Transportist: May 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
Posts: 2 articles and a link to Findings Newsletter
Research: 4 papers
Books you should read
News and Links: Many links, sorted by topic.
Posts
Thoughts on Traffic Safety
The Sydney Morning Herald has run an article with the clickbaity title: Why high school kids need help crossing the road. They quoted me, current WalkSydney President Marc Lane, who has also written more about this, as well as others. This title is unfortunate (though I don’t blame the author). Safety matters, but it does not require infantilising all of…
Improving Both Transport Efficiency and Equity in Sydney with One Neat Trick
One of the things that attracted me to Sydney is that it is arguably the “most tolled city in the world”. I did my dissertation on road pricing, and so from a research perspective this presents a huge opportunity. Road pricing has been the great white whale
The Findings Newsletter …
Research
The Angiogenic Growth of Cities
Recently published: Capel-Timms, Isabella, Levinson, David, Bonetti, Sara, Lahoorpoor, Bahman, and Manoli, Gabriele (2024). The Angiogenic Growth of Cities. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. [doi] Describing the space–time evolution of urban population is a fundamental challenge in the science of cities, yet a complete theoretical treatment of the u…
Some media coverage
The Guardian: Sydney’s urban sprawl grew along rail lines similar to way cancer spreads, researchers say
The more train lines you have, the more territory that can be covered,” David Levinson, a co-author of the study and a professor of civil engineering at the University of Sydney, said.
“That territory has developed more and more intensely … similar to the process by which malignant tumours form.”
Levinson said the study illustrated an important point – that Sydney’s infrastructure could be better used.
“Sydney has a disproportionate number of jobs in the eastern side of the city, and a disproportionate number of residents in the western part of the city,” he said.
This leaves transport underutilised compared to other cities around the world, where housing and jobs are more evenly spread out.
UK Telegraph: London’s transport system helped capital grow like a ‘tumour’ [paywall]
A multi-modal analysis of the effect of transport on population and productivity in China
Recently published: Wu, Bingyu, and Levinson, D. (2024) A multi-modal analysis of the effect of transport on population and productivity in China. Journal of Transport Geography Volume 116, April 2024, 103856. [doi] This paper examines the impact of three modes of transport infrastructure, namely high-speed rail, highway, and aviation on population densit…
Access, the built environment, and behavior
Recently published: Levinson, D. and Wu, Hao (2024) 14. Access, the built environment, and behavior in Handbook of Travel Behaviour, edited by Dimitris Potoglou, Justin Spinney. Edward Elgar publishers. [doi] [OA preprint] Abstract Access is an essential component of the built environment that measures the ease of reaching desired destinations; the level o…
The Cost of Shopping: Measuring Virtual and Physical Access for Obtaining Goods
Recently published: Chen, Jing, Cui, Mengying, and Levinson, D. (2024) The Cost of Shopping: Measuring Virtual and Physical Access for Obtaining Goods. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment. No. 1. 129-145 [doi] Abstract The rise of e-commerce, bolstered by advances in information and communication technology (ICT), has made it possible for …
Books
Killed by a Traffic Engineer by Wes Marshall … The title is a provocative thesis. I haven’t read the final version, only bits and pieces, but it is self-recommending. Bad design kills.
News and Links
Public Transport
Road Guy Rob talks about BRT in Minneapolis - St. Paul, featuring some former students.
Canberra Liberals' proposed public transport plan would see a busway replace light rail with locally built electric buses [As a point of comparison, the current LRT in Canberra has 8,673 passengers per day, as per Wikipedia on 12 km, in contrast Sydney’s LRT has 89,095 as per Wikipedia on 24.7 km. I will leave it to your judgment as to what’s the best investment in Canberra.]
How TfLs simple pop-up message led to a significant drop in paper ticket sales (UI/UX for the win).
Autonomy … At least the people who say AVs don’t exist now don’t say that, they just say they are unsafe. We are past “Denial” to “Bargaining” (i.e. regulation). Acceptance will come.
Sharing
Safety
Kevin Krizek has a piece in the Boulder Weekly
Routing
Environment and Energy
Fantasy Land Use Planning
Public Safety, Streets, and Land Use