Transportist: December 2022
End of Year Double Issue
Jobs
Imperial College London is currently advertising two lectureship positions in Transport in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. The deadline for applications is the 13th of December. Full information about the lectureships is available here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/description/ENG02356/lecturer-transport-2-posts
TransportCamp
TransportCamp Sydney will be held this Friday December 2. Hope to see you here.
Benefits should outweigh costs
I am going to take the controversial position that we should do things that have more advantages than disadvantages.
I was at a conference recently where a representative of a major Commonwealth government unit tasked with assessing the validity of benefit/cost assessments for projects said they green-lit a major road project in Australia’s second largest city, though it had a benefit/cost ratio of 0.7, because … honestly I am not sure why, something maybe about benefits that weren’t included the benefit/cost analysis?
So one must call BS on this. If there are other benefits, monetise them. Implicitly the other benefits were worth more than 30% of the cost of the project if overall full benefits exceeded full costs. But if they are so squirrelly that one cannot monetise them, why? If practice does not incorporate full benefits (and full costs), again, why?
I am as skeptical of benefit and cost practice as anyone, but I still think we should do things (and only do things) where the benefits are greater than the costs. We should of course debate what are the benefits, the categories of the benefits, their value if realised, and the likelihood of them being realised. Similarly with costs. But if you insist something is a benefit, or cost, demonstrate it. Otherwise, we can just follow politician’s whims, and that is what B/C analysis often devolves into, contorting “facts” into a nice rhetorical package to satisfy a politician looking for votes or dollars which has been green-eyeshade-washed.
The Trolley Solution
Logically, cities should be able to pedestrianise streets without the need for installation of new light rail facilities. But experience shows with examples like George Street in Sydney, (or Church Street in Parramatta) without the LRT, very little pedestrianisation had occurred in the nearly 60 years since trams were removed. So while logically, and technically, trams or light rail are not required to pedestrianise a street, politically it may be required. This makes me sad, and it raises the costs of street pedestrianisation enormously. [The extent to which this is a Sydney only phenomenon is open, and perhaps New York and European cities don’t have this linkage. Melbourne CBD has a bunch of pedestrianised tram routes. Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis substitutes buses for streetcars. Though lots of LRT/streetcar is built without pedestrianisation as well, so this rule is of the “more necessary than sufficient” variety (though not strictly either).]
The Decentralization Turn
There is no a priori law about whether from a given point in time it is better to centralize or decentralize. It depends on the technology, on context, and on history. So should everyone ride a horse or a streetcar? In the city there are economies of mass transit, in the country there are not. Should flights be direct or go through a hub? It depends on demand and willingness to tolerate schedule delay vs travel time. In computers should we have personal computers or mainframes? It depends on the problem. Should our PCs connect directly or via servers?
Which brings us to the present moment, when we ask, should our social networks be centrally controlled by man-child billionaires, or should they be smaller, decentralized, and federated so no one person is in control, even at the cost of slower virality ? I think we know the answer to that.
The split lays bare the divide between the “old school” open access creators of the Internet and Web and Wikipedia, who envisioned a commons of information, and the Silicon Valley tech-bro culture who are trying to exploit that commons by selling their users to advertisers. We in the transport community have seen this class before, it’s the same folks pitching tenuous technological solutions to transport problems: Uber, Hyperloop, the Boring Company, and Scooter Sharing are all products of this culture. One can see who has left Twitter, and who remains behind as signifiers of who identifies where.
The rise of Mastodon, and ActivityPub more broadly is a turn away from the disastrous run of social media over the past decade. It’s not as simple, it suffers growing pains, but liberty is not free.
Mastodon
I am now at Mastodon @transportist@mastodon.social . Given the direction things are going with the bird site, you may want to Join Mastodon: besides the behemoth mastodon.social, new instances of interest include: urbanists.social, datasci.social, and transportation.social.
Personality
I ran the same poll on Twitter and Mastodon.
Some/Many people feel they are the "Chosen One", destined for great things like bringing balance to the force or being President of the United States. Did you generally feel this way before the age of 21. Do you generally feel this way now?
Data Column 1 is Twitter/ Column 2 is Mastodon
Then 15.4% / 11%
Now 1.5% / 2%
Both then and now. 12.3% / 7%
Neither then nor now. 70.8% / 80%
I don’t know the snark level in the responses. I also don’t know the number of people who are actually destined for great things, and who actually are the “chosen” one. I wouldn’t want to dismiss this and just assume everyone who believes they are the chosen one are simply narcissists (although of course, many may be). My use of “One” in the survey implies there can only be “one” at a time, but it could be defined more broadly, as “one” in a particular domain, like Michael Jordan in Basketball in the 1990s. A good fraction of humanity believes in prophets who by definition are believed to be “chosen” ones. I doubt if the differences between Mastodon and Twitter are significant, though I perceive the snark level on Mastodon to be a bit lower.
