo Intini, Vittorio Ranieri, from the Politecnico di Bari, Italy).
• Jawad Mahmud Hoque, Gregory D. Erhardt, David Schmitt, Mei Chen, Ankita Chaudhary, Martin Wachs & Reginald R. Souleyrette (2021) The changing accuracy of traffic forecasts.
• Ride-hailing
  • Meng Liu,Erik Brynjolfsson, Jason Dowlatabadi (2021) Do Digital Platforms Reduce Moral Hazard? The Case of Uber and Taxis.

News & Opinion

• COVID and The Free Flow of People
  • Billionaires Lindsay Fox and John Wagner offer to run quarantine camps[A solution available a year ago, but meanwhile many Australians, as well as international students have been kept out].
• COVID and Remote Work
  • Superstar Cities Are in Trouble: The past year has offered a glimpse of the nowhere-everywhere future of work, and it isn’t optimistic for big cities. (Derek Thompson).
  • The Old New York Won’t Come Back: ‘The pandemic changed everything,’ we say. But we have yet to absorb fully everything that means.(Peggy Noonan).
  • Post-Covid, Transit Agencies Must Look Beyond Ridership (David Zipper)
  • If Rush Hour Dies, Does Mass Transit Die With It? (Henry Grabar).
  • Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let some employees work remotely from now on.
  • JC Decaux national [Australia] audience highest reported since pre-COVID.
• Transport Agency Management.
  • NSW transport boss to receive more than $800,000 payout. [It’s good to get fired from some jobs].
  • BECAUSE: Minister pushed to clear all trees along NSW highways after Black Summer bushfires But NSW transport boss refused, because that would be illegal (and bad). So reports the Sydney Morning Herald. [I have heard other rumours for the cause, but had no confirmation.]
• Robots
  • Ford Sold Velodyne Stake After Sensor Maker’s Post-SPAC Gain.
• Batteries and Electrification
  • The Battery Is Ready to Power the World: After a decade of rapidly falling costs, the rechargeable lithium-ion battery is poised to disrupt industries
  • The road to electric is filled with tiny cars: Forget Tesla: Millions of people in China are embracing tiny, off-brand competitors.
• Mobility as a Service
  • Google Maps will now let you pay for public transportation and parking through its app.
  • Uber and Lyft Are Trying to Compete with Google Maps For Some Reason.
• Vehicles
  • The Changing Mix of Light Vehicle Sales. 80% of new light vehicle sales in the US are trucks/SUVs. 5 years ago it was 50%.
• Walking
  • Beg Buttons are terrible. Australia’s have the nicest sound though. Why Australia’s Crosswalk Buttons are the Best (ft. Billie Eilish)
• The Internet of “Things”
  • Someone tried to poison a Florida city by hacking into the water treatment system, sheriff says.
• Privacy
  • (2019) Cities Can See Where You’re Taking That Scooter: Thanks to technology developed by Los Angeles (and opposed by Uber), they know more about the movement of dockless vehicles than ever before. [This was just upheld in court in 2021].
• Justice
  • Berkeley City Council Passes Sweeping Reforms to Limit Police Traffic Stops. 
  • ‘Abolish ICE’ was a top submission in Minnesota’s snowplow naming contest.
• International Trade
  • Age of Invention: The Industry of All Nations [World’s Fairs].
• Nature
  • The mysterious existence of a leafless kauri stump, kept alive by its forest neighbours [It’s part of a network, trees are social].

Podcasts:

• Mitch Turck interviews Carlos Pardo (NUMO Alliance) covering transportation avoidance as a fundamental strategy in TDM, and why 99% of transpo planners neglect to acknowledge it as being within their purview: https://www.telekineticshow.com/episodes/transportation-avoidance.

Transport Engineering and Planning at the University of Sydney

Emily Moylan

Jan 8

Welcome to the start-of-year update from TransportLab at the University of Sydney.

We’re looking forward to meeting people face-to-face again, but in the meantime, you can follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Events

The TransportLab Seminar started up again in the second half of 2020. In addition to student presentations, the virtual format allowed us to host several academic and industry speakers, including:

• Meead Saberi (UNSW) on Strategic Modelling for Walking Infrastructure
• Jonathan Busch (SCT Consulting) on a practitioner’s perspective on transport innovation
• Emilie Gunaratnam and Matthew Jones (TfNSW) on Cost-Benefit Analysis at TfNSW
• Sue McNeil (University of Delaware) on using real-time time data to provide situational awareness to first responders in emergencies. 
• Gabriel Metcalfe (Committee for Sydney) on Advocacy for Change in Mobility Systems

TransportLab participated in the annual Transport Research Association for NSW (TraNSW) Symposium on 17-19 November. Six TransportLab students presented their work, and Linji Chen (fourth from left) received an award for Best Research Demonstration.

