January 2012 Archives

I give a talk at my alma mater Georgia Tech on Thursday:

Thursday, February 2, 2012
11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Instructional Center, Room 205
Join CEE and Dr. David Levinson of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota as he speaks about network structure and travel behavior on Thursday, February 2, 2012 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM in the Instructional Center Room 205 (behind ISYE building). A light lunch box will be provided.

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 travelers 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.

Bio
Dr. David Levinson is a faculty member in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota and Director of the Networks, Economics, and Urban Systems (NEXUS) research group. He currently holds the Richard P. Braun/CTS Chair in Transportation. In academic year 2006-2007 he was a visiting academic at Imperial College in London. He has authored or edited several books, including The Transportation Experience and Planning for Place and Plexus, and numerous peer reviewed articles. He is the editor of the Journal of Transport and Land Use.

A growing set of researchers are boycotting Elsevier, a major academic publisher, details at: The Cost of Knowledge. From that website:

"Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect. The main objections are these:

1. They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals.
2. They sell journals in very large "bundles," so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals.
3. They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information."

The long review process is another complaint, but this is journal or editor specific, rather than Elsevier as an organization.

For those in the field of transportation research, Elsevier is an oligopolist and the dominant player at that, it publishes the well-known Transportation Research parts A - F and other journals in the transportation field (Research in Transportation Economics, Transport Geography, Accident Analysis and Prevention, Transport Policy, and Journal of Air Transport Management, as well as the new Economics of Transportation: Journal of ITEA)

Basically this is a collective action / coordination problem, someone has to coordinate academic publishing. Some money needs to be collected somewhere. Papers don't typeset themselves. The problem is the charge for this service is outrageous, allowing Elsevier in particular to collect excess rents (monopoly profits).

I have not yet joined the boycott, I am still debating internally. Words are cheap, actions have consequences. While undoubtedly I could get by, my students careers may be hurt if they were unable to publish in some of the highly ranked Elsevier journals. I count 7 papers currently under review in Elsevier journals and I don't want to restart the process on all of them. I have published other papers in Elsevier journals. And of course, all this may flop.

In transportation we need more alternatives. There are not enough open content journals, and only a few other serious non-Elsevier choices. We have the following significant English-language non-Elsevier journals I am familiar with, (this list seems like a lot, but few have the reach or the legacy of the TR journals, and many are specialized):

• Transportation Research Record (ideally if it were better managed, TRR would be the natural solution, given its size, distribution, and home in a non-profit organization, but the quality is inconsistent across disciplines and it should be open access.),
• ASCE Transportation Engineering,
• European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research , (TU Delft)*
• Journal of Advanced Transportation, (Wiley)
• Journal of Public Transportation, (U. South Florida)*


• ITE Journal, (Institute of Transportation Engineers)


• International Journal of Sustainable Transport (Taylor and Francis),


• International Journal of Transport Economics,


• Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems: Technology, Planning, and Operations, (Taylor and Francis)


• Journal of Choice Modeling, (U. Leeds)*


• Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, (U. Bath)


• Journal of Transport History, (U. Manchester)


• Journal of Transport and Land Use, (U. Minnesota)*


• Journal of Transport Literature, (Brazilian Transport Planning Society)* [mostly not English]
• Journal of Transportation of the Institute of Transportation Engineers ,




• Journal of Transportation and Statistics (newly relaunched, USDOT)*,


• Journal of Transportation Law, Logistics, and Policy, (Association of Transportation Law Professionals)


• Journal of the Transportation Research Forum,


• Journal of Transportation Safety & Security, (Taylor and Francis)


• Proceedings of the ICE: Transport, (Thomas Telford)


• Transport (Taylor and Francis, with Vilnius Gediminas Technical University)


• Transport Letters, (J. Ross Publishing)


• Transport Reviews, (Taylor and Francis)


• Transportation Planning and Technology, (Taylor and Francis)


• Transportation, (Springer) and


• Transportation Science (INFORMS).


• Transportmetrica , (Taylor and Francis)

* indicates open access.

[Did I miss any (I intentionally excluded journals from Bentham and SCIRP)?, a more comprehensive list is maintained by Robert Bertini here, a list of Open Access journals in Transport is here and Transportation is here ]

There are also lots of journals in adjacent fields (Safety, OR, Planning, Regional Science, Geography, Civil Engineering, etc.)

I have done what I can with JTLU, but I can't operate 15 open access journals, other people need to step up. We need new models.

The whole publication field is in flux, Public Library of Science and arXiv have been around a while in the sciences, and a new initiative called Faculty of 1000 is promoting "post-publication" peer review in biology and medicine.

Previous posts on Elsevier:

• Dear Elsevier, Your RSS Feeds are Broken [which I point out, they still are, 2.5 months after my first post]
• Problems at Elsevier where the issue was "Elsevier publishes fake journal for Merck".

