Transportist: December 2023

Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow along on Substack at our new domain: transportist.net or on Mastodon or RSS.

This month

• Posts

• Research

• Education

• Videos

• Links

Posts

Research

• Wu, Hao, Lee, B. and Levinson, D. (2023) The Node-Place Model, Accessibility, and Station Level Transit Ridership. Journal of Transport Geography. Volume 113, December 2023, 103739 [doi]

This paper uses Sydney rail data to examine the relationship between station level ridership and local and regional accessibility. We use net transit accessibility, which is the additional number of opportunities reachable by transit over walking to represent the regional connectivity value provided by transit. We map accessibility at transit stations, and use the number of opportunities within walking distance as an indicator of local access. We find elements of place (or local) access, including access to jobs and to residents within walking distance (local access), and nodal (or regional) access, including transit access to distant jobs and residential locations are both significant indicators of station level ridership. In particular, the number of jobs within walking distance of a transit station is the best single predictor of transit ridership. This paper highlights the importance of high density around station areas for transit ridership.

• Lahoorpoor, B., Sarkar, S. and Levinson, D. (2023) Evaluating the Vulnerability of the Sydney Train Network by Comparing Access-Based and Network Centrality Metrics. Findings, November [doi].

Operational incidents are a significant cause of unreliability on rail transit networks. These incidents cause major delays in services, impact passenger travel time, and have knock-on effects that interrupt other public transport services. Consequently, the vulnerability of the rail transit network is a crucial concern for managers and operators. This paper employs network vulnerability analysis to characterize individual critical stations in a railway network. The concepts of graph theory and person-weighted access are implemented to identify the critical nodes in the Sydney train and metro network, and the results are compared. In the first method, weighted and unweighted centrality measures are computed to find the most critical station. In particular, eigenvector centrality is used to identify the critical nodes by scoring all nodes in the network using the first eigenvector of the graph adjacency matrix. In the second approach, stations are ranked by the reduction of access before and after an incident. Finding of this study may have implications not only for the train operators and managers but also for the transit network planners to enhance the resilience of the public transport network.

Education

• Karl Smith shares some links about the evolution of engineering education:

  • "Five Major Shifts in 100 Years of Engineering Education" for the Proceedings of the IEEE Centennial Issue.

  • The Meaning of Engineering Education. Michael Kyte Distinguished Lecture, University of Idaho, October 5, 2023. Link to slides

  • Learning in the time of coronavirus. ASEE Webinar, March 30, 2021. Smith, K.A. & Chavela, R. Link to recording. Link to slides.

Videos

Strategic Modelling: Helpful or Harmful, including my presentation to the City of Sydney.

Links

• The History of Graph Paper

• AVs/Cruise:

  • How a robotaxi crash got Cruise’s self-driving cars pulled from Californian roads.

  • NY Times on GM’s Investment in Cruise

  • Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt Resigns [after they were suspended from driving in California due to an incident where a Cruise vehicle dragged a pedestrian (and the company sort of tried to cover it up). Edges cases are hard, not lying is easy.]

• Crime

  • One Regulation Could Have Stopped a Nationwide Car Theft Wave. Why Don't We Have It?

  • Micromobility used in Hitman’s Getaway

• Rail

  • On the UKs now shorter High-Speed 2 project. [It is not going well, it seems]

• Safety

  • Urban Planning has long ignored women’s experiences: Here are 5 ways we can make our cities safer by Nicole Kalms et al.

• Roads

  • Westconnex is mostly finally open. [Sydney’s great underground motorway. The tolls are too high, and the promised improvements to arterials didn’t happen, of course.]

• Aviation

  • Qantas and Virgin Australia are hoarding slots

• Electrification

  • Why Norway — the poster child for electric cars — is having second thoughts [A bit misleading to say “ second thoughts. “ They are scaling back subsidies, as they should, with near 100% market share for new vehicles.]

  • Tesla implements congestion pricing at superchargers [for people trying to charge above 80% (which is slower and degrades battery life, apparently)].

• Telecom

  • Optus CEO leaves after another nationwide outage. [Another not well run network utility.]

• Sport

  • Australia beat India in Cricket World Cup [This is not some apolitical sporting event in India, played Modi Stadium (yes that Modi).]

• Space

  • SpaceX loses another rocket. [Declared a “success”]

  • Israel shoots down a Ballistic Missile in Space. [From Reagan’s Star Wars to Reality in 40 years.]

  • Frank Borman died

• Health

  • Life expectancy for men in U.S. falls to 73 years

  • Diwali detonations pollute Delhi [Maybe don’t set off fireworks in cities of 30 million people, people.]

• Privacy

  • US Court rules automakers can record and intercept owner text messages

TV Reviews

• Succession is The Godfather where all the kids are Fredo.