Together with the UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science, University of Sydney organised a virtual symposium on Big Data and Neighborhood Change. Somwrita Sarkar was a project lead on the event. 

People

Teck Kean Chin has started his PhD on Smart City Applications in Land Use and Transport

Yang Gao will start a PhD in early 2021.

Mengyuan (Derek) Zhu has started his MPhil on Optimising Space-time Matching in Ridesharing through Predictive Modelling

Former post-doc Mengying Cui started as an Associate Professor at Chang-An University

Jing Chen and Louise Aoustin finished as a visiting scholars with TransportLab at Sydney. 

• Louise graduated from EPFL and is currently working at Keolis Downer in Sydney. 
• Jing Chen will finish her PhD at Southeast University in Nanjing, China

Awards, Accolades and Memberships

Jennifer Kent’s book “Planning Australia’s Healthy Built Environments” was awarded a Commendation Award for Planning Excellence in the category of Cutting Edge Research and Teaching by the Planning Institute of Australia, NSW.

The University of Sydney has the most influential academics of any university in Australia. This includes David Levinson who is in the top 2% of citations. 

Emily Moylan received the 2020 Dean’s (Faculty) Award for Teaching Innovation in 2019 for her work incorporating informatics into the transport curriculum.

Mohsen Ramezani was promoted to Senior Lecturer.

Mohsen Ramezani has received an ARC DECRA on Market Design of Next Generation of Shared and Automated Transport Services

PhD student Linji Chen won the Best Research Demonstration Award at the TraNSW 2020 Symposium for his presentation on Decentralised Cooperative Cruising of Autonomous Fleet.

Honours student April Alcock is the 2020 University of Sydney winner of the ITE-ANZ Trafficworks Student Award.

Articles, books and chapters

Davis, Blake, Ji, Ang,  Liu, Bichen, and Levinson, D. (2020) Moving Array Traffic Probes. Frontiers in Future Transportation. doi: 10.3389/ffutr.2020.602356 [doi]

Ji, Ang and Levinson, D. (2020) Injury severity prediction from two-vehicle crash mechanisms with machine learning and ensemble models. IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems. [doi]

Ji, Ang and Levinson, D. (2020) An energy loss-based vehicular injury severity model. Accident Analysis and Prevention. 146 October 2020, 105730. [doi]

Kamal, M. A. S., Ramezani, M., Wu, G., Roncoli, C., Rios-Torres, J., & Orfila, O. (2020). Partially Connected and Automated Traffic Operations in Road Transportation. Journal of Advanced Transportation. [doi]

Kent, J.L. (2020). The role of car-sharing in sustainable transport. In Curtis, C. (Ed.) Handbook for Sustainable Transport. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham

Kent, J.L. and Thompson, S. (2020) Healthy Cities. In Rogers, D., Keane, A., Nelson, J. and Alizadeh, T. (Eds.) Introduction to Urbanism: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Palgrave McMillan, Camden

Kent, J.L. (2020) Transport, access and health. In Mulley, C. (Ed.) Urban Form and Accessibility. Elsevier, London

Levinson, D. (2020) Logistic Curve Models of CO2 Accumulation. Transport Findings. [doi]

Levinson, D. (2020) A Timeline of Future Transport in Sydney as Revealed in Tablet Form. In Derrible, S. & Chester, M. (Ed.) Urban Infrastructure: Reflections For 2100: An Edited Volume Imagining Infrastructure Transitions And Goals At End-Of-Century. Independently published.

Paine, G., Thompson, S., Prior, J., Connon, I., & Kent, J. L. (2020). Bringing History Forward: Learning from Historical Context when Translating Contemporary Health Evidence into Planning Practice. Journal of Planning History. [doi]

Sarkar S., Farid R. (2020) Data, Science and Cities. In: Rogers D., Keane A., Alizadeh T., Nelson J. (eds) Understanding Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. [doi]

Reports and Projects

Liverpool Sustainable Urban Mobility Study. iMOVE CRC/Liverpool City Council

The Transport Access Manual was published by the Committee for the Transport Access Manual, chaired by David Levinson 

Opportunities to build capability in traffic management for Austroads. Dissemination webinar is on the 21st January. 

New housing supply, population growth, and access to social infrastructurefor Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)

Journals

Transport Findings has been renamed Findings, and a new section Urban Findings, will launch in 2021

Mohsen Ramezani is editing a special issue of Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics on Advanced Modeling and Control for AI-enabled Multimodal and Automated Transport Systems.

