I get to talk about Flying Cars and Transportation Technology for about 8 seconds in this 3:40 Greater MSP video: The Future of Greater MSP’s Cultural and Physical Environment
(Just don't call it the Twin Cities anymore)
((The interview was ~ 30 minutes, I talked about lots of other cool things as well, they just survive on the cutting room floor))
NYT: Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden:
" In the future, he said, the conference should not accept papers from authors who did not make their data public. He was greeted by applause from the audience.In February, Dr. Huberman had published a letter in the journal Nature warning that privately held data was threatening the very basis of scientific research. 'If another set of data does not validate results obtained with private data,' he asked, 'how do we know if it is because they are not universal or the authors made a mistake?'"
In the "be careful what you wish for department" ... NYT: George Lucas's Plans in Marin:
"But after spending years and millions of dollars, Mr. Lucas abruptly canceled plans recently for the third, and most likely last, major expansion, citing community opposition. An emotional statement posted online said Lucasfilm would build instead in a place 'that sees us as a creative asset, not as an evil empire.'If the announcement took Marin by surprise, it was nothing compared with what came next. Mr. Lucas said he would sell the land to a developer to bring 'low income housing' here."
TOLLROADSnews: Traffic congestion dropped off 30% in 2011 INRIX says - weak economy, higher gas prices :
"2011 saw a dramatic drop in traffic congestion in the US - 30% fewer hours wasted in congested traffic according to INRIX, the nation's leading provider of traffic data. The 2011 improvement is only outmatched in the years since INRIX has been measuring congestion by the financial crisis year of 2008, when congestion dropped 34%. In 2009 congestion was up 1% and 2010 saw a 10% regrowth of congestion. "[I call 'Bullshit'. There may have been a methodological problem they are calling a trend.]
Wired: SpaceX In Orbit - Successful Launch of Falcon 9 Rocket :
"CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The second time’s the charm for SpaceX. This morning at 3:44 a.m. EDT the company’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. After a faulty valve led to an aborted launch on Saturday, today’s successful flight marks the third of the Falcon 9 rocket, the second flight of the Dragon capsule, and the first flight for a commercial spacecraft bound for the International Space Station (ISS)."
Kottke: Douche parking: "I can't tell if the app featured in this video is imaginary or not, but it's a great theoretical solution to the problem of douche parking. Douche parking is basically parking like a douche, and is way more prevalent in Russia than in the US. The Village feels publicly shaming is the best way to deal with douches. Unfortunately, one trait of douches is an inability to be shamed."
Matt Kahn @ Environmental and Urban Economics: New UCLA Research Suggests that Men Should Not Bike:
"A study by researchers at the UCLA School of Nursing has found that serious male cyclists may experience hormonal imbalances that could affect their reproductive health. "
Now at streets.mn: Cross-subsidies:
"We subsidize transit to spur development. We subsidize development to spur transit ridership."
Eric Jaffe @ The Atlantic Cities picks up on John Calimente's recent JTLU article: The Secret to Tokyo's Rail Success :
"In other words the railway itself was just a sideline attraction. This is no accident. As John Calimente reminds us in the latest issue of the Journal of Transport and Land Use [PDF], a major reason Tokyo's private rail lines are so successful is that they've diversified the business beyond transportation into real estate holdings and retail outlets. At the end of the day this means both profitability for the company and better transportation for city residents. Calimente writes:Government regulation of fares coupled with limited subsidies for railway operations pushed the private railways to innovate and diversify into a wide variety of related businesses, most notably real estate. Due to their long-term interest in the communities they built along their rail lines, the private railways provided valuable social benefits through public transportation while still pursuing profits. High quality, frequent rail service to dense, mixed-use, safe, pedestrian-friendly developments has allowed Tokyo to achieve enviable rates of public transit usage and given Tokyoites the freedom to view automobile ownership as a lifestyle choice rather than a necessity.Take, for instance, the Tokyu Corporation. Established in 1922 as a regional development company, Tokyu today is a massive "rail-based conglomerate" of nearly 400 companies that employs 30,000 people, only a tenth of which work directly for the railway. Beginning in the 1930s Tokyu surrounded its hubs with commercial and retail buildings and sold land near its intermediate stations to universities at good prices, to create reliable residential (and thus passenger) corridors.
