The Transportist: February 2018
Welcome to the February 2018 issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter.
Thank you to all who purchased Elements of Access. Copies are still available.
Transportist Posts
A Friendly Guide to Transport Planning | Human Transit ["Access — where can you get to soon? — is, or should be, the core idea of transportation planning"] -- Jarrett Walker
Fielding Dreams – Hypotheses about Induced Demand and Induced Supply, ["In the planner's telling, only the hapless traffic engineer, who made the partial equilibrium assumption that demand does not respond to supply, is surprised" by induced demand.]
On Power and Multi-sided Markets: Internet, Cities, Universities, Hollywood, and Politics [“Power accrues to the middleman. Most power comes from being the middleman in a difficult-to-disintermediate multi-sided market.”]
15 Strategies to Solve Global Warming ["as long as we don’t have net zero or net negative carbon emissions, the queue of unabsorbed pollution will continue to lengthen."]
Transport Jobs
Level B Research Fellow x 2 at ITLS. Closing date: 11:30pm, 25 February 2018.
Transport Scholarships
Forest Coach Line in association with the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies are offering a Scholarship to a PhD student whose research is focused on public transport. Please see website and Research Database for further information.
The Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies are offering a Scholarship to a PhD student whose research is focused on public transport. Please see website and Research Database for further information.
Transport News
Transit
[It is a requirement to use the phrase 'off-the-rails' in commentary about Sydney rail issues]
This is how Sydney's transport system has gone off the rails - theconversation.com [David Hensher]
Construction Costs: Metro Stations - Pedestrian Observations [Alon Levy]
Roads
Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11.52 Under Congestion Plan - NY Times
How many motorists are using the widened M4? Government refuses to say - SMH [Honestly, just send an intern and count the damn cars, traffic counts are not a state secret, lame all around]
Exclusive: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US - The Verge
AVs
Quote: I just realized that with the advent of self-driving vehicles, we may soon get country songs where your truck leaves you too. [Marko Kloos on Twitter]
Self-Driving Cars in a City Like No Other - Autonomous transportation launching to 125,000 residents in Florida - Voyage [press release]
A key part of many autonomous cars just got a huge price cut - Slashgear
How Big is the Transportation Opportunity? - Horace Dediu
EVs
SVs/Taxis/Car Sharing
Uber’s Secret Tool for Keeping the Cops in the Dark - Bloomberg
Why Can't Uber Make Money? - Forbes
Didi Chuxing’s ambitious plans for new energy vehicles - AllTechAsia
Report: China’s Didi to buy Brazil’s 99 in $1B deal - TechCrunch
BMW and Daimler close to merging car-sharing units - Reuters
Uber CEO hopes to have self-driving cars in service in 18 months - TechCrunch
Uber Co-Founder Travis Kalanick Said to Plan Sale of 29% of Stake - Bloomberg
HGVs/Freight/Delivery/Retail
Amazon Go, a high-tech version of a 7-Eleven, will finally open on Monday — with no checkout lines - Recode
Truck drivers still aren't paid for all the work they do, leading to fatigue on our roads - Ann Williamson at the Conversation
Intercity Rail
Second person in less than a week killed by high-speed Brightline train in South Florida - USA Today
Brightline kills woman during VIP ride - Sun-Sentinal
Land Use
China’s Hot Housing Market Begins to Cool In Beijing and Shanghai - WSJ
What Happens When You Ease Parking Requirements for New Housing - Nick Magrino
Science
HPVs/Bikes/Pedestrians
Dockless bike-share leads to quick spike in bike use in Chinese cities - Bikebiz.com
Who’s Afraid of the “Petextrian”? - Jordan Fraade
Ferries
Social Networks
The Last Days of Reality - Mark Pesce
Linguistics
Trade
The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely - The Atlantic
Research
Grisé, E., Boisjoly, G., Maguire, M., & El‐Geneidy, A. (2018). Show me where we are going: Measuring and comparing accessibility to jobs by public transport for individuals with physical disability in Montreal and Toronto, Canada. Paper presented at the 97th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington D.C., USA.
Zhu, S., Levinson, D., and Liu, H. (2017) Measuring winners and losers from the new I-35W Mississippi River Bridge. Transportation.
Aaron C. Poole, James C. McCutcheon, Kayla Toohy, (2018) Testing the Impact of Road Network Connectivity on Criminal Lethality. Journal of Homicide Studies.
Books
Now available:
Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen. 342 pages, 164 Images (most in color). Published by the Network Design Lab.
Nothing in cities makes sense except in the light of accessibility. Transport cannot be understood without reference to the location of activities (land use), and vice versa. To understand one requires understanding the other. However, for a variety of historical reasons, transport and land use are quite divorced in practice. Typical transport engineers only touch land use planning courses once at most, and only then if they attend graduate school. Land use planners understand transport the way everyone does, from the perspective of the traveler, not of the system, and are seldom exposed to transport aside from, at best, a lone course in graduate school. This text aims to bridge the chasm, helping engineers understand the elements of access that are associated not only with traffic, but also with human behavior and activity location, and helping planners understand the technology underlying transport engineering, the processes, equations, and logic that make up the transport half of the accessibility measure. It aims to help both communicate accessibility to the public.
Purchase:
PDF (Electronic Download) (on Gumroad)... $8.88
High Quality Color Trade Paperback (on Blurb)... $28.88
Very High Quality Color Hardcover (on Blurb) ... $88.88
Still available ...
The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape. [3rd Edition] By David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.
In this book we propose the welcome notion that traffic—as most people have come to know it—is ending and why. We depict a transport context in most communities where new opportunities are created by the collision of slow, medium, and fast moving technologies. We then unfold a framework to think more broadly about concepts of transport and accessibility. In this framework, transport systems are being augmented with a range of information technologies; it invokes fresh flows of goods and information. We discuss large scale trends that are revolutionizing the transport landscape: electrification, automation, the sharing economy, and big data. Based on all of this, the final chapters offer strategies to shape the future of infrastructure needs and priorities.
Purchase
Softcover, Black and White ($US 18.88)
Softcover, Color ($US 28.88)
Hardcover, High Quality Color ($US 67.49)
PDF via Gumroad ($US 8.88)
Kindle ($US 9.99)
iBooks ($US 9.99)