Mohsen Ramezani is editing a special issue of Frontiers in Future Transportation on Integration of Real-Time Information in Transport Planning and Operations.

Appearances

Jennifer Kent presented at the Sydney Environment Institute’s Critical Companion Series on Sustainable Urban Mobility

David Levinson keynoted at IARAI  Traffic4cast 2020 Special Session: The End of Traffic and Future of Access

David Levinson guest lectured at UBC: The New, New Normal

David Levinson presented at Australia Build Week: 30-Minute City

David Levinson presented at Festival of Urbanism: The New New Normal: Mobility and Activity in the After Times. The article was originally published in The Fifth Estate, November 2, 2020.

David Levinson was a panelist at Transport Australia Society webinar: The Role of Walking in the Movement and Place Framework

David Levinson was quoted by the Daily Telegraph: Outer Sydney Orbital: M9 to be Built Next to Airport Metro, Freight Line

David Levinson was quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald: “Sydney’s bike network stuck in the slow lane“.

Emily Moylan was an invited speaker at the CSIRO Symposium Future of Meetings

Emily Moylan spoke at the Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference about civil engineering students coding to learn.

Mohsen Ramezani was invited to be a speaker in the full-day online workshop “Emerging Control of Vehicular Traffic for Improving Sustainability and Energy Efficiency” for SICE Annual Conference 2020

Welcome to the mid-year update from TransportLab at the University of Sydney.

The world has been in flux since our last newsletter, which has led to far less mobility than we would have liked (on a personal level). So while we won’t be seeing most of you this year, we hope to remain in touch online. You can follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

We hope to host a TransportCamp later in 2020, and should see many New South Welshmen there.

Seminars

Before the shutdown, we were pleased to have a presentation at the TransportLab Professional Seminar from Paul Anderson of Texas A&M on bus bunching. Paul was previously an undergraduate student working for David at the University of Minnesota, and a Master’s Student at EPFL working with Mohsen.

We plan some additional seminars in second semester, which were deferred from the first, as the university and society reboot.

People

• Linji Chen started in March 2020 as a PhD student. Thesis topic: Traffic state estimation and congestion control with connected and automated vehicles
• Jaime Soza Parra is hoping to join us as a postdoc. He was supposed to start 18 May, but can’t until the travel ban is lifted.
• Jing Chen and Louise Aoustin started as a visiting scholars

Current Projects

• FAST Corridor Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan. iMOVE CRC/Liverpool City Council
• University of Toronto Partnership Collaboration Awards
• Access Across New Zealand: 2019

• Opportunities to Build Capability in Traffic Management. Austroads
• New housing supply, population growth, and access to social infrastructure.

Editorial Boards

• Mohsen Ramezani was named Review Editor in Transportation Systems Modeling (specialty section of Frontiers in Future Transportation)

Committees

• Emily Moylan joined AED20 the TRB Committee on Urban Data

Articles

• Beauvoir, V., & Moylan, E. (2020). Unreliability of Delay Caused by Bike Unavailability in Bike Share Systems. Transportation Research Record. [doi]

• Cui, Mengying, and Levinson, D. (2020) Shortest paths, travel costs, and traffic.Presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, January 2020. Environment and Planning B. (accepted and in press)
• Cui, Mengying, and Levinson, D. (2020) The Internal and External Costs of Motor Vehicle Pollution. Transportation Research Record (accepted and in press)
• Cui, Mengying, and Levinson, D. (2020) Multi-Activity Access: How Activity Choice Affects Opportunity. Transportation Research part D. (accepted and in press)