Metropolis Mag on The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc:

"the collection of essays edited by Lewis Siegelbaum, is a fascinating look at automobile use, production, and urban planning behind the Iron Curtain. It reveals a system that, if far from socialist or egalitarian in origin, created a culture of automobile use distinct from the western world."

Carl Davis sends me to: Historical Gas Taxes for 26 States from Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Minnesota's is shown here) Building a Better Gas Tax - a set on Flickr

Why We Reason: How To Generate A Good Idea :

"The modern day coffeehouse can be found in the office buildings of the most innovative companies. At Pixar, for example, Steve Jobs insisted that the architect positioned the bathrooms at the center of the building so that the animator could easily strike up a conversation with the designer who could bounce ideas off of the COO. " [internalizing economies of agglomeration]

Lewis Lehe has posted: An Animated Argument For Congestion Pricing at Streetsblog. Well worth watching.

Some visualizations:

Urban Demographics: Москва TimeLapse

Not this body (on Vimeo) (via SR) To understand is to perceive patterns

Toronto Star: Toronto teens send Lego man on a balloon odyssey 24 kilometres high

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one)." - Surak

"The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many." - Kirk

Case A. An individual releases toxic substances into the unowned environmental commons where it is breathed in by many members of the community for the individual's benefit and to some community-members' cost. This is pollution.

Case B. The community releases toxic substances into an individual where it is ingested by the individual for the community's benefit and to some individuals' cost. This is immunization.

Is A bad and B good?

A produces in economic terms a "negative externality", an unwanted side-effect on third-parties. (Strictly speaking, pollution may also produce positive externalities, e.g. some agriculture may benefit from a change in the chemical composition of the air, or change in temperature, etc., these are often thought to be relatively small compared to the downsides)

B produces a "positive externality" (a good side-effect on third parties) [e.g. Herd immunity is whereby the immunity of a significant portion of the population protects others from disease, as it limits the ability of viruses to spread.]

So long as most individuals benefit from immunization, people seem to let it slide. But there have been a number of immunization attempts that were not generally successful, where the downsides may have outweighed the upside, the 1976 Swine Flu immunization is an example, where the flu killed 1 person, and the immunization killed 25 (of course, the story is quite complicated, and those who were immunized in 1976 were less likely to get ill in the 2009 outbreak, so it may have been net positive in the long run).

Pollution exists and is known to cause harm. Most people think all else equal, pollution is bad for society. There is debate on how much to regulate or price pollution, as well as the magnitude of the harm caused from individual pollutants. In the US, air pollution in general is down, though decreasing some pollutants may increase other pollutants (e.g. processes that reduce the size of pollutants may reduce the amount of large particulates but increase the number of small, less easily measured, particulates).

It is known that vaccines have side effects, it is not known in advance which unlucky individual will be the recipient of those side effects.

If you are a communitarian, A is unacceptable, B is acceptable. If you are an individualist, A is acceptable and B should be voluntary.

An individualist may willingly submit to immunization, but only if their personal benefit outweighs their personal cost, not strictly for herd immunity of for the benefit of others (unless those are things that they get salutary benefits from, either from a feeling of moral righteousness or from rising in status do to the perceptions of others). They believe society does not have the right to forcibly vaccinate individuals, or coerce individuals into vaccination in exchange for mandatory services (e.g. public education).

At TRB this week, I ran into former student and University of Minnesota Civil Engineering alumnus Michael Groh, who was working with National Transit Institute in New Jersey. He was presenting a poster (reduced version pictured, with a downloadable PDF) titled "An Assessment Scale for Travel Information at Bus Stops". There is an associated paper obtainable from the author or on the TRB website for attendees.

In brief, it provides a systematic way to assess bus stops according to four basic questions:

• Where does the bus go?
  


• How soon is the next bus?
  


• What does it cost?
  


• Is the bus stop design usable for everyone?
  

This is a much needed metric to remind operators what constitutes passing and failing bus stop performance. The vast majority of the Twin Cities bus stops would rate an "F" by these criteria, only a few of the newly remodeled downtown stops warrant an "A".

Bus stop signage is really important for a variety of reasons, but especially for what is often called "choice" ridership. People cannot choose a product if they have no information about it, and won't choose a product if they feel uncomfortable using it.

When living in London, I felt very comfortable taking the buses to neighborhoods I had never been before, with full knowledge there was an 'A' or 'B' level bus stop sign on the other end to help me get back home. In Minneapolis, if I rode a bus to an unknown neighborhood, I would likely wind up walking home for all the information that Metro Transit is going to give me.

See also previous posts:

Seattle Metro’s New Bus Stop Signs - The Transportationist.org

Towards an Urban Interface - Some Design Principles - The Transportationist.org

On "A Streetcar Named Development", Streetcars, Buses, and Signs - The Transportationist.org

Some links on visualization and interface …

Annie Mole @ Going UndergroundNext-Gen London Underground on-platform display - Tells how crowded next Tube is [an interesting user-interface mockup.

