Transportist: January 2024
Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow on Mastodon or RSS.
This month
TRB
Sydney Metro West
Posts
Research
Books of Note
Links
TRB
Like Neil Diamond, I am Coming to America, at least temporarily.
I will be at TRB, giving some presentations.
Emergency Responder Safety, Travel Demand, and Routing. TRBAM-24-02692. Convention Center, Hall A Monday, Jan 08, 2024 8:00AM - 9:45AM Poster-board Location Number: B523. This is lead-authored by Changle Song and also with Emily Moylan.
Access-Based Cost-Benefit Analysis of Sydney's South West Metro Link TRBAM-24-00606. Convention Center, Hall A. Monday, Jan 08, 2024 3:45PM - 5:30PM. Poster-board Location Number: A272. [I won’t actually be here most of the time, since I am supposed to be at the following simultaneously]. This is lead-authored by Isaac Mann.
Racializing Roads: Are Police Traffic Stops Racially Biased? TRBAM-24-01578 2198 Examining the Equity Impact of Transportation Policies and Practices Mon 8/1/2024 3:45 PM- 5:30 PM ET , Convention Center. This has like 7 co-authors.
Access-Based Hedonic Model of Land Value in Sydney TRBAM-24-00604 4054 Emerging Economic and Finance Approaches: Global Findings 151B, Convention Center. This is lead-authored by Isaac Mann.
I will also be giving a talk on the 30-Minute City at Civil Engineering George Mason University on Friday January 12. Contact me for details.
Sydney Metro West
'Shortsighted in the extreme': Clover Moore rails against NSW government's Metro West decision
Good news, the government of NSW admitted that it was going to proceed with the already under construction Sydney Metro West (as predicted here), and add a station or two (or more, but probably not). More good news, Rosehill Racecourse will be converted to housing (25,000 units they say) and Rosehill will get a station. Silverwater or Newington may get a station. I doubt Rozelle/Leichhardt/Lilyfield will get a station (though it should). Extension of Sydney Metro West eastward to Randwick or Zetland or the University of Sydney (hah!) will have to wait until another administration, which makes some sense given how overcommitted everything is on construction already. It would be nice if the government would commit to it coming in the future, but obviously they cannot really bind future administrations to their policy, and they want the political flexibility of playing off potential station locations against each other, to see who can bid more. (The currency of that bid to be determined, construction $, new housing units, riders, bribes1)
Prof David Levinson, a transport analyst at the University of Sydney’s civil engineering school, said adding stations in the 7km gap between Olympic Park and Parramatta made sense, but that adding too many stations risked diminishing the speed savings of the route.
Levinson noted that Metro West was initially heralded as a way to get from the city to Parramatta in 20 minutes, which is just five minutes shorter than the express service on the existing heavy rail network.
“If you add in a station now, it’s going to be 21 or 22 minutes, so it’s a tradeoff,” he said. “Adding a station is good for the people who live next to it, but bad for people already on the train. You’re adding lost time.”
Levinson said extending the line south of the CBD then eastwards in future would be logistically easier, while infill stations, especially on underground sections of the track, are “much trickier”.
Posts
Research
Wang, Y. and Levinson, D. (2023) Access-based land value appreciation for assessing project benefits. Journal of Transport and Land Use. 16(1), 469–496. [doi]
The traditional mobility-oriented travel-time saving benefit assessment method has been repeatedly questioned for numerous intrinsic flaws, motivating the search for alternative benefit assessment approaches. Although a wealth of literature confirms the capitalization effect of access benefits induced by transport improvements to land or real estate value, the access-based land value uplift method hasn’t yet been widely recognized and employed as an official tool assisting transport decision-making. The present paper collects 136 empirical studies and aims to disentangle the obstacles hindering the promotion of the access-based assessment method by systematically reviewing methodological design, the access metrics used, and the target real estate sub-markets or land use types upon which access benefits are quantified. First, it was found that almost half of the sampled studies just investigated the general effects of transport operation on real estate prices without incorporating sufficient temporal and locational considerations, thereby failing to isolate project-specific incremental impacts. Second, while the hedonic pricing model remains the most popular model, a trend towards embracing more advanced modelling techniques such as spatial lag, spatial error, and Difference-in-Differences (DID) models to control for bias caused by spatial dependence has been observed. Third, Euclidean distance and distance buffer rings are the most widely used operational measures of access. Primal access measures covering the number of opportunities available at a destination and travel impedance are recommended. Last, over 86% of sampled empirical studies target the residential real estate market. The lack of non-residential land uses in the literature presents a significant research gap that should be addressed.
Books of Note
News
Zero Interest Rate Phenomena
Hyperloop One is Gone [Not the end of Hyperloop, but the beginning of the end]
Bird is bankrupt [Not the end of shared electric scooters, but maybe the beginning of the end]
Cruise cuts 900 jobs. [Definitely not the end of AVs, but the end of TechBros having free reign over the safety and regulation culture of the CarGuys.]
Tesla
Tunnels
Pipedream promises underground delivery network. [Color me skeptical.]
Safety
Right to Repair
Land Use
Six years on Sydney’s high tech aerotropolis is just a ‘shed with a fancy pergola’ [Hopium is a strong drug. TBF, neither the Western Sydney Airport nor the Western Sydney Airport Metro are open yet. When after they open, if this still is true, is the real test.]