• Cui, Mengying and Levinson, D. (2019) Primal and Dual Access. Geographical Analysis.  [doi] [code]
• Han, Y., Ramezani, M., Hegyi, A., Yuan, Y., & Hoogendoorn, S. (2020). Hierarchical ramp metering in freeways: an aggregated modeling and control approach. Transportation Research part C: Emerging Technologies, 110, 1-19. [doi]
• Ji, Ang and Levinson, D. (2020) A Review of Game Theory Models of Lane Changing. Transportmetrica A. 16(3), 1628–1647. [doi]
• Ji, Ang and Levinson, D. (2020) Estimating the Social Gap with a Game Theory Model of Lane Changing.  IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Transactions. [doi]
• Lahoorpoor, Bahman and Levinson, D. (2020) Catchment if you can: The effect of station entrance and exit locations on accessibility. Journal of Transport Geography. 82, 102556. [doi] [full report]
• Levinson, D. and Wu, Hao (2020) Towards a General Theory of Access. Journal of Transport and Land Use. 13(1) 129-158. [doi]
• Sarkar, Somwrita, Wu, Hao and Levinson, D. (2019) Measuring polycentricity via network flows, spatial interaction, and percolation. Urban Studies. [doi]
• Sarkar, Somwrita, Elsa Arcaute, Erez Hatna, Tooran Alizadeh, Glen Searle and Michael Batty (2020) Evidence for localization and urbanization economies in urban scaling. Royal Society Open Science. [doi]
• Walsh, Lexie, Xian, Tingsen, and Levinson, D. (2020) Walking and Talking: The Effect of Smartphone Use and Group Conversation on Pedestrian Speed.TeMA – Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment. 12(3), 283-294. [doi]
• Wu, Hao (2020) Effects of Timetable Change on Job Accessibility. Transport Findings. [doi]
• Wu, Hao, Owen, Andrew,  and Levinson, D. (2020) Commute Mode Share and Access to Jobs across US Metropolitan Areas. Environment and Planning B. [doi]
• Wu, Hao and Levinson, D. (2020) Unifying Access. Transportation Research part D. Volume 83, June 2020, 102355 [doi]
• Yildirimoglu, M., & Ramezani, M. (2020). Demand management with limited cooperation among travellers: A doubly dynamic approach. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 132, 267-284. [doi]

Reports

• Travel Time Reliability Measurement Research Report: Establishing Empirical Evidence (Feb 2020) Moylan, Wijayaratna, Jian, Saberi, Waller. Commissioned report for TfNSW
• Designing a Dynamic Matching Method for Ride- Sourcing Systems (2020)  Amir Hosein Valadkhani and Mohsen Ramezani.  Working Paper ITLS-WP-20-01

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 next issue of the Transportist will be August, as July will be reserved for the TransportLab newsletter.

Urban riots in response to police murders [tears for my old hometown Minneapolis, the riots were a few miles from our house, and we sometimes went to those shops] moves into the top spot of the armageddon-of-the-month rankings, as Covid-19 fades from attention, because people got bored.

When will Tesla Full Self Drive be functional?

• End of 2020 0%
• End of 2021 3.9%
• End of 2025 20.9%
• Never 75.2%

I interpret this to be when will Tesla Autopilot be “Level 4” autonomous on a large share of roads, with drivers not needing to touch the wheel or pedals for most trips. This poll comes with a sample size of 153 Twitter people, most of whom have some transport knowledge. The respondents are very skeptical of Elon Musk. Now much of this is probably deserved with Hyperloop and the Boring Company and his general antics, but on the other hand, Tesla Autopilot already exists and works reasonably well on freeways (death rates are probably lower than humans, though this is debated) and they have been testing on arterials for over 4 years, and it’s not like he is the programmer. 

I did a similar poll of GM’s Ultracruise (Supercruise for freeways plus new autonomous/driver assist features for city streets, similar tech to Tesla FSD without the hype), though with a smaller and non-identical sample. People trust GM more than Tesla, but remain skeptical. 

GM Ultracruise will be functional in at least one model by: 

• End of 2020 3.4%
• End of 2021 7.2%
• End of 2025 20.7%
• Never 58.6%

I’m at 2021 on both of these.

Recall Notice: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The Huanan Seafood Market would like to recall “Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”. It has severe side-effects and should not be consumed. A replacement virus is available with exchange at site of purchase.

Universities, which are financially strapped at the moment, could save money by canceling subscriptions to expensive journals. We can get that knowledge in other ways now. 

In contrast, their current plans are highly uncertain.

Research 

• Ji, Ang and Levinson, D. (2020) A Review of Game Theory Models of Lane Changing. Transportmetrica A. (online version) [doi]
• Ji, Ang and Levinson, D. (2020) Estimating the Social Gap with a Game Theory Model of Lane Changing. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. [doi]
• Wu, Hao and Levinson, D. (2020) Unifying Access. Transportation Research part D.Volume 83, June 2020, 102355 [doi][free until June 25]

Transportist Blog

• Virus Loading as a Queue
• Beautiful Access
• Your Daily Commute Won’t Ever Be The Same | National Geographic
• How Public Transport Will Change as Lockdowns are Eased | Yahoo 
• A Days of Distancing Holiday
• On Trash Talking

Transport Findings

• Tracing the Sars-CoV-2 impact: The first month in Switzerland
• Comparison of the person flow on cycle tracks vs lanes for motorized vehicles
• Do For-Hire Vehicles Provide First Mile/Last Mile Access to Transit?
• Improving Bicycle Infrastructure with the use of Bicycle Share Travel Data
• Spatial Distributions of Attitudes and Preferences towards Autonomous Vehicles

