The Transportationist

Two articles on speeding, one from Techdirt about how GPS can dis-prove a speeding allegation:
GPS Tracking: Drivers' New Best Friend?

The second from the New York Times about police over-enforcement and beating (stemming from alleged traffic violations) leading to a drivers' rebellion in Russia.
Weary of Highway Bribery, Russians Take on Police.

They are both rebellions against extortion, one extortion has a slightly greater veneer of legitimacy (it is the state seeking the payoff rather than the individual officers), but in the end it is the state's monopoly on the use of force as Max Weber put it, that enables this practice.

(Yes of course, speeding is wrong, but wrongful enforcement is also wrong).

Posted by David Levinson at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Tom's Hardware: DARPA Urban Challenge Coverage
"Victorville (CA) – In about 24 hours, robotic cars will be zooming around the former George Air Force Base in Victorville for the DARPA Urban Challenge and TG Daily will be covering the exciting event in force. For the next six days, 36 teams from across the country – and several from Germany – will compete for 20 spots in the actual race to be held on November 3rd."

Posted by David Levinson at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the NYT: Surface Navigation Help for Subway Riders . This is a brilliant aid to the urban interface, put a decal (or a more permanent marker) on the sidewalk so subway riders emerging from the subterranean depths of Gotham can quickly ascertain where they are. Frankly, we should use the sidewalks for this kind of information more often, especially mid-block. It particularly helps those looking down to avoid making eye-contact.

How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He is the one looking at the other person's shoes

Posted by David Levinson at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From News.com: Hydrogen fuel cell cars from Chevy hit the streets . "Chevrolet is in the midst of launching "Project Driveway," an ambitious program where more than 100 fuel cell electric vehicles will be put in the hands of select consumers for the largest market test ever of its kind."

Let's hope this has a better impact than the General Motors EV1, their first electric vehicle, cancelled in 2003 just as the Hybrid market was taking off. This was featured in the film "Who Killed the Electric Car?".

Posted by David Levinson at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by David Levinson at 08:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

From the NY Times: Navigating With Feedback From Fellow Drivers . The article describe a GPS device from Dash Navigation in which every car is a probe, that reports information back other drivers in the club. This is an idea (hardly original I suspect) I analyzed in Levinson, D. (2002a) The Economics of Traveler Information from Probes. Public Works Management and Policy 6(4) pp 241-250 (April). The model in the paper implies probe information can be very good for detecting incidents, but will be almost useless for recurring congestion, because the lag in the data will be too long to take advantage of it.

Posted by David Levinson at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MnDOT made the right decision by avoiding a groundbreaking ceremony for the I-35W bridge ...
Ceremony for new bridge skipped - Minnesota Daily

Will there be a "ribbon cutting" though?

Posted by David Levinson at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new study reported by BBC: 20mph limit called for in towns

One of the interesting lines
"The Pacts report, called Beyond 2010 - a holistic approach to road safety in Great Britain, also recommends that all new residential developments should be subject to a "pint of milk test".

This is whether a resident can reach a shop to buy a pint of milk in under 10 minutes without using a vehicle."

Posted by David Levinson at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Centers are not nodes, in fact junctions are not nodes. In graphs (representation of transportation networks for modeling and analysis), nodes are aspatial representations of the intersection of links, which themselves are aspatial representations of the structure of network. However real nodes, i.e. centers and junctions, take space. As such they provide a spatial separation between areas that adjoin them. They serve as edges to adjoining areas (e.g. neighborhoods).

As Alfred Korzybski once said, "the map is not the territory". Similarly, the graph is not the place. Network elements separate as they connect.

Posted by David Levinson at 09:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Boing-boing: Making Light: Shipping container architecture. A really nice post about the use of excess shipping containers for housing and other purposes. With the disproportionately one-way flow of containerized commodities from Asia to the US, there are a surplus of containers landing on US shores (most are of course shipped back), the post details a number of articles about their reuse.

Posted by David Levinson at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nice article from the Financial Times on carsharing: You take the hire road

"Streetcar fosters this sense of community by encouraging a sense of responsibility towards other club users. You are asked not to leave the car with the petrol tank less than a quarter full; if the car gets dirty, you are invited to earn an hour’s free rental by taking it to the car wash and getting it cleaned at Streetcar’s expense; and if you return the car late, keeping a neighbour waiting, you are fined £25 – of which £20 goes to your aggrieved fellow member."

