Transportist: March 2023

Li, Manman, Cui, M., and Levinson, D. (2023) Interaction between development intensity: An evaluation of alternative spatial weight matrices Urban Science 7(1), 22; [doi]

Abstract: This paper investigates the spatial dependency of job and worker densities for the Minneapolis–St. Paul (Twin Cities) metropolitan area using census block level data from 2002 to 2017. A spatial weight matrix is proposed, considering the statistical expression of data, referred to as the correlation matrix, which detects the variations of dependencies among spatial units in both direction and level. The superior performance of the correlation matrix is demonstrated through a series of spatial regression models to predict land use patterns, in comparison with the conventionally used adjacency matrix as well as the accessibility matrix.
Keywords: spatial weight matrix; land use intensity; panel data; spatial regression model

Ji, Ang, Ramezani, M. and Levinson, D. (2023) Joint modelling of longitudinal and lateral dynamics in lane-changing maneuvers, Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics, 11:1, 996-1025 [doi] [free 50 downloads]

This study models a lane-changing event as two behaviourally interconnected phases: ‘stay’ and ‘execution’. The model considers the ‘stay’ phase duration stochastically depending on external traffic conditions. The ‘execution’ phase is modelled as the longitudinal speed profile deployed to perform the lane change. The model comprises a Bayesian survival analysis to predict the probability of the stay duration before a new ‘execution’ phase while tackling the censoring issue of survival methods. Using naturalistic vehicular trajectory data, this paper quantifies what factors influence driver behaviour in lane-keeping and lane-changing execution. The parameter estimation results demonstrate that drivers' decisions on phase transitions are influenced by surrounding conditions, lane-changing purpose, directions, and departure lanes. The findings reveal that urgency (stemming from the purpose) and patience (satisfaction with the existing situation) are the main reasons for leaving the current lane. Adequate distances and relative speeds compared with surrounding vehicles induce or dissuade acceleration behaviour during the execution phase.

Ji, Ang, Ramezani, M. and Levinson, D. (2023) Pricing Lane Changes. Transportation Research part C. 149: 104062 [doi][free for 50 days]

Risky and aggressive lane changes on highways reduce capacity and increase the risk of collision. We propose a lane-changing pricing scheme as an effective tool to penalize those maneuvers to reduce congestion as a societal goal while aiming for safe driving conditions. In this paper, we first model driver behavior and their payoffs under a game theory framework and find optimal lane-changing strategies for individuals and their peers in multiple pairwise games. Payoffs are estimated for two primary evaluation criteria: efficiency and safety, which are quantified by incorporating driver tradeoffs. After that, the discretionary lane-changing (DLC) model is calibrated and validated by real-world vehicular trajectory data. To manipulate drivers’ DLC behaviors, two types of lane-changing tolls based on local-optimal and global-optimal rules are introduced to align individual preferences with social benefits. We find prices can close this gap and achieve ‘win-win’ results by reducing drivers’ aggressive lane changes in the congested traffic. Meanwhile, the tolls collected can be used to compensate drivers who get delayed when yielding, to encourage appropriate yielding behavior and a pseudo-revenue neutral tolling system.
Keywords: Lateral dynamics, game theory, road pricing, micro-toll

Reports

Levinson, David (2022) Governing for Access. report for Urban Development Institute of Australia - New South Wales.

The only reason to locate anywhere is to be near some people, places, and things (opportunities) and be far from others.
Access quantifies the ability to reach, or be reached by, people, places, and things. It explains much of the variation in real estate prices and development density. It does so in large part because real estate capitalises into land value the ease of travel to desired opportunities.
Physical infrastructure networks like roads and rails exist to connect within and between places faster than travel without them. Transport agencies often plan networks as if the land use is given, and regulators plan and zone development as if the network were unchangeable. Since the efficiency of a transport network depends on the land use pattern and the efficiency of the land use pattern depends on the network configuration, systems which coordinate these may be more efficient than those where transport and land use are planned independently. This is especially pertinent for long-term capital investments which are largely irreversible.
While compared to some peer cities, Sydney has done a good job coordinating transport services and land development, it can do much better. This would lead to shorter commutes lengths, greater public and active transport mode shares, higher employment and incomes, and greater productivity. Overall Sydney would be a more desirable and convenient city.
This is also important as better coordinating transport with land development while better balancing jobs and housing will thereby reduce motor vehicle travel. Reducing private vehicle travel will remain critical to addressing environmental problems such as CO2 emissions and air and water pollution, and increasing traveler safety.
Modern urban planning confronts the challenge of coordinating policies in transport investment, land use and development regulation, budgets and taxation, and capital spending so that they reinforce instead of undermine each other.
Several inter-related problems with transport - land use planning processes in New South Wales are apparent:
1. Mobility-centric transport planning and density-centric land use planning.
2. The uncoordinated and disjointed nature of decision making, wherein transport and land use decisions made by different organisations assume the other is unchanged.
3. Lack of systematic feedback in the infrastructure/land development cycle, so the gains in land value from new transport facilities don’t generate revenue could have helped fund the infrastructure in the first place.
4. The political cycle reversing long-term strategic planning decisions.
5. Lack of institutional knowledge caused by lack of long-term stability in senior staff and organisational structure.
6. Lack of domain expertise within operating agencies leading to: • Very high costs (and unexpectedly high costs) for infrastructure, reducing the capacity for investment. • Under-utilisation (over-forecast of demand) of many major new infrastructure projects.
7. Lack of transparency and authentic public participation in decision processes. This report contains several major parts.