Pretty good plan: Tokyu's seven main rail lines and branch line now carry about a billion riders a year. That's the most of any private railway in Japan, as of 2006, according to Calimente. That year Tokyu generated $2.63 billion in revenue en route to $587 million in profits. Rail fares brought in about a third of that figure, real estate holdings reap another third, and retail about a fifth."
[This is from the recent special issue on Value Capture.]
Walk Score has put out: Most Bikeable Cities
Just for the record:
Minneapolis - 79
Portland - 70
Their map is here:
I am not sure how exactly they decided this, but we do have our Bike Accessibility data online for your mapping pleasure.
Brendon sends me to MPR Minneapolis moving toward single-sort recycling
[We have been cheering in our household for a week. We will regain at least 18 square feet of space. I can soon reduce the number of streams identified here. ]Wikimedia blog: Welcome to the world’s first Wikipedia Town
Fast Company: J. Crew CEO, Apple Board Member Mickey Drexler Reveals Steve Jobs' iCar Dream, Confirms "Living Room" Plans:
"'Look at the car industry; it's a tragedy in America. Who is designing the cars?' Drexler said. 'Steve's dream before he died was to design an iCar.'"
Several folks have sent me to Wired's take on the paper discussed in the SciAm article I linked to earlier: World's Subways Converging on Ideal Form
Alex @ Getting Around Minneapolis discusses the rerouting of buses in St. Paul in response to the Central [University Ave.] Corridor Green Line … St Paul transferring
[My #8 bus is getting absorbed by the 67. The rider will be pleased the route now goes farther (actually there are 172 average daily rides over 50 daily bus trips, and they run a full size bus) and hopefully has a higher frequency (it can't be lower). The #2 is still crazy from a circuity perspective.]
SR sends me to Betabeat, which discusses Zimride: Nine Startups Tried to Teach Brooklyn Bowl How to Share Last Night :
"Next, former Lehman Brothers employee John Zimmer came up to pitch Zimride even though he really didn’t need to. The San Francisco based startup just got funded for $7.5 million. Mr. Zimmer explained that 80 percent of the seats in cars on America’s highways are unoccupied. That’s why he founded Zimride, which allows users to find a driver with empty seats and book a ride just like you would a bus, train or plane ticket.Zimride is a social marketplace for drivers and riders who can see each other’s profiles and decide if the ride is one they’re willing to take. If it takes off, Mr. Zimmer believes Zimride will help take cars off the road, reduce traffic wait times and help people make new friends. In fact, Zimride has been the catalyst for more than one relationship already—but please guys, it’s not a dating site."
Karl Smith @ Modeled Behavior: More on Self-Driving Cars :
"When I said that by 2035 we could have 3 times as many cars as human beings, obviously that was a prediction about the predominance of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). I think we should begin to retire self-driving/driverless car, as it will eventually sound as hokey as horseless carriage.In part this is because it attempts to define a thing in terms of a paradigm that will no longer be familiar. Yet, it will also sound hokey because it suggests that AVs are basically like today’s cars but with no driver. That suggestion is likely to appear comical in retrospect.
My guess is that the majority of AVs will not only, not carry passengers but not interact with humans unless they explicitly need something that only a human can provide, such as specialized repair or maintenance.
The majority of AVs will live in their own world, interacting only with other AVs and a vast array of infrastructure as they form the backbone of a human-less global supply chain. They will pick up goods from the point of production and ship and sort them all the way to the final consumer without ever meeting human in between.
They will likely be the most powerful force for globalization we have ever seen."
Via MEK: political science job rumors: Can you be a top-5 polisci department without rapid rail?
Via BS: LATimes: An electrifying freight solution on the 710? Siemens working on it:
"Los Angeles may be one of the first global cities to adopt a new electric freight trucking system, unveiled by electrical engineering giant Siemens Corp. last week at the 26th Electric Vehicle Symposium, or EVS26.The new technology, called eHighway, is a highway electrification system that uses overhead electrical wires to transmit energy to freight trucks in select vehicle lanes, similar to modern-day streetcars."
