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Transportist Newsletter: April 2019

David Levinson
Mar 27, 2019

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Transportist Newsletter: April 2019
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Welcome to the April 2019 issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow along at the transportist.org or on Twitter.

March was notable for the launch of A Political Economy of Access

Book: A Political Economy of Access

Now available: A Political Economy of Access: Infrastructure, Networks, Cities, and Institutions by David M. Levinson and David A. King, in paper and PDF.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Why should you read another book about transport and land use? This book differs in that we won’t focus on empirical arguments – we present political arguments. We argue the political aspects of transport policy shouldn’t be assumed away or treated as a nuisance. Political choices are the core reasons our cities look and function the way they do. There is no original sin that we can undo that will lead to utopian visions of urban life.

The book begins by introducing and expanding on the idea of Accessibility. Then we proceed through several major parts: Infrastructure Preservation, Network Expansion, Cities, and Institutions. Infrastructure preservation concerns the relatively short-run issues of how to maintain and operate the existing surface transport system (roads and transit). Network expansion in contrast is a long-run problem, how to enlarge the network, or rather, why enlarging the network is now so difficult. Cities examines how we organize, regulate, and expand our cities to address the failures of transport policy, and falls into the time-frame of the very long-run, as property rights and land uses are often stickier than the concrete of the network is durable. In the part on Institutions we consider things that might at first blush appear to be short-run and malleable, are in fact very long-run. Institutions seem to outlast the infrastructure they manage.

Many of the transport and land use problems we want to solve already have technical solutions. What these problems don’t have, and what we hope to contribute, are political solutions. We expect the audience for this book to be practitioners, planners, engineers, advocates, urbanists, students of transport, and fellow academics.

PURCHASE

  • Very High Quality Color Hardback on Blurb … $98.88

  • Very High Quality Color Trade Paperback on Amazon … $78.88

  • High Quality Color Trade Paperback on Blurb … $38.88

  • PDF, Color (with extensive hyperlinks) on Gumroad … $8.88

Transport Findings

The new open access journal Transport Findings continues to add articles. Follow the journal on Twitter. Visit the journal. Read. Submit. Cite. This month's articles include:

  • Stationless in Sydney: The Rise and Decline of Bikesharing in Australia

  • ​Inferred Switching Behavior in Response to Re-entry of Uber and Lyft: A Revealed Study in Austin, TX

  • Modeling reliability benefits

Posts at the Blog

  • Traveling backwards into the future

  • Priority for trams will likely make crossing Northbourne even worse | Canberra Times

  • Livability – a definition

  • As Parking Needs Shrink, How Will That Impact The Future Of Housing Design?

  • Pedestrian safety around light rail a balance: transport experts | Canberra Times

  • GTFS but for …

  • World Symposium on Transport and Land Use Research 2020

  • SMART Seminar Series: Evolving and Designing the 30-minute City

  • 8th International Symposium on Transport Network Reliability (INSTR)

  • Open Access in Transport

My Posts at WalkSydney

  • We Want Wombats

News

Elections

  • 2019 NSW Election – The Transport Promises List - Kypros1992

  • 2019 NSW Election: A transport perspective - Bambul Shakibaei

And the winner of the NSW State Parliamentary Elections is ... the COALition (the Liberals and Nationals)

Transit and Microtransit

  • 'Quickest, cheapest' way to boost Sydney's train services While tens of billions are ploughed into new metro rail lines, London's Tube is a lesson on how to significantly increase train services in Sydney. [Signals] smh.com.au

  • Which lines are priorities for Sydney Metro conversion? Hint: it's not Bankstown Every major transport study since the 1970s has identified Sydney's western rail corridor as the priority for an upgrade. The latest patronage figures confirm that's where the need is greatest. Matthew Housell at theconversation.com

  • Construction Costs: Metro Accessibility It is much harder to find estimates of construction costs for elevator access to metro stations than to find estimates for the costs of new tunnels. pedestrianobservations.com

  • Remix picks up $15 million to help cities make better decisions around transit techcrunch.com

  • Students don't feel safe on public transport but many have no choice but to use it theconversation.com

  • Sydney Metro West geotech digging reveals potential stations – including a new “super Central” thestrategicweek.com

Automated, Autonomous, Driverless, and Self-Driving Vehicles, and Semi-Autonomous Systems

  • Bikes put spanner in works of Dutch driverless car schemes - share.postbeyond.com

  • Tesla is dealing with the failure to achieve full self-driving by shifting goalposts - Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica

  • Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" Pricing Controversy Misses The Point thedrive.com

  • Waymo Starts Selling Sensors to Lower Cost of Self-Driving Cars bloomberg.com

  • Sweden to introduce self-driving buses into public transport next year dailysweden.com