Upcoming Conference Presentations

Capel-Timms, I., Levinson, D., Bonetti, S., and Manoli, G. (2023) Modelling the coevolution of London's population and railway system, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-12606, [doi] (Isabella Capel-Timms will be presenting)

Research by Others

Elias Willberg, Henrikki Tenkanen, Harvey J. Miller, Rafael H. M. Pereira, Tuuli Toivonen (2023) Measuring just accessibility within planetary boundaries
Alon Levy, Elif Ensari, Marco Chitti, Eric Goldwyn The Transit Costs Project
James Bushell What if Opal and Myki became one? It’d help more of us than you’d think

Meta-Research (Research about Research)

Florian Jehn Against the dominance of gap-spotting in research
Study: Over 50% of academics admit to pirating research papers (The other 50% don’t admit it).

Pedagogy

University students went to an in-person lecture this week. They actually liked it.

Professor David Levinson from the department of civil engineering at the University of Sydney said the recording of live lectures, which started well-before the pandemic, has made the learning experience worse. “[S]tudents now think they can skip class, and will watch the video later, but don’t actually do so,” he said.

Videos

B1M Sydney's $5BN Tunnel U-Turn
HBO’s Gritty Prestige TV Adaptation of Mario Kart (You may need a VPN to watch). [Relatedly AppleTV+ is making a movie about Tetris, it’s a Cold War thriller]
@RMTransit Why Subways are So Expensive (Discussing the Transit Costs Project)

Audios

The Mess of Family Travel - Talking Headways podcast episode with Jennifer Kent

News

Wales cancels new road projects. [A transport consultant is appropriately named “Sloman”, though nominative determinism is not real]
Cars have a death grip on American cities—but a new movement against parking spaces is starting to gain traction
The cities we create lead to isolation and loneliness
Tesla to Open Up EV Charging Networks
Steve Wozniak Says Elon Musk Deceived Buyers of FSD.
“Utter bollocks:” Energy analyst debunks Toyota’s “scarce lithium” hybrid myth
Peak Oil, Really?
Construction on four new metro lines could begin this year
North Arm Cove: The fight to revive Walter Burley Griffin’s lost city
Grid Smarter Cities’ Kerb-Dock bookable loading bays now live in London

Truth

Gasoline Car Review by Geoff Greer
Vice Signalling (with applications to Germany, but valid anywhere Democracy is sold.) by Alon Levy

Truthiness

Mutiny on the Sydney commute: ‘pirate bus’ hits the road after privatisation leads to axed routes. [This headline is wrong. Axed routes were axed by the government before the buses were contracted out to private operators. The services provided are determined by the Government. The Pirate Bus is private (run as a GoFundMe, which surely isn’t sustainable, hence fares on normal services), so there is that. So why is private “bad” in this context?]

Follow-Up

KH writes on Livability vs Sustainability:

One is an issue of vertical (temporal) negative spillover minimization and the other is an issue of horizontal (spatial) negative spillover minimization. Both are important in their own right but neither address the issues of positive spillovers. They in effect assume either no positive spillovers or none that compensate or off-set the negative spillovers. This assumption may be correct but are not addressed by the sustainability or livability perspectives. This is an important gap in our overall analyses and deserves to be explicitly addressed.

[Yes, that is correct. But the reason they are positive externalities (as opposed to benefits) is that they cannot be captured. So the welfare analysis (which includes the +/- externalities) will differ from the political choice analysis, where the agents are selfish. Here the local neighbourhood is selfish to preserve its quality of life at the expense of other places, but also future people, whose benefits are diffuse in the first case, and not captured by any of today’s political actors in the second case.]

On economic evaluation, I responded to a conversation with CH about whether we should rely on BCA for decision-making.

My economic sense is we should use objective project economics to decide things.
My moral sense is you should do that, and if something fails that test but helps truly disadvantaged people, you should do that, and we can establish some kind of implicit “Value of Equity” or “Equity Budget”. It is the politician’s job to determine which trade-offs against economic rationality are worthwhile.
My political sense is you should that, but if it fails but is necessary to hold a coalition together for some other greater good, you should do that, and we can establish an implicit “Value of Political Harmony”. That is the politician’s job, not mine though.
But of course I dislike it if it simply to get re-elected, which is how it often falls out.