This is exactly the same logic behind the Delayer Pays Principle: Examining Congestion Pricing with Compensation (1.2 MB) (International Journal of Transport Economics 31:3 295-311) Peter Rafferty and I have posited for congestion pricing, those who cause delay pay those who they delayed.

Posted by David Levinson at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Transportationist makes Top 100 Academic Blogs Every Professional Investor Should Read .
I haven't given much in the way of stock tips on the blog, but hey, if someone can profit from reading this, more power to them.

Posted by David Levinson at 08:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Oberstar Forum on Transportation Policy and Technology: The Condition of Our Nation's Transportation Infrastructure: Heading Toward a Crisis? was held this past Sunday and Monday. The CTS website advertises the public Monday session, but there was a double-secret, super private, unadvertised, invitation only session attended by the elites in the transportation community (i.e. I was invited). These private sessions are more interesting in that there is less speech-making and more discussion, though one can hardly say there was no speech making. In fact, I gave a talk on the Cost of Frugality, which I have posted.

Posted by David Levinson at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MnDOT unveiled plans for the new I-35W replacement bridge day before yesterday... Interstate 35W Bridge in Minneapolis, MN, The main distinction in alternatives seems to be which way the piers are oriented. I think the best you can say about it is that it is unimaginative, but probably better looking than what went before. One never can truly visualize the bridge until it is complete, but I am not optimistic. There are opportunities to do interesting things in the space along the water under the bridge, Sydney does some great things under highway bridges there. It is not clear if those opportunities will be taken, but that is something that can be done later.

Clearly MnDOT missed the boat on the opportunity to use airrights over the bridge for some positive good (in addition to avoiding snow removal and de-icing costs) which is too bad, but not surprising.

Nevertheless, I am amazed that if Aesthetics/Visual Quality amounted to 20% of points available for technical evaluation, that something so mediocre will be built though.

Posted by David Levinson at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

From the Pioneer Press: MnDOT says releasing bridge inspection records could be a threat to national security.

Before you dismiss such threats as implausible, note that Osama Bin Laden was trained as a civil engineer at King Abdul Aziz University of Jedda and Yasser Arafat was trained as a civil engineer at Cairo University. Since civil engineering would seem to disproportionately lead to terrorism [perhaps too much statics?], we should be very careful who we give our bridge plans to, they might actually be able to read them (as opposed to say, going to the bridge and looking for cracks themselves, or just getting more exposives).

Posted by David Levinson at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Boing-Boing, from Science Daily:Clever Plants 'Chat' Over Their Own Network. This is just cool, ... everytime you think the world is complicated, it just gets more so.

Posted by David Levinson at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Washington Post: Infrared Scans May Regulate HOT Lanes. The latest technology used to detect cheaters in HOV/HOT lanes.

(1) Hopefully they won't throw out this data after its collected (see previous post on LA), it does have valuable planning uses in predicting mode utilization.

(2) Any semblance of privacy you thought you had is gone, hopefully we can watch the watchers just as easily as they watch us. David Brin's Transparent Society is interesting in this regard.

(3) The amount of effort we go to in order to enforce minor rules is amazing. In the absence of congestion on the HOV lane, (and the presence of congestion in the general purpose lanes) it is actually efficient for there to be some small amount of cheating: it takes a car out of the congested lanes, puts it in the uncongested lanes (without congesting them) and produces a net benefit to society. Too much clearly would congest the HOV/HOT lanes. It reminds one of the expression "A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone somewhere is having fun." The point isn't that it is costing society to have some cheating, the point is that "free riding" is cheating and "unfair" whatever that means.

Posted by David Levinson at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As with many large infrastructure projects, the estimated cost of the I-35W replacement bridge rises and rises. How come public officials never over-estimate initial costs? (Perhaps a question for my Transport Policy class).

Articles from the Strib and PiPress:
Sticker shock: Bridge tab soars by $143 million

The cost of rebuilding the collapsed I-35W span is climbing

Posted by David Levinson at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From the front page of the LA Times web page, an article on traffic counts!: L.A. doesn't save data on traffic growth

"But although the sensors and computers collect massive amounts of data about traffic patterns and congestion, they do little to help engineers plan for the city's growing transportation needs -- or determine how development is affecting traffic.

That's because the city does not save the information for more than a few days, using it only to direct traffic in real time by adjusting the speed at which lights turn from green to amber to red."

This is true elsewhere (Minneapolis e.g.), and a damn shame. I have been in meetings about this, but people are frugal and the beneficiaries are in different departments/units than those who would do the work.

Posted by David Levinson at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)