Transportist: July 2024

Happy Birthday America

Politics

Videos

WSTLUR Keynote:

[I did this with pneumonia, jet lag, and mountain sickness!]

Congratulations also to Rafael Pereira (along with (Daniel Herszenhut, Marcus Saraiva and Steven Farber) for winning the 2024 David Levinson prize for Best paper for "Ride-hailing and transit accessibility considering the trade-off between time and money". Previous winners here.

North Sydney Council: Integrated Transport Online Forum

Events

Follow-Ups

• SG writes: “Here is a worse proposal in Montreal, Canada – on-street, surface running LRT: over $450 million per kilometre. The corridors seems reasonable, the technology might be a good choice but the cost! The cost!!”

• Expansive new study finds racial bias in Chicago traffic stops (NBC Chicago)

• Black Drivers in Chicago More Likely to be Stopped by Police (Block Club Chicago)

• Black Chicago drivers more likely to be stopped by police than to get traffic camera tickets, study finds (Chicago Tribune)

• The Great Synchronization and the Great Asynchronization has been republished by The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (NZ) for their June issue. (You can find it on p20 – the outside cover of the June issue, which you can access through www.cilt.co.nz, and pressing the “read our magazine” button.)

Research

The Conversation

• Toll roads charge too much yet we don’t have enough of them. To fix both things, NSW should buy their private owners

Posts

Sorry, I meant to write something like On Bogota, but then I got Mountain Sickness [Bogota is 2640 m above sea level] and Jet Lag and what turned out to be Pneumonia [since treated with antibiotics back in Australia] and didn’t see much of Bogota, and don’t think it would be terribly fair to review the block around my hotel (which was fine), the Farmatodo (which is a perfectly typical first world drug store, with far fewer shoplifting events than San Francisco), the airport (which is fine), and the route between the hotel and the University (which is also fine). My general (not enthusiastic) feeling is that all cities in the world are basically comprised of the same elements these days, just in different amounts, and the mix is drawn from different parts of the distribution. There has been an urban convergence in modern cultures.

I did ride on the TransMilenio, which is a very high intensity BRT. It seems a good service for a developing country. Obviously rich countries will typically demand rail for similarly intensely used corridors.

I will also note I heard a surprisingly large amount of Australian folk music in Colombia.¹

Neighbourhood around the hotel, featuring a Farmatodo.

View of Bogota from the Andes

View of TransMilenio BRT Route and Highways (and some Neighbourhoods) from the Andes

TransMilenio BRT Station

View of Mountain with Cable Cars

By Others

• A participatory mapping approach to capturing perceived walkability

• Des voitures plus lourdes, plus hautes et plus puissantes pour une sécurité routière à deux vitesses ?

• Opinion: America’s Traffic Death Epidemic is a Public Health Emergency. The Surgeon General Should Treat It Like One. 

News

• Pricing

  • Congestion Pricing in NYC - Indefinitely Halted

• HSR

  • ‘We’re trying not to reinvent the wheel’: meet the man who seriously believes in high-speed rail for Australia

• Public Transport

  • ALTRAC Parramatta Road to Green Square Light Rail proposal [PDF document] [video]

  • Committee for Sydney releases report: Plan B: Better Buses for Sydney

  • Trolley Problem Variations for Dads

• Space

  • One Satellite Crash Could Upend Modern Life [Kessler Syndrome - Wikipedia]

• Safety

  • Traffic engineers build roads that invite crashes because they rely on outdated research and faulty data

• Tubes

  • The Return of Pneumatic Tubes

• Retail

  • How many High Streets are there in London? [57]

1. i.e. I heard AC/DC on two different occasions.