Kotaku: Toyota Just Turned the Nintendo DS into a Navigational System
How Do You Put a Price Tag on a Brand New City? - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities: "The infant nation of South Sudan has a big construction project in mind. Officials are hoping to build a brand new city to act as its capital. The cost of the project was recently estimated at $940 million."
OK, cost of 1 stadium in Minneapolis to serve 8 games a year to replace existing stadium > cost of capital of entire country.
Susan Fecht @ SciAm: Track Record: Do Major Urban Subway Networks Evolve along Similar Patterns?:
"No two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning."
Nice summary of recent research by Roth, Kang, Batty, and Barthelemy "A long-time limit for world subway networks" in Journal of the Royal Society: Interface (which might be behind a firewall if you don't have library access)
I am interviewed in the SciAm article.
From February: GTI/UTC Lunchtime Lecture Series - Dr. David Levinson - YouTube: "Network Structure and Travel Behavior"
(57:22)Abstract: Transportation networks have an underlying structure, defined by the layout, arrangement and the connectivity of the individual network elements, namely the road segments and their intersections. The differences in network structure exist among and between networks. This presentation argues that travellers perceive and respond to these differences in underlying network structure and complexity, resulting in differences in observed travel patterns. This hypothesized relationship between network structure and travel is analyzed using individual and aggregate level travel and network data from metropolitan regions across the U.S. Various measures of network structure, compiled from existing sources, are used to quantify the structure of street networks. The relation between these quantitative measures and travel is then identified using econometric models.
Kottke: Fantastic time lapse map of Europe, 1000 - 2005 A.D.
In Vancouver, Buzzer Blog: New wayfinding signage is going up around the region
Massive Tornado, Can it Happen Here? [MPR succumbs to Sweeps Month] If you're stuck in traffic, you have no good choices"
A local Car Dealer (Walser) is encouraging trading in used cars for bikes (and cash). The campaign is here: New Wheels
The Scholarly Kitchen: The Emergence of a Citation Cartel :
"In a 1999 essay published in Science titled, ‘Scientific Communication — A Vanity Fair?’ George Franck warned us on the possibility of citation cartels — groups of editors and journals working together for mutual benefit. To date, this behavior has not been widely documented; however, when you first view it, it is astonishing.Cell Transplantation is a medical journal published by the Cognizant Communication Corporation of Putnam Valley, New York. In recent years, its impact factor has been growing rapidly. In 2006, it was 3.482. In 2010, it had almost doubled to 6.204.
When you look at which journals cite Cell Transplantation, two journals stand out noticeably: the Medical Science Monitor, and The Scientific World Journal. According to the JCR, neither of these journals cited Cell Transplantation until 2010."
KSTP has a story on Fighting Rush Hour featuring MTO Director John Hourdos
David King @ Getting from here to there: NO TAV: Anarchists Debate the Merits of High Speed Rail
Matt Kahn @ Environmental and Urban Economics: John Quigley: A Giant in Urban Economics: "UC Berkeley's John Quigley passed away this weekend. "
[John Quigley was on my Ph.D. oral exams committee.]
At the STREET - Simulating Transportation for Realistic Engineering Education and Training website, we have a new model, ANGIE:
"The Agent-based Network Growth model with Incremental Evolution (ANGIE) models the growth of road networks in several scenarios such as road networks in an artificial grid-like city and the Minneapolis Downtown Skyway network. The philosophy inherent in these models is that accessibility affects road network growth and vice versa. The examples aim to illustrate that different values of accessibility at individual locations can lead to different network topologies."
The model is what we used on two papers:
We welcome feedback.
A web-based mapping system for Ancient Rome: ORBIS:
"For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity."
Andrew Adamatzky and Andrew Ilachinski have an Op-Ed in the NY Times: The Wisdom of Slime:
" it’s worth remembering that the highway system was created by mere humans, using only human intelligence. To find out if it’s optimally designed, we need to consult a higher authority. Namely, slime mold."
[I have blogged about slime molds before].