News & Opinion

• Coronavirus 
  • Coronavirus: what if we stop repeating that public transport is risky?
  • One giant car park: Sydney commuters urged to rethink their travel
  • Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations
  • What impact has the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic had on cycling patterns in Melbourne?
  • What impact has the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic had on pedestrian volumes in central Melbourne?
  • More cycleways, streets to shut, footpaths widened under NSW’s COVID-19 plan
  • Speed cameras rake in record fines while NSW in lockdown
  • Brits pushed to cycle or walk amid public transport restrictions
  • Subways, trains and buses are sitting empty around the world. It’s not clear whether riders will return.
  • Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad, for a Very Long Time
  • Don’t Close Parks. Open Up Streets.
  • Is the United States Giving Up on Public Transportation?
  • ‘Huge statement’: cycling group wants Harbour Bridge lane for commute
  • Did the Coronavirus Kill Ideology in Australia?
• Transit and Microtransit
  • Assessing the Impact of Metro West
  • Intel set to buy Israeli co Moovit for $1b
• AVs
  • The Relentless Startup Fast-Tracking Ford’s Self-Driving Cars
• EVs
  • Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)
  • Tesla quietly adds bidirectional charging capability for game-changing new features
• Shared Vehicles
  • Why a battle between tech visionaries, privacy advocates, Uber, and transportation officials is about much more than scooter data
  • Hertz files for bankruptcy
• Retail
  • Why Do Food Delivery Companies Lose Money?
• Land use
  • Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs abandons Toronto smart-city project
• Miscellany
  • The Man who Thought too Fast (Frank Ramsay)
  • The Coming Disruption: Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolize higher education.
  • Think we [The US] have military primacy over China? Think again.

Books

• The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access. (2019) By David M. Levinson (Book 5 in the Access Quintet)
• A Political Economy of Access. (2019) By David M. Levinson and David A. King (Book 4 in the Access Quintet)
• Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. (2018) By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen. (Book 3 in the Access Quintet)
• Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport (2016) by David Levinson. (Book 2 in the Access Quintet)
• The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape (3rd edition). (2017) By David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek. (Book 1 in the Access Quintet)
• Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus (2018) by David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.
• The Transportation Experience: Second Edition Garrison, William and Levinson, David (2014)

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 armageddon of the month, Covid-19, is rearing its logistically, not exponentially, growing head. (I am sending this early, since at this rate, there may be no April.)

Open Access Access

• ELEMENTS OF ACCESS – OPEN ACCESS

  We are pleased to announce that you can now download a PDF version of Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners  from the University of Sydney eScholarship Repository. (Free)

  [That’s right, we made Elements of Access a free download. Get your copy now. Read it. Make your students and friends and colleagues read it. No excuses. You have the time.]

Covid-19

Locally, we went to all-online mode at the University of Sydney, as did many other universities, and all our travel and other operational expenses were frozen (this was before the international aviation system more-or-less shut down), so I won’t see many of you in person this winter/summer as I had hoped. I am also sad because we had to switch my Transport Policy, Planning and Deployment class’s game night from being an in person (board game) activity to one where students played electronic games. Maybe one day, spatial distancing will be the problem, and they will want us to huddle together again to improve our immune systems.

We saw lots of other novel behaviours this month.

Hoarding was perhaps the most remarked on at first. Toilet paper hoarding in Australia became a thing. Remember, the only thing to fear is fear itself. But if everyone thinks everyone else is afraid, it is rational to be afraid (and hoard). I would argue hoarding and shortages are the natural consequences of a just-in-time economy transforming into an inventory-based economy. This is not inherently irrational when supply interruptions (due to possible store closures, illnesses taking out the supply chain, etc.) are considered. It is derided as selfish, I think that is needless moralising. Now needless moralising may itself be rational for society to engage it, to convince everyone to behave well, or to signal you align with society, but I prefer facts.

Is everyone so panicked because they have been primed by decades of dystopian media and Zombie Apocalypses that they think *this* is the big one? Will we be better prepared when (not if) a much more fatal epidemic hits? A twitter poll says 2/3 of you think so. I remain skeptical. If the response is successful, and fewer than expected/threatened die, people will believe collectively pushing the self-destruct button and blowing up the world economy (people’s lives and employment, not just their retirement portfolios) an over-reaction. If it is unsuccessful, and many people die, there may be more hope for people taking the warning signs more seriously in the future. It’s a dilemma.

As in the table below, we are collectively fucked unless the virus is a lot weaker than evidence suggests (and people don’t get it yet). (The virus, of course, is what it is, though there is uncertainty about that (since as of this writing, we don’t know the true infection numbers, as most people who have been infected have not been tested), it is only our collective reaction that we collectively control at this point).

