Transportist: December 2018
Welcome to the December 2018 issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow along at the blog or on Twitter
Jobs
Multiple academic opportunities at multiple levels (including Transport) -- School of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney (Closing date: 2 December 2018 - Sydney Time)
WalkSydney
We launched WalkSydney.org this month. It's a local organisation aimed at promoting walking. I have put up several posts on the site (others have as well). While the details are Sydney-based, the logic is sadly universal. If you want to make Sydney a better place to walk (scoot, stride, perambulate, and so on), you should join. We are bike-friendly, unlike some other Australian pedestrian 'advocacy' groups. You can follow on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as well.
The Alexandria – Moore Park Disconnector (reprinted in Foreground)
Posts
The End of Traffic and the Future of Access (Free) #OpenAccess
Transport Accessibility Manual Working Group (TRB Monday 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM - Marriott Marquis, Mint (M4))
News
Macromobility:
Transit
Australian light rail systems and lessons for New Zealand - Neil Douglas
Alexandria - Missing out on the metro - JedSetter
Contactless payments on Opal - TfNSW
Automated, Autonomous, Driverless, and Self-Driving Vehicles, and Semi-Autonomous Systems
Electric Vehicles [and Renewable Energy]
Human-Driven Vehicles, Signs, Signals, Sensors, and Markings, and Roads
Why GM is selling Opel to PSA - autonews
GM to kill Chevrolet Volt, Cruze, Impala as Americans ditch passenger cars - tennesseean
The Latest: GM to slash 14,700 jobs in North America - AP News
Some problems with Sydney traffic signals - walksydney.org
Nissan to sack chairman Carlos Ghosn over 'serious misconduct' - as it happened - The Guardian
Asset Recycling - Bob Poole
Know before you go: Surprising insights from analyzing prices of 260 tollways - Kenny Durrell (Coord)
No Pelosi-Trump Infrastructure Deal, Please - Alon Levy
Mesomobility:
Shared Vehicles/Ride-sharing/Ride-hailing/Taxis/Car Sharing
Lyft is launching a rider loyalty program in December - TechCrunch
Uber introduces an Amazon Prime-style monthly subscription service $14.99 a month for flat, heavily discounted fares - theverge.com
Uber Revenue Slows as Quarterly Loss Surges to $1.1 Billion - Bloomberg
Micromobility:
Human-Powered Vehicles/Bikes/Pedestrians/Scooters/eBikes/Last-Mile/First-Mile/etc
The shy geek behind Hellobike – the latecomer that battled for survival in China’s bike sharing - SCMP
Love them or loathe them, there's another share-bike operator in town (Lime) - SMH
A defense of jaywalking. - Slate
Two minutes too long before crossing? Push to shorten pedestrian wait - SMH
Technology History
Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck - The Atlantic
Intercity Trains
Bullet-train land acquisitions are moving so slowly a judge hearing the cases calls it a ‘lifetime.' - latimes
Aviation and Space
Maritime and Ferries
Walking and waterborne public transport - Robin Sandell
Research & Data
Papers by Us
Jie Huang, David Levinson, Jiaoe Wang, Jiangping Zhou, and Zi-jia Wang (2018) Tracking job and housing dynamics with smartcard data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [doi] (Open Access)
Residential locations, the jobs–housing relationship, and commuting patterns are key elements to understand urban spatial structure and how city dwellers live. Their successive interaction is important for various fields including urban planning, transport, intraurban migration studies, and social science. However, understanding of the long-term trajectories of workplace and home location, and the resulting commuting patterns, is still limited due to lack of year-to-year data tracking individual behavior. With a 7-y transit smartcard dataset, this paper traces individual trajectories of residences and workplaces. Based on in-metro travel times before and after job and/or home moves, we find that 45 min is an inflection point where the behavioral preference changes. Commuters whose travel time exceeds the point prefer to shorten commutes via moves, while others with shorter commutes tend to increase travel time for better jobs and/or residences. Moreover, we capture four mobility groups: home mover, job hopper, job-and-residence switcher, and stayer. This paper studies how these groups trade off travel time and housing expenditure with their job and housing patterns. Stayers with high job and housing stability tend to be home (apartment unit) owners subject to middle- to high-income groups. Home movers work at places similar to stayers, while they may upgrade from tenancy to ownership. Switchers increase commute time as well as housing expenditure via job and home moves, as they pay for better residences and work farther from home. Job hoppers mainly reside in the suburbs, suffer from long commutes, change jobs frequently, and are likely to be low-income migrants.
by Others
People resort to violence because their moral codes demand it – Tage Rai | Aeon Essays
King and Saldarriaga (2018) Measuring changes in taxi trips near infill development and issues for curbside management of for-hire vehicles. “Curb space should be considered “wetlands” of urban systems, a poorly understood, yet key, component that connects the flows of traffic and activities in the built environment.”
Books
Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus (2018) by David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.
Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. (2018) By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen.
Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport (2016) by David Levinson.
The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape. (2017) By David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.
The Transportation Experience: Second Edition Garrison, William and Levinson, David (2014)