CNU20 is underway, there are lots of posts emanating, see
Erin Chantry @ At the Helm of the Public Realm: Looking Forward: New Urbanism and the New World
Chuck Marohn @ Strong Towns Blog: CNU 20, Day 2
Sam Newberg alias Joe Urban: CNU – Elitist or Grassroots Urbanism?
[The retrospective reflection is so bright, you gotta wear shades]
Nokohaha: Tooling Around Minneapolis ’02
"That’s the busy intersection of Fourth and Nicollet in 1902. Minneapolis City Hall and Hennepin County Courthouse was still under construction and gas buggies had to share the road with bicycles, horses and street cars."
I got quoted last weekend in the Oregonian about peak travel: Columbia River Crossing needs $900 million from Washington and Oregon, but how to raise it remains elusive:
"David Levinson, a University of Minnesota professor who studies transportation issues, argues that the trend is long-term and is as much cultural as financial.Teens, historically the most avid drivers, are waiting longer to get their licenses and are driving less, pushed by higher costs and also tougher rules for young drivers, stronger enforcement of drunk driving laws, even technology. Another theory: smart phones and the Internet have supplanted the car as a central platform of young people's social lives.
Cars themselves have also changed. Some don't burn a drop of gas or pay a penny in gas taxes. Others use less, due in part to tougher federal mileage standards. 'It's official government policy to drive down gas tax revenue,' Levinson said. "
Giant Freakin Robot: Faux Vintage Travel Posters Invite You To Tour The Solar System
Chicago Tribune: Peapod unveils virtual grocery store aisle at CTA's State/Lake tunnel
Tim Lee writes in Forbes: Why The Bay Area Should Have 11 Million Residents Today - Forbes:
"Today, the Bay Area has about 7 million residents. In a free housing market, the population of the San Francisco Bay Area would have been growing rapidly over the last two decades. For example, between 1900 and 1920, the growth of the auto industry helped the population of the Detroit metro area nearly triple, from 540,000 people to 1.4 million people. If the San Francisco Bay Area had grown that fast since 1990, it would have about 16 million people today."
Having lived in the Bay Area for half a decade, I don't doubt there are housing restrictions in some municipalities. There are many municipalities. Some would welcome development. Other just demand more side payments. Where is the boom in the East Bay? In the East Bay development is more welcome than the Valley. Where are the hordes clamoring to live in Oakland? Why have the bad neighborhoods areas not been gentrified? Why are existing zoning caps not reached (with buildings torn down and rebuilt more intensely). Because, the demand is too weak.
The so-called economies of agglomeration are just not large enough to justify side payments, or they would be made, or overcome social problems constraining gentrification.
Those 4 million come from somewhere. Maybe they come from Phoenix or Dallas or Houston or Atlanta (or of course everywhere?), but then those places have the infrastructure, land, and housing stock, where if the demand were lower would just see lower land prices, not less people (mostly).
Maybe some development would not have been built there. But that development (i.e. roll back the last 10 years of US development for 2 million housing units, reallocate that to the Bay Area, as is implied in the article) and most of that would be single family houses that would be unbuilt. Preferences for 2 million single family homes cannot physically be satisfied in the Bay Area, so residents would thus face a far worse housing situation than preferred.
We have a friend from Minneapolis we nicknamed "Pre-Millenium Man", since in the early 2000s he wanted to live the hipster dream of San Francisco in the 1990s, and he did move to the Bay Area and works in software development. Nothing stopped him. He undoubtedly bid out someone who did not care to live there quite as much. So the people who are bid out contribute much less to the economies of agglomeration than the average person who is there (their wages reflect willingness to pay for housing, and are determine by their productivity). Adding 2 million marginals to the pool won't increase the total productivity as much as the average person today, and will reduce average productivity. It will worsen the aggregate productivity elsewhere. There are diminishing economies of agglomeration, and increasing negative externalities with larger populations.
The entire rationale for housing regulations is to reduce negative externalities, both perceived and real. If we lived in a world where those externalities were otherwise internalized, great, communities would be much more willing to allow more development, as the negative spillovers would not exist. We do not yet live in that world.