Andor
If you haven’t, y’all should watch season one of Andor on Disney+. It’s not only the best of the Star Wars TV series, it is one of the best TV series ever made, and aside from some chrome, you wouldn’t even know this was a Star Wars story. I won’t give spoilers.
Research
Wang, Yadi and Levinson, David (2022) Forecast Accuracy of Recent Australian Passenger Rail Projects. Presented at Australasian Transport Research Forum.
After decades of reliance on the bus and heavy rail as the primary transit mode connecting the inner and outer city, new fixed-guideway facilities have gradually revitalised in Australian public transport sector in the last two decades However, whether the disproportionate invest- ment in fixed-guideway, particularly light rail, over Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is economically justifiable has been increasingly questioned.
This research collected 6 Australian passenger rail projects delivered before 2021 (con- sisting of 8 passenger rail segments in Sydney, Gold Coast, Newcastle, and Canberra), and attempts to disentangle whether the alternative reckoned to be worthwhile outperformed other candidates in ex ante stage and materializes its potential value as envisioned.
We find that BRT beat rail option in ex ante BCA analysis of G:Link in Gold Coast, Captial Metro in Canberra, and Metro Northwest in Sydney, although the BRT was ultimately rejected. The Sydney Dulwich Hill Line hit its opening-year ridership target, whereas the remaining five projects failed to achieve the target patronage in the corresponding year. In addition, the demand on all the rail lines aside from the Sydney CBD and South East line dropped since 2020, demonstrating the heavy blow of COVID-19 pandemic and government travel restrictions on public transport services. Last, both overestimating and underestimating of actual station-to- station in-vehicle travel times are observed.
Posts
Advancing Arncliffe [WalkSydney]
#NearerInTime - a fun post (I hope) that will help orient your time perception.
Going backward to go forward [now Open Access]
In defense of induced demand [now Open Access]
Weekly Links
Stringlines: Their history and how to make them
Danny Lim, a well-known 78-year old local street personality in Sydney who would walk around wearing philosophical and sandwich boards, was injured by the New South Wales police at the Queen Victoria Building who were called by the mall cops, because? … [No good reason, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”]
‘He was fast … he ran you right over’: what it’s like to get hit by an SUV [about a case in Minneapolis]
TRB Sessions
Airlines, Virus, and Global Warfare permitting, I and my crew will be at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington DC in January 2023.
Mon 1/9/2023
8:00 AM- 9:45 AM ET
TRBAM-23-00604 - A Bifurcation of The Peak: New Patterns of Traffic Peaking During the Covid-19 Era
Research in Statewide and National Transportation Data and Information Systems
Hall A, Convention Center
8:00 AM- 9:45 AM ET
TRBAM-23-02512 - Intersection Design, Pedestrians, and Safety
Roundabouts, Intersections, and Diverging Diamond Interchanges
Hall A, Convention Center
Mon 1/9/2023
10:15 AM- 12:00 PM ET
TRBAM-23-00591. - An Empirical Model of Land use and Railway Co-development in Sydney
Economic Development and Land Use Committee
Archives (M4), Marriott Marquis
10:15 AM- 12:00 PM ET
TRBAM-23-00780 - Route Choice Set Generation on High Resolution Networks
Travel Forecasting Methodological Advances and Insights
Hall A, Convention Center
1:30 PM- 3:15 PM ET
TRBAM-23-04253 - Optimizing Random Breath Test Scheduling in Networks
Impairment in Transportation Poster Session
Hall A, Convention Center
1:30 PM- 5:30 PM ET
TRBAM-23-00778 - Streetcars Across America: An Analysis of the Growth of Electric Urban Railways in the United States from Directory Data
Light Rail Transit Committee
Mint (M4), Marriott Marquis
Tue 1/10/2023
8:00 AM- 9:45 AM ET
TRBAM-23-00598 - An Agent-based Simulation Model for the Growth of Sydney Trains
Innovative Methodologies for Transit Planning and Analysis
Hall A, Convention Center
8:00 AM- 9:45 AM ET
TRBAM-23-04761 Generating Historic GTFS files for Sydney to Measure Access
Innovative Methodologies for Transit Planning and Analysis
Hall A, Convention Center
1:30 PM- 3:15 PM ET
TRBAM-23-02662 - A Rendezvous Strategy for Emergency Healthcare Logistics
Freight Planning and Health Care Logistics During COVID-19 Pandemic
144C, Convention Center
1:30 PM- 3:15 PM ET
TRBAM-23-01068 - The Overlooked Transport Project Planning Process - What Happens before Selecting the Locally Preferred Alternative?
Public Transportation Planning Methods and Considerations
147B, Convention Center
Start your own Substack
If you want to start your own, and I encourage you to, see this link.