Transportist: September 2021

Catbagger n. Someone who tries to put the cat back in the bag. I.e. someone attempting a futile act too late, which may have been prevented but cannot be reversed.

Sep 02, 2021

In Australia are currently experiencing an exponential increase in COVID-19 cases as part of the Delta Wave. This is sad, and results in a few deaths daily (a rate, mind you, that is low enough other countries use it as a level at which lockdowns are lifted, rather than imposed). The rise is due to any number of mistakes that went previously. I won’t re-litigate the past. Instead, I posit that had those mistakes not been made at that time, lessons from those mistakes wouldn’t have been learned, and a similar mistake would have then been made shortly thereafter. This is not an apology for incompetence, and I am sure none of the Transportist readers would have made those mistakes had they been in charge, but is an acknowledgement that like COVID-19, incompetence is endemic and no one competent person can be everywhere simultaneously, and everyone relies on systems that are only as good as their weakest link.

If not for some outbreak, people would not (over)-react, leaving the same conditions in place for a later outbreak. While on average one prefers to avoid mistakes, it is only by mistakes that lessons are learned, pre-planning is imperfect, and we can plan and prepare for any number of eventualities that would never occur at great cost, leaving us worse off than those who react to the eventualities that do actually occur without having wasted resources preparing for those that don’t.

So while it may be psychologically or politically important to blame individuals who should have done this instead of that, or have learned from the mistakes of others, (and obviously the best people do better than the worst, by definition), and hopefully select slightly less incompetent administrators, that merely would have delayed the mostly inevitable outcome in terms of cases and deaths. And until there were COVID outbreaks, or very obvious prospects of COVID outbreaks, no vaccine would have been developed, no vaccine would have been manufactured, and no one would have gotten vaccinated, leaving everyone vulnerable to a COVID outbreak.

Still, Australia could have managed COVID better

Posts

“Sydney’s motorists are still suffering breakdowns despite the lockdown”

Polls

For authors, considering peer review: Are you biased so as to be more likely to accept papers that cite you? Are others (generally) similarly biased?

I am/Others are 46.3%
I am not/Others are 24.4%
I am/Others are not 0%
I am not/Others are not. 29.3%

At least no one admitted to being more unethical than the population as a whole (choice 3). About half the people admitted bias (choice 1 and 3), indicating that the people who thought “Others are not” (choices 3 and 4) are hopelessly naive. I tend towards choice 2 for myself, at least I hope I am not.

How much time would you be willing to sacrifice at the end of your life (your life would be X units of time shorter) to forego 1 month of lockdown for yourself?

0-1 hour 44.4%
1-24 hours 17.8%
1-6 days 11.1%
7 or more days 26.7%

Now these are Twitter polls, so sampling bias is rife, and questions cannot be particularly sophisticated (lockdown means different things to different people in different places, what about lockdown for other people, etc.), but it does suggest that many people think that lockdown makes their life worse off in a way that suggests their benefits (reducing COVID cases) need to be countered with their costs (diminished quality of life). It also suggests that some other people really like lockdown, and if there had been negative numbers, some people who elected for choice 1 might have given up time at the end of their life to preserve lockdown longer. This I think gets pack to the Plants vs. Animals dichotomy I developed last year.

Videos

Towards a General Theory of Access is now on Video.

Conferences

The World Society for Transport and Land Use Research presents awards at each Symposium. The conference took place last week, and I had the honour of bestowing the Best Paper and Best Student-Led Paper awards (and the honour of being the namesake of one of the awards). Congratulations to the winners who are:

DAVID LEVINSON AWARD FOR BEST PAPER

WSTLUR 2021 (PORTLAND)

Viewpoint: Turning streets into housing
Adam Millard-Ball, University of California Los Angeles

HONORABLE MENTION BEST PAPER

The inevitability of automobility: how private car use is perpetuated in a Greenfield estate
Jennifer Kent, University of Sydney

BEST STUDENT-LED PAPER

WSTLUR 2021 (PORTLAND)

Traffic-Land Use Compatibility and Street Design Impacts of Automated Driving in Vienna, Austria
Emilia Brucke and Aggelos Soteropolis, Technical University of Vienna

HONORABLE MENTION BEST STUDENT-LED PAPER

Traffic Noise Feedback in Agent-Based Integrated Land-Use/Transport Models
Nico Kuehnel (Technical University of Munich), Dominik Ziemke (Technical University of Dresden, and Rolf Moeckel (Technical University of Munich)

BEST PHD DISSERTATION

WSTLUR 2021 (PORTLAND)

Xiang Jacob Yan – current affiliation University of Florida, Gainsville, FL
Thesis: “Redefining the Value of Accessibility: Toward a Better Understanding of How Accessibility Shapes Household Residential Location and Travel Choices” (Filed at University of Michigan, 2019)

HONORABLE MENTION BEST PHD DISSERTATION

Lindsay M. Braun – current affiliation University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Thesis: “Geographies of (dis)advantage in walking and cycling: Perspectives on equity and social justice in planning for active transportation in U.S. cities” (Filed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018)

Research and Presentation

Laura Aston and David Levinson (2021) Accessibility-Oriented Planning: Why and How to Make the Switch. ITE Journal (August). p25-29. … Discusses the Transport Access Manual.

Research

Gao, Yang, and David Levinson. 2021. “COVID-19, Travel Time Reliability, and the Emergence of a Double-Humped Peak Period.” Findings, August.

Research by Others

Safety, reactogenicity, and immunogenicity of homologous and heterologous prime-boost immunisation with ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 and BNT162b2: a prospective cohort study - Ensemble models for the win. It is better to dose with two different vaccines than the same vaccine twice.

Jobs

Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota is hiring people for the Accessibility Observatory.

News & Opinion

AVs
- Self-Driving Car Company to Test a Second Autonomous Vehicle in NYC
- Toyota resumes self-driving operations at Paralympic Games [After Autonomous Vehicle with 2 Safety Drivers Hits a Blind Paralympian]; CEO remains skeptical of autonomous progress [As he should, given his company’s poor performance, but he is down talking the entire field, despite his company doing especially badly].
Transit
- Quick Note: Do Costs Ever Go Down? [by Alon Levy, so self-recommending]
Biking
- Radical new electric bike drive system requires no chains or belts, entirely ride-by-wire
Walking
- Walking Places Is Part of the Culture Wars Now
We need better transport planning and management processes