I know the Bay Area (thinks it) is the most important place in the world, delivering us the future. I know that future would just be so much worse without famous investments like Pets.com. Real productivity is created there, but so is crap. A much better strategy would be to stop wasting so much effort on duplication, drivel, and so on, and incentivize those competent software developers to make things that are worthwhile. If people can no longer find good investments, or can no longer distinguish between good investments and crap, perhaps the economies of agglomeration have been exhausted.
Conrad deFiebre @ MinnPost: Rough road ahead for Minnesota drivers:
"'Misaligned funding incentives' The authors, Matthew Kahn of UCLA and tough-minded transportation engineer David Levinson of the University of Minnesota, fault the feds for 'misaligned funding incentives,' a lack of cost-benefit analysis and 'mispricing of use.' Their solution: radically reform federal highway progams to direct all current fuel taxes away from new construction and instead use them to 'repair, maintain, rehabilitate, reconstruct and enhance existing roads and bridges.' They call that step 'Fix It First.'But what about growing areas that really need new roads? The next part of Kahn and Levinson's plan, 'Expand It Second,' calls for a Federal Highway Bank that would offer states construction loans 'contingent on meeting strict performance criteria and demonstration of an ability to repay the loan through direct user charges [read: tolls] and capture some of the increase in land values near the transportation improvement.'
Those would be tough pills to swallow, sure to be loudly opposed by any driver or landowner asked to pay more for the direct benefits of new public investment. The hit could be softened, however, by Kahn-Levinson's final proposal, 'Reward It Third.' If a new construction project met or exceeded performance targets such as on-time completion or environmental improvement, the bank would collect a reduced interest rate on the loan, resulting in lower tolls or less value capture from adjacent properties.
There's plenty of sense in these ideas to correct the incentives and pricing around highways, even if a few oxen get gored. While the current federal highway program encourages new infrastructure at the expense of maintaining what we have, the rate of return on these greenfield projects has been declining for decades. That's because the most economically efficient facilities have already been built, even if they're often left to crumble. Furthermore, some studies have shown that road repairs produce more jobs and economic bang for the buck than new construction.
Congress is currently negotiating new a federal surface transportation bill, nearly three years after the last one expired. We've had nine temporary extensions since then, with no change in policy. The prospects for reforming the program along Kahn-Levinson's lines range from slim to none this time. But eventually we'll have to come to grips with the accelerating disintegration of the world's greatest highway system and its negative effects on our economy, our job and cultural opportunities and even our pocketbooks.
Conrad deFiebre is a Transportation Fellow at Minnesota 2020, a nonpartisan, progressive think tank based in St. Paul. This article first appeared on its website."
Continuing on our series of anthropomorphic vehicles (Trains and more Trains), Helicopters, Planes, and Boats), and Tom Vanderbilt's different, artistic link to cars, we have the genre of the construction vehicle.
There is of course Bob the Builder, Jack and The Pack from Sodor, and the new multi-ethnic Chuck and Friends.
Bob started off with stop-motion animation, but that is a lost art form, and new episodes are CGI. Jack and his Pack was aimed to be a Thomas and Friends spin-off when they first showed up in Series 6 (2002), but the company that owned Bob and the company that owned Thomas merged (HiT Entertainment (originally Henson International Television, named for Jim Henson), which owned Bob the Builder, acquired Gullane which owned Thomas), and no need for the in-house competition. HiT was recently acquired by Mattel.
My son had a Chuck dump truck (his grandfather likes to give him dump trucks), and I just found on Netflix that the character has been cartoonified by Hasbro. Hasbro lost the contract to make Bob toys in 2005.
Which is more pure, a toy turned into a cartoon (a la Chuck), or a cartoon turned into toys (a la Thomas (which of course originates as a book))?
See also Dumpy the Dump Truck
Strib: No-frills air carrier is filling in gaps :
"Meet Great Lakes, a no-frills newcomer that believes there's a lucrative opportunity in connecting rural America with bustling airports like MSP. The Wyoming-based airline is in the midst of adding more than a dozen new cities to its local roster, with the Twin Cities serving as its hub for 20 percent of its destinations."It provides "essential air services" with big government subsidy.