The stock market crash (which takes coronavirus as an organising principle, but was long overdue) brings it nearer in line with long-term trends (it had been seriously overpriced, as readers have been warned. [The Precarity of Our Situation][What a Logistic Curve of the S&P 500 Tells Us]).

Oh and oil prices collapsed too. If this sustains, bad news for the environment and public transport. In the mean time, the economic collapse buys us a few extra days of CO2 emissions I suppose.

Incoming President Biden (10 months away if the gerontologically-challenged leadership of the US survives intact), (we’re all thinking it) obviously a fan of high-speed rail, should consider renationalising all the mainline US Railroads and strip them of right-of-way for his HSR system if their low stock prices persist. It would be cheaper than negotiating piecemeal. (I first suggested this 11 years ago). Commercial railroading is in long-term decline with its main commodity, coal, on the downslide.

“Let’s consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn’t the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it’s exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce….” 

— Robert Pirsig from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 

In happier matters, I am thinking about a Reviewers Guild to help break academics from their subservience to the for-profit journal publishing hegemony. An editable Google Doc is available to read at the link. Let me know if you are interested in participating.

Transportist Blog

• E-BIKES COME TO MELBOURNE
• ARE YOU SICK OF/FROM TRB — You are more than twice as likely to report having gotten sick if you attended TRB (33.8%) than otherwise (15.4%). Hmm. Wonder what you were sick from?
• FOGGY BOTTOM TOP D.C. NEIGHBORHOOD FOR WALKING ACCESSIBILITY, UMD REPORT FINDS

Transport Findings

• Travel in the time of Covid-19. Transport Findings welcomes short papers on the impact of the virus on travel behavior and traffic or on the impact of travel on virus spread.
• [Our friends at the Open Access EJTIR have a similar call: Mobility and Logistics in the Era of the Coronavirus Pandemic.]
• Park & ride – Exploring the demand effects of parking charges by Erik Bjørnson Lunke

WalkSydney

• Whose turn? The strange case of Golden Grove Street and Darlington Road
• Don’t push the button … our Transport Minister announces:

• And we had just begun our campaign “How to let Transport for NSW know we want automated pedestrian actuators …” So, we’ll take our victory. We want them throughout greater Sydney (and the world).

News & Opinion

• Coronavirus affects
  • Call for government to consider stopping public transport
  • Traffic jams 60km long as desperate travellers choke Europe’s borders
  • Pedestrian numbers drop in the [Melbourne] CBD as pandemic keeps people home [Jealous that Melbourne has this data]
  • City traffic levels plummet 35% following new executive orders
  • Pollution is plummeting in Italy in the wake of coronavirus, emissions data show
  • To limit coronavirus risks on public transport, here’s what we can learn from efforts overseas
  • ¡Atención! Alcaldía habilita ciclovía permanente por coronavirus
• Transit and Microtransit
  • Why the US Sucks at Building Public Transit
  • Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders … [uh, full employment, cheap fuel, buses are (sadly) an inferior good, transit service cutbacks — not much of a mystery, really.]
• Human-Driven Vehicles, Signs, Signals, Sensors, and Markings, and Roads
  • Apple CarPlay, Android Auto distract drivers more than pot, alcohol, says study
• Vehicle Automation
  • Waymo Raises $2.25 Billion
  • The End of Starsky Robotics
• Ride-hailing, Car-sharing
  • SoftBank-Backed Getaround [Car-sharing] Looks for a Buyer as Demand Evaporates
• Walking, Biking, Micromobility
  • Self-driving e-scooters in Georgia

Interesting Research (by others)

• The Cost of Convenience: Ridehailing and Traffic Fatalities [NBER Paper]
• The Talking Headways podcast interviews Geoff Boeing, one of the best younger minds in planning
• Evidence for localization and urbanization economies in urban scaling

Books

• The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access. (2019) By David M. Levinson (Book 5 in the Access Quintet)
• A Political Economy of Access. (2019) By David M. Levinson and David A. King (Book 4 in the Access Quintet)
• Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. (2018) By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen. (Book 3 in the Access Quintet)
• Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport (2016) by David Levinson. (Book 2 in the Access Quintet)
• The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape (3rd edition). (2017) By David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek. (Book 1 in the Access Quintet)
• Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus (2018) by David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.
• The Transportation Experience: Second Edition Garrison, William and Levinson, David (2014)

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.

We skipped the January Transportist Newsletter this year (confusing future archivists), and in its place we launched the TransportLab Newsletter. Most of you should have received that, but they are separate mailing lists.

