Transportist: October 2022
Transportist: October 2022
Aussie Aussie Aussie ... Oi Oi Oi
Citizenship
My family’s long journey to dual Australian citizenship is completed, and passport applications are in the mail. Cheers to those who helped. Jeers to those who didn’t, including the needlessly hostile immigration system.
At the citizenship induction ceremony (which is merely a 30-second oath (importantly to Australia, not to the monarch) stretched to 1 hour of ceremony and 1 hour of waiting at the local Council Hall), the Australian Electoral Commission registered people. I look forward to being required to vote, using an Australian ballot, on a Saturday, in an election with ranked-choice voting, where the system has integrity, and eating a democracy sausage. No system is perfect, the King of Australia’s previous gig was as Prince of Wales (not the seemingly better training ground as Sheikh of Sydney or Marquis of Melbourne or Baron of Brisbane or Prince of Perth or Archduke of Adelaide or Count of Canberra or Tsar of Tasmania or Dauphin of Darwin), and got the job because almost 1000 years ago one of his ancestors killed another one of his ancestors; but some systems are far better than others.
Travels
I flew for the first time this month since January 2020 to attend the Australasian Transport Research Forum (ATRF) 2022, hosted by Flinders University in Adelaide on their Tonsley Campus.
First, aviation. I flew from Sydney airport (Domestic Terminal) on Qantas, which has been much bashed lately in the media, so I prepared for the worst. I walked from home to the train station, I arrived at the airport early in case there were security lines. There were none, and I immediately cleared security. Because the security guards were bored, I was randomly tested for the chemical test. Fortunately I left my bombs at home — this time. (It’s a joke, I am not in a security line, so jokes are legal). Thus I got to spend quality time in the terminal, which is not so bad. The flight itself was smooth, they gave us a hummus, crackers, and carrots snack, which was above average, and the flight landed on-time at Adelaide Airport, which is 15 minutes along Sir Donald Bradman Drive, a stroad, by taxi from the CBD, passing through the Hilton suburb of South Australia, including the intentionally confusing Hilton Hotel (pub) (there must have been a lawsuit, which the local Hilton won). Since a bunch of the Sydney crew were on the same flight, we shared a taxi to the Adelaide Hilton hotel. [I should note the return flight had a 25 minute security line at ADL, though it moved quickly, apparently we arrived at peak time. The flight was on-time, but a bit rougher, which I won’t blame on Qantas. The Qantas airline breakfast (microwaved egg sandwich) was the quality you would normally expect.]
ATRF2022 was a well-run conference providing a good opportunity to meet some old friends and make new ones. Australia has too many transport conferences (for a country of its size. This diffuses the network effects of the conference itself (whose value probably scales with something like n*ln(n), where n is the number of participants, and thus country would be well-served to combine its many national transport conferences into one or maybe two seasonal conferences. This requires cooperation, and contradicts the incentives of any particular conference organiser, but the TRB model, which dominates the US, has value.
Visiting Adelaide is like traveling 10 years into the past. It’s mostly the same, but calmer. Adelaide is a planned city of 1.3M people, located on a plain surrounded by hills and mountains, designed on a grid. The Central part of the city is surrounded by a Greenbelt. Around the city, one sees many signs for Polites, which is not a European police station, but the name of the one-time Greek owner of that building, who applied his name to anything he owned.
Finally, we must talk about Adelaide’s gadgetbahn of fame entry, the O-Bahn. Adelaide’s public transport (Adelaide Metro, which doesn’t have a real “metro”, as the train lines have level crossings) is surprisingly extensive for an auto-oriented city of 1.3 million people, including multiple train lines, trams, buses, and most notably the O-Bahn Busway. For research, a contingent of TransportLab scholars rode the O-Bahn from the CBD to Tea Tree Plaza station (Tea Tree Plaza has a Westfield, which are so generic, they are not worth entering). The O-Bahn is a guided busway serving the city and its north-east suburbs, so the bus wheels are on narrow concrete tracks, kept in place by orthogonal actuators attached to the edge of the bus to ensure it stays on track.
The advantage it, like any busway, has over light rail is that the buses can leave the busway at multiple points, in particular either end, and distribute to local communities. Overtaking occurs at station interchanges. The advantage over a standard bus way is the narrower lane that is enabled by eliminating variance in the wheel path. This might reduce initial fixed costs by reducing right-of-way or allowing the system to be threaded through narrow spaces.
The downside is the buses must be more expensive than standard buses. The second downside is ride quality. While not having the standard jerkiness (and subsequent motion-sickness) of some buses due to excessive and sharp braking and acceleration, the buses are very loud, with a high-frequency noise and a lot of vertical movement.
One piece of evidence of a successful system is that it continues to operate. The O-Bahn passes this test. A second test is that it is replicated, and one struggles to find similar systems beyond Adelaide, Nagoya, Cambridgeshire, and Essen, Germany (about which one of you should write a Wikipedia article).
Research
Recently published:
Gao, Yang and Levinson, D. (2022) A bifurcation of the peak: New patterns of traffic peaking during the COVID-19 era. Transportation. [doi]
This paper analyzes the emergence of two well-defined peaks during the morning peak period in the traffic flow diurnal curve. It selects six California cities as research targets, and uses California employment and household travel survey data to explain how and why this phenomenon has risen during the pandemic. The final result explains that the double-humped phenomenon results from the change in the composition of commuters during the morning peak period after the outbreak.
Books
Alex Wardrop’s new book: A Tale of Two Systems: The Evolution of Melbourne and Sydney’s Metropolitan Railways from Federation to Pre-Pandemic, is now available. I have my copy. It is well worth owning if you want to understand how and why railways grew (and declined) in Australia’s two largest cities.
News and Opinion
Woman Hit by Freight Train While Detained in Cop Car Parked on the Tracks - everything wrong with the US in one bizarre story.
The Urban Form and Transport of Marseille (and Sydney) by Jed Coppa
Crowded house(s): Can New Zealand’s planning reforms show Sydney the way?
EVs
Australia is failing on electric vehicles. California shows it’s possible to pick up the pace by Scott Hardman, Dan Sperling, Gil Tal,
Peak Oil Has Finally Arrived. by David Fickling (Also The Supply Chain to Beat Climate Change Is Already Being Built)
First Errand (99% Invisible) on how little kids can travel independently if they are in Japan, and why in other countries this seems impossible in the modern era.
I have said for a long time that Transport costs too much. New report by Eno: On the Right Track: Rail Transit Project Delivery Around the World provides evidence that the US (and Australia, mates) have exceptionally high costs.
Reece Martin: Sydney Trains Explained