Human-Driven Vehicles, Signs, Signals, Sensors, and Markings, and Roads

  • The radical plan to cut congestion on Sydney's roads smh.com.au

  • Genoa Bridge Collapse Throws Harsh Light on Benettons’ Highway Billions [Autostrade] nytimes.com

  • All New Cars To Have Speed Limiters Fitted, Rules European Parliament forbes.com

Shared Vehicles/Ride-sharing/Ride-hailing/Taxis/Car Sharing

  • Uber to sign $3.1bn deal for Careem as early as Monday US company’s acquisition of Dubai-based rival would be rare tech success for Middle East. - ft.com

  • Can a Ridehailing App Be Ethical? - motherboard.vice.com

  • How Bird plans to blanket the world with electric scooters without going bankrupt -theverge.com

  • The Servant Economy Ten years after Uber inaugurated a new era for Silicon Valley, we checked back in on 105 on-demand businesses. - theatlantic.com

  • Taxify rebrands as Bolt to expand its transport options beyond private cars - techcrunch.com

  • Singapore's Grab Raises $1.5 Billion From SoftBank Fund - bloomberg.com

  • Lyft S-1: 2018 revenue of $2.2B up 100% YoY, gross bookings of $8.1B from 1B+ rides, loss of $911M - CNBC

  • Zūm, a ridesharing service for kids, raises $40 million -techcrunch.com

Micromobility: Human-Powered Vehicles/Bikes/Pedestrians/Scooters/eBikes/Last-Mile/First-Mile/Last-Meter/First-Meter/etc.

  • The Five Categories of Micromobility - micromobility.io [Horace Dediu]

  • [Melbourne] Car-lovers beware: Lord mayor flags wider footpaths, more bike lanes - theage.com.au

  • [Brisbane] City’s Lime scooter fad sours theaustralian.com.au

  • Bike-sharing pioneer Mobike is retreating to China techcrunch.com

Electrification

  • German carmaking giants agree on strategy - electrive.com

  • A Behind the Scenes Take on Lithium-ion Battery Prices - BNEF

Land Use

  • Milton Keynes: curio from the past or model for the future? Why the radical thinking of the new town’s planners remains relevant today ft.com

Retail, Wholesale, Logistics, Supply Chain, Freight

  • Uber Freight is expanding into Europe - techcrunch.com

  • Amazon’s latest program to curb emissions? One delivery day per house, per week Amazon has been testing the program with a few customers, but now it becomes official. arstechnica.com

Intercity Trains

  • Why is east coast High Speed Rail still being taken seriously - Alan Davies at Crikey

Maps

  • In honor of Metro’s birthday, watch the system’s evolution since 1976 -- Greater Greater Washington

Science Fiction

  • The Worst of All Possible Universes and the Best of All Possible Earths: Three Body and Chinese - Cixin Liu

Fantasy

  • 'It’s a Car in a Very Small Tunnel': Actual Transportation Professionals Unimpressed With Musk's... jalopnik.com

Professoring

  • Scientists rise up against statistical significance - nature.com

  • Norway becomes latest country to ditch Elsevier - timeshighereducation.com

  • How publishers keep fooling academics bjoern.brembs.net

  • UC terminates subscriptions with world’s largest scientific publisher in push for open access universityofcalifornia.edu

Research

Papers by Us

  • Yokoo, Toshi, and Levinson, D. (2019) Measures of Speeding from a GPS-based Travel Behavior Survey. Traffic Injury Prevention. [doi]

  • Carrion, Carlos and David Levinson (2019) Route choice dynamics after a link restoration. Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics [doi]

Books by Others

  • Lecture and Book Launch: Planning Australia's Healthy Built Environments by Jennifer Kent and Susan Thompson

Books

  • Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus (2018) by David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.

  • Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. (2018) By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen.

  • Spontaneous Access: Reflexions on Designing Cities and Transport (2016) by David Levinson.

  • The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape. (2017) By David M. Levinson and Kevin J. Krizek.

  • The Transportation Experience: Second Edition Garrison, William and Levinson, David (2014)

Transportist Newsletter by David Levinson University of Sydney - School of Civil Engineering Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia
Sent to beamer-f611944edead159ae67925dc0942646b99f81821@tinyletter.com — Unsubscribe Delivered by


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On Bridge Collapses (2024)
In 2007, I inadvertently wound up researching bridge collapses after the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge Collapse in my then home town of Minneapolis…
Mar 27, 2024 • 
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Fantasy Modeling
Transport planning plays an outsized role in shaping the future of our metropolises.
Sep 6, 2023 • 
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A Review of Sydney Metro: Sydenham to Chatswood
A brief foray into Sydney's new dark underbelly
Aug 19, 2024 • 
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