I also attended TRB along with students and colleagues from TransportLab, and then keynoted at Transforming Transportation at the World Bank/WRI, so happy to meet many of you in person again or for the first time.

Sydney has been smoky, with poor air quality, but managed to avoid the brunt of the Australian bush fires which devastated other parts of Australia. Despite reports on US media, the whole continent is not on fire, though something like 6% of the state of New South Wales did burn, destroying far fewer than 6% of houses. It does look like the end-times though.

Book: The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access.

I am pleased to report that  The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access is now available for purchase

• Paper
• PDF

The book reads fast, with just over 20,000 words, and contains 50 images and 6 tables.

About

This book describes how to implement The 30-Minute City.  The first part of the book explains accessibility. We next consider access through history (chapter 2). Access is the driving force behind how cities were built. Its use today is described when looking at access and the Greater Sydney Commission’s plan for Sydney.

We then examine short-run fixes: things that can be done instantaneously, or nearly so, at low budget to restore access for people, which include retiming traffic signals (chapter 3) and deploying bike sharing (chapter 5) supported by protected bike lane networks (chapter 4), as well public transport timetables (chapter 6).

We explore medium-run fixes that include implementing rapid bus networks (chapter 7) and configuring how people get to train stations by foot and on bus (chapter 8).

We turn to longer-run fixes. These are as much policy changes as large investments, and include job/worker balance (chapter 10) and network restructuring (chapter 9) as well as urban restoration (chapter 11), suburban retrofit (chapter 12), and greenfield development (chapter 13).

We conclude with thoughts about the ‘pointlessness’ of cities and how to restructure practice (chapter 14).

The appendices provide detail on access measurement (Appendix A), the idea of accessibility loss (B), valuation (C), the rationale for the 30-minute threshold (D), and reliability (E). It concludes with what should we research (F).

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1  Introduction 15
• 2  The 30-Minute City: Then and Now 19
• 3  Traffic Signals 25
• 4  On the Four Paths 29
• 5  Bikesharing 35
• 6  Timetable 37
• 7  Rapid Bus 39
• 8  Interface 45
• 9  Gradial: Or the Unreasonable Network 51
• 10  Job-Worker Balance 55
• 11  Urban Restoration 59
• 12  Retrofit 69
• 13  Greenfields and Brownfields 75
• 14  A New Profession: Urban Operations 81

Appendices

• A  Theory 89
• B  Accessibility Loss 93
• C  Access Explains Everything 95
• D  Why 30 Minutes? 97
• E  Reliability 99
• F  Research Agenda 101

Master of Transport at the University of Sydney

• Classes start in early 2020, apply now for term 2.

Transport Accessibility Manual

• The Committee of the Transport Accessibility Manual met at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington DC in January.
• We discussed the first (preliminary) draft of the document, which was distributed to mailing list members before the meeting. Contact me directly if you would like to be added to the mailing list.

Talks and Conferences

• I will be in Auckland, New Zealand for the IAEE – International Association of Energy Economics conference 12-15 February 2020. My talk will by on Friday Feb 14 1:40 – 3:20.
  

  Dual Plenary 4: Energy Transition in Transport | Chair: Professor Frank Jotzo, The Australian National University . Speakers: Professor David Levinson, University of Sydney, Dr Amela Ajanovic, Vienna University of Technology, Dr Selena Sheng, University of Auckland.
  (OGGB3 | 260-092)

WalkSydney

• December issue of WalkSydney Newsletter,

Research

• Published articles
  • Zhao, Xia, Cui, Mengying, and Levinson, D. (2020) Temporal Variations in Daily Activity Networks Using Smartcard Data Presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, January 2020.
  • Walsh, Lexie, Xian, Tingsen, and Levinson, D. (2020) Walking and Talking: The Effect of Smartphone Use and Group Conversation on Pedestrian Speed.TeMA – Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment. 12(3), 283-294. [doi]

Transport Findings

• A scoping indicator identifying potential impacts of all-inclusive MaaS taxis on other modes in Manchester by Ian Philips, Andrew Walmsley, Jillian Anable
• Sunday Drivers, or Too Fast and Too Furious? by Juan Francisco (Frank) Arellano, Kevin Fang

Transportist Blog

• The Next Big Things, Revisited
• Top 19 Transportist Posts in 2019
• Why Australian Road Rules Should Be Rewritten To Put Walking First
• Elsevier and the Quid Pro Quo
• Remode, Reprice, Reshape
• TransportLab Capability Statement
• The 30-Minute City: Small Decisions for Big Gains (iMove article)