The frequent fliers who flew too much - Los Angeles Times. Matt Yglesias writes:
Back in 1981, American Airlines needed cash. Interest rates were sky high, so rather than borrowing the money, they hit upon a weird idea: sell lifetime passes good for unlimited first-class air travel for $250,000. Add a companion pass for $150,000 more. The resulting program, the AAirpass, turned out to be a huge disaster brilliantly chronicled over the weekend in the Los Angeles Times. Losing millions of dollars a year on its highest-use members, American has in recent years been employing investigators to try to find instances of rule violations that let them cancel members' passes.I absolutely love this story because it illustrates so much about the business and economics worlds. It highlights the fact that there are a lot of ways to engage in "hidden borrowing" and that this kind of hidden leverage is often very costly. It illustrates the importance of avoiding adverse selection if you want to succeed. And most of all, it illustrates that over and above the structural issues facing the notably unprofitable U.S. aviation industry there also seems to be a problem of systematic mismanagement and repeated blunders.
Amtrak to Use iPhones to Streamline Service - NYTimes.com:
"Old-school train conductors are finally ready to give up their hole punchers to try something new: the iPhone.Amtrak, the government-owned corporation that oversees the nation’s railroad train services, has been training conductors since November to use the Apple handset as an electronic ticket scanner on a few routes, including from Boston to Portland, Me., and San Jose, Calif., to Sacramento."
Ars: Google gets license to test drive autonomous cars on Nevada roads:
"On Monday, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles approved Google’s license application to test autonomous vehicles on the state’s roads. The state had approved such laws back in February, and has now begun issuing licenses based on those regulations.The state previously outlined that companies that want to test such vehicles will need an insurance bond of $1 million and must provide detailed outlines of where they plan to test it and under what conditions. Further, the car must have two people in it at all times, with one behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle if needed.
The Autonomous Review Committee of the Nevada DMV is supervising the first licensing procedure and has now approved corresponding plates to go with it, complete with a red background and infinity symbol."
The Prospect Park Newsletter sends me to Pete LeBak ... :
"Pete LeBak's barber shop is a neighborhood institution in Prospect Park. He's been here over 31 years. Light rail is going in on University Ave. now, and the work has wiped out the parking in front. Access is daunting folks; traffic has slowed to a trickle. So business has cratered. By the way, that's 'Bug' (short for Ladybug) on the floor in her usual posture. She's about 110 in dog years. Neighbors and friends are trying to get Pete some press and spread the word to help him make it through the construction gauntlet. Pete was fixing to move out, but he thought back on the 31 years he'd been there, all the friends he'd made, and it got his back up. Longtime customers stopped by to beg him not to go. So now he's fighting to stay. We're rallying the troops."[the external cost of transportation construction is non-trivial]
Reason says: New Light Rail Ridership Falls Short by More Than Half:
"Los Angeles’ brand new $930 million Exposition light rail line is carrying so few riders and bringing in so little revenue that it will, at best, take 65 years for the train to earn back its capital investment (not including ongoing operating costs). If the project completes its next phase and establishes an at-grade train that runs through heavy street traffic from Downtown L.A. to the city of Santa Monica, it will not pay for its construction for 170 years. "
Daniel Teridman @ CNET: Hindenburg disaster 75 years ago abruptly ended zeppelin era:
"Yet the Hindenburg accident, as dramatic as it was, only put a sudden exclamation point on the already seemingly inevitable end of the era of the great zeppelins. In the years leading up to World War II, airplanes were already beginning to supplant the giant airships as a much more efficient and economical way to cross oceans."
KurzweilAI: Robot cars get ready to roll:
"Manufacturers such as Ford have announced that autonomous vehicles are the future. Bill Ford, executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, recently said that the company sees ‘the introduction of semi-autonomous driving technology, including driver-initiated ‘auto pilot’ capabilities, and vehicle platooning in limited situations’ as early as 2017.In the longer term, from 2025 onwards he believes we will see the ‘arrival of smart vehicles capable of fully autonomous navigation, with increased ‘auto pilot’ operating duration, plus the arrival of autonomous valet functions, delivering effortless vehicle parking and storage.’"
