If your job is what you do, my primary job is telling prospective graduate students that I’m not taking any new students at this time.
Posts
Who Pays for a Toll Cap?
Labor and the Coalition both promise Victorians a Sydney-style toll rebate.
On Ironside there is always a double door
There’s crime to be solved in 1960s San Francisco, and Karl Malden and Michael Douglas are not yet ready.
Papers
Levinson, D., Sarkar, S., Tajik, N. and Ermagun, A. (2026) Access-based network growth: preferential attachment with capacity, cost, and connectivity. Applied Network Science, October 23, 2026. [doi]
Levinson, D. M. (2026) Estimating Pedestrian Flows and Signal Delay from Sydney Traffic-Signal Event Histories. Findings, October 20, 2026. [doi]
Askari, S., Tilahun, N. and Levinson, D. (2026) Determinants of automated speed camera location choice. Journal of Transport Geography, 137, 104869. [doi]
Ji, A., Ma, Z., Yang, H., Khattak, A. J. and Levinson, D. (2026) Learning from common knowledge: A multi-agent cooperative ramp merging framework for decentralized autonomous vehicles. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 105275. [doi]
Pointers
Your regular reminder
Rail
People movers
Roads and streets
Oxford Street London pedestrianised! [via Liam K McGrath]
AVs
Research
The planner/engineer distinction, drawing on Garrison’s The Transportation Experience [via Greg Shill]
Amusements
Sydney’s moth saga continues as thousands invade homes and wash up on beaches [It’s hard to believe these guys are endangered, given how many have invaded our house.]
Great job everybody… LimeBikes blocking a raised pedestrian crossing at the University of Sydney.
Tesla unveils its new Roadster sports car, which can thrust itself into the air [Musk bad etc, but this sick (as the kids say). I hope never to see this on public roads.]
Seattle Supertrain [Clip from Singles, 1992]
Color coded public transit in the US [via @kyp92]
Pigeon postal communication routes in the defense system of Moscow in 1941 [via Simon Kuestenmacher]
Authors
Saul Goodman Voice: Did you write a copyrighted book? Do you think it was taken to train AI, and you weren’t compensated? Do you like money? ClaimsHero is evaluating individual copyright claims, and it’s free to check if you qualify. [Referral link]. (Downside, forms to fill, emails to process — dml).
Press
Sydney’s New $4 Billion Airport Opens With Barely Any Flights. Bloomberg, 19 October.
Compounding the government-owned airport’s challenges, a planned rail link won’t open until 2027 at the earliest, while a shuttle bus to the center of Sydney costs A$55 and takes about one hour. That means Sydney Kingsford Smith, 20 minutes by taxi or train from the central business district and Australia’s primary gateway, remains a more practical option for most people. “The main airport is much more convenient to almost all travelers,” said David Levinson, a professor of transport at the University of Sydney. Western Sydney International’s passenger forecasts, look “a bit optimistic,” he said.
80 years in the making: How Sydney’s new international airport finally took off. The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 October.
Sydney University transport professor David Levinson believes it will be a “very long time” before the airport becomes profitable or competitive with Kingsford Smith despite the federal government subsidising airlines to fly to the new hub. “They’re going to be eating losses for decades,” he says.
He argues Sydney risks repeating the mistakes of Montreal, which “built an airport in the middle of nowhere and nobody used it”. Located more than 50 kilometres from the centre of the Canadian city, Mirabel airport’s passenger terminal was demolished a decade ago despite being designed to replace Montreal’s main airport at Dorval.
ABC Melbourne, Breakfast with Bob Murphy and Richelle Hunt, 19 October. On Sydney’s toll cap and the proposals for Victoria.
Designing for quiet roads. Republished by London Reconnections, October.