News & Opinion

• Transit and Microtransit
  • Metro Transit says bus stops are improved with better signs, more shelters [Perhaps my only legacy in the Twin Cities, successfully advocating for better bus stop signs]
  • Cuomo Will Build the Train Station New York Deserves, But Not the One It Needs Right Now
  • IPART singles out ferries for special treatment in Opal fare proposals
  • [US] Federal officials give green light to red bus lanes [Because the US government has taken it upon itself to decide the coloration of pavement to the detriment of safety and efficiency for many years, in the name of standardization]
  • Update on Australian transport trends (December 2019)
  • Supershuttle is no more
  • Sydney Light Rail 2 line opens. It was not without “teething pains”. I rode it. The ride quality was fine. It was, in fact, slow. My 15 year old son fell asleep on opening day.
    • Why Sydney’s south east light rail is so slow and how to fix it [Greg Sutherland, SMH]
    • Why Sydney Light Rail (L2) is slow and how to fix it [Bambul at Transport Sydney]
    • Light rail debut: trapped on board, mystery breakdown, emergency stops and medical incidents [Daily Tele]
    • ‘These projects are like chil]dbirth’: Delays, technical difficulties mar light rail’s first day [SMH]
    • Sydney’s light rail finally opens: what you need to know about trams
    • Comment: they should be called trams, though they are super-long and have some exclusive right-of-way. The word trams is much shorter than Light Rail, and signage and communication should be clear and direct.
• Safety
  • The states with the least ambitious safety targets – Smart Growth America
  • Virgin Trains USA has highest US railroad death rate
  • Oslo has reduced annual vehicle fatalities to 1 (1975: 41 døde i Oslo-trafikken. 2019: Én død i Oslo-trafikken.). You can too.
  • Pacific Highway turns the corner on safety [Still not completely dual carriageway between Sydney and Brisbane, which would have been done c. 1982 in the United States.]
  • Mobile phone detection cameras pick up more than 3,000 NSW drivers in a week
  • A Proactive Approach to Redefining Child Road Safety:
• Shared Vehicles
  • Getaround to Lay Off About One-Fourth of Staff
  • Cities Struggle to Boost Ridership With ‘Uber for Transit’ Schemes
  • Los Angeles may force Uber to use electric vehicles, mayor says 
• Electrification, Energy
  • France Opens the World’s First Solar Panel Road in Normandy [again]
  • GM to revive Hummer brand as electric pickup
• Walking, Biking, Micromobility
  • Segway’s newest self-balancing vehicle is an egg-shaped wheelchair
  • York set to become UK’s first car-free city centre
  • Metrication
    • US finally giving boot to official foot measurement [Did you know there was more than one foot, and I don’t mean left foot and right foot? While we are at it, did you know US shoe sizes increment in units of 1/3 inch?]
• Land Use
  • Woven City, Toyota’s Prototype City of the Future
  • Lucy Turnbull warns Parramatta precinct must avoid ‘mistakes’ of Green Square, Leppington
• Retail
  • Ghost Kitchens Are Reshaping the Restaurant Industry. Is That a Good Thing?
• Wholesale, Logistics, Supply Chain, Freight
  • Railroads are slashing workers, cheered on by Wall Street to stay profitable amid Trump’s trade war [Process innovation, this should be a good news story]
  • Trucker Celadon filed bankruptcy
• Aviation and Space
  • Boeing Starliner flies into wrong orbit.
• History
  • The Evolution of European Motorways 1920–2020
• Social Justice
  • IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete With TurboTax
  • Nearly 2 million Florida drivers have license suspended for unpaid fines, study finds
  • Sydney alone has more foreign-born residents than mainland China.
• Fires
  • The Arsonous Birds of Australia
  • Do Recent Wildfires Match Up ‘Exactly’ with California’s Proposed High Speed Railway?
  • Eyre Highway closed – the shortest path between Adelaide and Perth is not very short at all.
• Professoring
  • Academic publishing is broken. Here’s how to redesign it

Australian Expression of the month:

• Pyro-cumulonimbus clouds
• Ember Attack

Books

• The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access. (2019) By David M. Levinson (Book 5 in the Access Quintet)
• A Political Economy of Access. (2019) By David M. Levinson and David A. King (Book 4 in the Access Quintet)
• Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. (2018) By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen. (Book 3 in the Access Quintet)
• Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport (2016) by David Levinson. (Book 2 in the Access Quintet)
• The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape (3rd edition). (2017) By David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek. (Book 1 in the Access Quintet)
• Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus (2018) by David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.
• The Transportation Experience: Second Edition Garrison, William and Levinson, David (2014)