Newly posted @streets.mn: The Missing Link
My colleague Henry Liu has been working with MnDOT the past several years on deploying the SMART-Signal system. It is live on Mn trunk highway 13, and the real-time intersection level of service, queueing, and speed data coming from the system are available online here. As the website says:
"Although measuring and archiving freeway traffic performance using commonly available loop detector data has become a norm for many transportation agencies, similar approaches for urban arterials do not exist. In practice, operational data from traffic signal systems are neither stored nor analyzed, which prevents proactive management of arterial streets. The development of the SMART-Signal (Systematic Monitoring of Arterial Road Traffic Signals) system fills in this gap. The SMART-Signal system simultaneously collects event-based high-resolution traffic data from multiple intersections and generates real-time arterial performance measures including intersection queue length and arterial travel time. The development of the system has laid the groundwork for better traffic models and control strategies and opens up entirely new opportunities for managing traffic on congested roads.In the SMART-Signal system, a complete history of traffic signal control, including all vehicle actuation events and signal phase change events, are archived and stored. At each intersection, an industrial PC with a data acquisition card is installed inside the controller cabinet, and event data collected at each intersection are transmitted to the data server in real-time using an Ethernet connection. Using the event-based data, a set of arterial performance measures, especially intersection queue length and arterial travel time, can be estimated. SMART-Signal uses a newly developed algorithmic approach to queue length estimation based on traffic shockwave theory. Cyclic traffic shockwaves at an intersection can be reconstructed using event-based data, allowing for queue length estimation even when the queue of cars extends beyond the upstream vehicle detector. To measure travel time, SMART-Signal simulates the movements of a virtual “probe vehicle” along the arterial road. As the virtual probe moves, it can modify its own state in response to the state of traffic around it by accelerating, decelerating, or maintaining a constant speed at each time step as it encounters queues, traffic signals, and changes in traffic density. SMART-Signal can also optimize traffic signal parameters using the collected high-resolution data. Instead of relying on traditional offset optimization approaches, which are based on manually collected volume data on a typical day, SMART-Signal can account for traffic flow variations by using archived traffic signal data and the derived performance measures.
The SMART-Signal system has been field-tested on three major arterial corridors in Minnesota including six intersections on Trunk Highway 55 in Golden Valley, eleven intersections on France Avenue in Bloomington, and three intersections on Prairie Center Drive in Eden Prairie. A demonstration project is also being carried out on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena, California. A large-scale implementation project currently under discussion with the Minnesota Department of Transportation will monitor 100 intersections in the Twin Cities area using the SMART-Signal system. "
Wired: Get Ready To Kickstart Project Hexapod:
"Meet Stompy. He’s a hexapod – a six-legged robot being built by a team of 15 students and three instructors at Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, Massachusetts. And if the rendering above didn’t tip you off, Stompy holds two passengers, can walk over a car and takes up nearly two lanes of road. Needless to say, Stompy is awesome."
Bloomberg: 'Jetman' Soars Over Rio: Video
"Yves 'Jetman' Rossy, a record-holding Swiss aerialist, flew his carbon-kevlar jetwing over Rio de Janiero on Thursday morning. During his 11-minute flight he reached a speed of 186 mph and an altitude of almost 4,000 feet."
Amanda Erickson @ Atlantic CitiesGreening Traffic Lights By Turning Them Off :
"But how's this for an idea to make traffic patterns greener (and, proponents say, safer): stop using traffic lights altogether. The so-called "naked streets" movement has gained traction across Europe, even in major cities like London."[Note to jargon-heads, naked streets = shared space].
Akamai: State of the Internet Report [Comment: It's not faster than last year, because, like roads, it is not rationed or priced properly]
Tim Lee @ Ars: Why bandwidth caps could be a threat to competition: "Since the first dot-com boom, unmetered Internet access has been the industry standard. But recently, usage-based billing has been staging a comeback. Comcast instituted a bandwidth cap in 2008, and some other wired ISPs, including AT&T, have followed suit. In 2010, three of the four national wireless carriers—Sprint is the only holdout—switched from unlimited data plans to plans featuring bandwidth caps."
