Transportist: December 2019

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.

Jobs

• Post-doc at the University of Sydney with Dr. Emily Moylan

Master of Transport at the University of Sydney

• Class start in early 2020, apply now.

Transport Accessibility Manual

• The Committee of the Transport Accessibility Manual will meet at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington DC in January:

Transport Accessibility Manual Working Group (SAM20-0007 AP050)
Tuesday, Jan 14, 2020  8:00AM - 9:45AM (US Eastern Standard Time)

• We will be discussing the first (preliminary) draft of the document, which will be 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 Wellington, New Zealand for two presentations:

  • New Zealand Transport Knowledge Hub, December 5, 2019

  • New Zealand Government Economics Network (GEN), December 6, 2019

• TransportLab co-Hosted: The Transit Transformation Australia Needs: Launch with Prosper Australia

• TransportLab co-Hosted the Australian Research Summit on Connected and Automated Vehicles with UNSW rCITI

WalkSydney

• Subscribe to the WalkSydney Newsletter, the next issue comes out mid-December.

• The Brown Skies of Sydney

Book Sales

• My publisher would like you to know that you can get Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus at a 30% off discount using code ADS19 - until December 31, 2019. Get your copy ...

Research

• Working Papers

  • Cui, Mengying, and Levinson, D. (2020) Shortest paths, travel costs, and traffic. To be presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, January 2020.

  • Davis, Blake, Ji, Ang,  Liu, Bichen, and Levinson, D. (2020) Moving Array Traffic Probes. To be presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, January 2020.

  • Ji, Ang and Levinson, D. (2020) A Review of Game Theory Models of Lane Changing. To be presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, January 2020.

  • Lahoorpoor, Bahman and Levinson, D. (2020) Trains, trams, and terraces: population growth and network expansion in Sydney: 1861-1931. To be presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, January 2020.

  • Lahoorpoor, Bahman and Levinson, D.  (2020) The Transit Travel Time Machine: Comparing Three Different Tools for Travel Time Estimation. To be presented at the Transportation Research Board Conference, Washington, DC, January 2020.

  • Rayaprolu, Hema and Levinson, D. (2020) What’s Access Worth? A Hedonic Pricing Approach to Valuing Cities. To be presented at the Transportation Research Board Conference, Washington, DC, January 2020.

• Published articles

  • Ermagun, Alireza, and Levinson, D. (2019) Development and Application of the Network Weight Matrix to Predict Traffic Flow for Congested and Uncongested Conditions. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. 46(9) 1684–1705.

  • 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] [free until 2019-12-25]

  • 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, Somwrita Sarkar, and Levinson, D. (2019) How Transit Scaling Shapes Cities. Nature Sustainability doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0427-7 . [doi]

    • Article in University of Sydney news

Transport Findings

• Where to put bike counters? Stratifying bicycling patterns in the city using crowdsourced data by Vanessa Brum-Bastos, Colin J. Ferster, Trisalyn Nelson, Meghan Winters

• Quantifying the Bicycle Share Gender Gap by Kate Hosford and Meghan Winters

• Modeling the Purpose for Renting Passenger Vehicles by Terence Dimatulac, Hanna Maoh, and Shakil Khan

• Shedding NHTS Light on the Use of "Little Vehicles" in Urban Areas by Kevin J. Krizek and Nancy McGuckin

• A New Metric in Town: A Survey of Local Planners on California’s Switch from LOS to VMT by Jamey M. B. Volker, Joe Kaylor, and Amy Lee

Education by Others

•  Visualizations to teach intro topics for transportation engineering by University of Illinois at Urban Champaign professor Lewis Lehe https://cee310.com/

• Urban Engineering for Sustainability is a new book by my colleague and University of Illinois at Chicago professor Sybil Derrible. 

Transportist Blog

• How climate change impacts infrastructure: experts explain

News & Opinion

• Transit and Microtransit

  • Why this orthopedic surgeon insists women should ‘sit like a man’ [Re: Manspreading]

  • Sydney's light rail bill soars to at least $2.9 billion

  • Final plans for $100m Redfern station upgrade reveal new lifts, concourse [from the rendering the whole bridge is Opal gated]

  • Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop will be a standalone line

• Human-Driven Vehicles, Signs, Signals, Sensors, and Markings, and Roads

  • Narrow Streets for People

  • When did “by” become “after”? On causality in articles about car crashes

• Shared Vehicles

  • Juno is deceased

• Vehicle Automation

  • Zombie Miles And Napa Weekends: How A Week With Chauffeurs Showed The Major Flaw In Our Self-Driving Car Future

  • Self-Driving Uber in Crash Wasn’t Designed to See Jaywalkers

  • After more than a decade, Waymo's driverless ride-hailing service is open to customers

• Electrification, Energy

  • Australia’s main grid reaches 50 per cent renewables for first time

  • World’s Air Pollution: Real-time Air Quality Index

• Walking, Biking

  • The FARS Side: The Myth of the Distracted Pedestrians

  • Over-the-top policing of bike helmet laws targets vulnerable riders

• Land Use

  • Introducing Culdesac: Building car-free neighborhoods from scratch

  • It’s time to define transportation success by what actually matters to people: getting where you need to go

• Retail, Wholesale, Logistics, Supply Chain, Freight

  • Malls are dying. The thriving ones are spending millions to reinvent themselves.

  • How FedEx Cut Its Tax Bill to $0

  • The future of autonomous delivery may be unfolding in an unlikely place: Suburban Houston

  • Deliveroo to ask UK customers to collect their own food at restaurants

  • Garçon! D.C. Requires Curb Reservations for Deliveries

  • Cities Stuck In The ‘Last Mile’ On Future Of Transportation

• Aviation and Space

  • Starlink is a very big deal

  • ‘This Is Not Cool!’ - Astronomers Despair As SpaceX Starlink Train Ruins Observation Of Nearby Galaxies

• History

  • Historians Still Unable To Determine How Americans Were Able To Build Hoover Dam

  • I am railing: Sir Rod Stewart reveals his epic model railway city

• Social Networks

  • The Dark Psychology of Social Networks: Why it feels like everything is going haywire

  • Facebook rebrands as FACEBOOK

Australian Expression of the month:

• “The Big Smoke” - Sydney

Books

• A Political Economy of Access. (2019) By David M. Levinson and David A. King (Book 4 in the Access Quartet)

• 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 Quartet)

• Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport (2016) by David Levinson. (Book 2 in the Access Quartet)

• 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 Quartet)

• 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)