Tom Vanderbilt @ The Wilson Quarterly: The Call of the Future : "Today we worry about the social effects of the Internet. A century ago, it was the telephone that threatened to reinvent society." ["He is currently at work on You May Also Like, a book about the mysteries of human preferences."]
David Willetts @ The Guardian: The UK government is promising: Open, free access to academic research [Woot!]
The picture is sort of difficult to see, but a bird family seems to think this traffic light (Franklin and Seymour) is a good nest site. This is not an unknown phenomenon. I would think the lights going on and off 24 hours a day would be annoying, but the rent is cheep.
By occupying metered parking spaces on Oak Street, General Motors has set up a mobile showroom for its Chevy line in Minneapolis. Is this guerrilla marketing or standard business behavior (I haven't seen it before)? Is it legal? Should the city charge more for parking if it is going to be used like this?
It seems clever, since this is right before graduation, and many graduating students will be in the market for new cars.
Recently published:
This paper reviews the state of high-speed rail (HSR) planning in the United States c. 2010. The plans generally call for a set of barely inter-connected hub-and-spoke networks. The evidence from US transit systems shows that lines have two major impacts. There are positive accessibility benefits near stations, but there are negative nuisance effects along the lines themselves. High speed lines are unlikely to have local accessibility benefits separate from connecting local transit lines because there is little advantage for most people or businesses to locate near a line used infrequently (unlike public transit). However they may have more widespread metropolitan level effects. They will retain, and perhaps worse, have much higher, nuisance effects. If high-speed rail lines can create larger effective regions, that might affect the distribution of who wins and loses from such infrastructure. The magnitude of agglomeration economies is uncertain (and certainly location-specific), but presents the best case that can be made in favor of HSR in the US.
JEL code: R40, R11, R14
Keywords: high-speed rail, public transportation, economic development, land use, hub-and-spoke
How to pay for the Vikings stadium is the topic of the hour here in GreaterMSP. I have another solution that has not been broached to recover part of the $77 per ticket subsidy.
Let us establish a Congestion Zone around the proposed Minnesota Sports Complex, which is in effect on game days only (and could be extended for other special events). Drive into this zone on game days and pay $100 $150 (assuming an auto occupancy of about 2, and most fans drive) as a congestion charge. As with the London Congestion Zone, on which it is loosely modeled, residents would get a discount. This would ensure people driving to the game, regardless of where they park, would have to pay.
The funds earned would pay for administering the zone and the new stadium. Wilf would have no say in the matter. I have put a first draft of the zone boundaries on the Google map below, but obviously this could be discussed (should it extend to Cedar-Riverside or to St. Anthony Main? I am counting on the inherent laziness of Vikings fans being unwilling to walk to counter-act their inherent frugality. Every entrance to the zone would be cordoned, starting say 10 am on game days, and running until say the end of the first quarter, and people would have to pay to enter the area or produce evidence of residence.
Fans coming by transit, foot, or bicycle would be exempted.
Obviously there would need to be some new legal framework established for this.
View Vikings Congestion Zone in a larger map
New Scientist: One Per Cent: Expressive car sends its 'emotions' ahead
Tyler Cowan notes: Amy Finkelstein wins the John Bates Clark award. Transportationistas may remember her mention here for her work on E-Z Tax
Wikipedia: Rocket mail
Arnold Kling: My Thoughts on Technology and :
"I think that urbanization increases the demand for government. When people are crowded together, many more externalities are created. Water and sewage management become a huge deal. So does planning a road and transportation system.Technology for long-distance trade also increases the demand for standardization and enforcement of standards. That is likely to raise the demand for government."
Jason Scheppers writes in at Kids Prefer Cheese: We Get Letters: Polls on I-95. The general point is that if a road is uncongested, and tolls are imposed which reduce use, this is a welfare loss. This is why we should continue to use average rather than marginal cost payment systems for uncongested roads (which is most of them), like the flat mileage-based user fee (in the future), gas tax or worse, property taxes. We still need to pay for the road if it is a worthwhile part of the network, but differential tolls or tolls on some uncongested roads but not others are not terribly efficient (though it may be profitable for the toll collector). The beauty of the gas tax (over the property tax) is that it better gets at road users in proportion to use.
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