David King @ Getting from here to there: Visualizing NYC Taxi Activity

Graphserver Growing Shortest Path Trees.

Recently published:

• Parthasarathi, Pavithra, Hartwig Hochmair, and David Levinson (2012) Network Structure and Spatial Separation. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 39(1) 137-154 [download]

Abstract. This research aims to identify the role of network architecture in influencing individual travel behavior using travel survey data from Minneapolis-Saint Paul and Florida (Fort Lauderdale and Miami). Various measures of network structure, compiled from existing sources, are used to quantify roadway networks, and to capture the arrangement and connectivity of nodes and links in the networks and the spatial variations that exist among and within networks. The regression models show that travel behavior is correlated with network design.

Keywords: network structure, travel behavior

Five articles on self-driving cars

Tom Vanderbilt @ Wired: Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here

Molly Rants @ CNET News: Self-driving cars: Yes, please! Now, please!

John Markoff @ NY Times: Google’s Autonomous Vehicles Draw Skepticism at Legal Symposium [The first thing we do, let's kill all the ___]

Matt Yglesias @ Slate: Three Barriers To Robot Cars

Jeremy Hsu @ MSNBC: [Sebastian] Thrun leaving Stanford for online startup: "When a Stanford University professor [and autonomous vehicle developer, ed.] first offered a free online version of his "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" class, he attracted 160,000 students from around the world. Now he has given up his tenured academic position to create a startup that could deliver university-level education for low cost to anyone with an Internet connection."

I have a new post up at streets.mn: The reallocation of roadspace

Congratulations to Nexus group almnus Lei Zhang for winning TRBs Fred Burggraf Paper Award for paper 11-4223 - Behavioral Foundation of Route Choice and Traffic Assignment. This work extends his dissertation.

Belated congratulations to another Nexus group alum and co-winner of the TRB 2011 Best doctoral dissertation presentation: Shanjiang Zhu: The Roads Taken – Theory and Evidence on Route Choice in the Wake of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge Collapse and Reconstruction (Advisor: David M. Levinson), University of Minnesota.


Shanjiang is now a post-doc at the University of Maryland working with Lei Zhang and prof Gang-Len Chang.

JW sends me to Technology Review: Europe's Driverless Car (Driver Still Required) - :

""Driverless" technology will initially require a driver. And it will creep into everyday use much as airbags did: first as an expensive option in luxury cars, but eventually as a safety feature required by governments. "The evolutionary approach is from comfort systems to safety systems to automatic driving," says Jürgen Leohold, executive director for research at Volkswagen Group in Wolfsburg, Germany."

Autoblog: Average U.S. vehicle age rises 12% in the last five years:

"The average age of the approximately 240 million light-duty vehicles on U.S. roads has risen about 12 percent in the past five years, according to automotive data research firm Polk. The average car or light truck on the road last year was 10.8 years old, up from a 9.7-year average in 2006. Cars were, on average, 11.1 years old in 2011, while trucks were 10.4 years old, Polk said."

My coauthor Matt Kahn writes: about Royalties: "Switching subjects:   I would like to show my appreciation to my uncountable number of blog readers by revealing my blog royalties for the last 3 months.

Publication:
Environmental and Urban Economics

Earnings This Reporting Period:
$28.30

So, over the course of 3 months I post around 100 entries. If it takes me 10 minutes to write each of these then that's 1000 minutes or roughly 16 hours so $28/16 = $1.6 an hour  ---- not bad for a big bad full prof at UCLA?"

That is infinitely times what I make from my blog, but of course, he is an economist.

More on Understanding bicycle markings

From StreetsWiki:

Class I Class I bike lanes are "physically separated from motor vehicle and pedestrian traffic," providing a buffer against faster, heavier vehicles. This physical separation can come in the form of a tree-lined path, a sidewalk, a concrete buffer, bollards, or a line of traffic cones.

...

Class II
Class II bike lanes are demarcated by paint on asphalt. In some cases, the entire lane is painted a distinct color so as to be distinguished easily from the rest of the street. In most cases, the lane is marked by a stripe, often thicker than a standard dotted white line. Some Class II lanes also receive a stencil in the middle of the lane (also refered to as a "sharrow").

Class III
Class III lanes are bike routes that are represented only by posted route signs.

Brendon commented on my post "Given recent severe crashes, I'd say eliminating markings will not make things safer. In a perfect world where drivers always expected and anticipated all legal modes might be using the road, perhaps so, but we don't live in a perfect world."

and Hokan said "The point of these markings isn't so much actual safety (although the hope is that they don't make things worse), but perceived safety (comfort). This improved comfort is supposed to encourage more people to ride bikes rather than drive cars."

I argue instead that Class III bike lanes are a meaningless distinction. All roads where bikes are allowed and not given their own marked lane should be considered Class III. Signing (or marking) something in some places that is legal everywhere is confusion-creating. It will lead motorists to think they can ignore bikes (or worse, that they are illegal) where they are not marked, just as drivers ignore unmarked crosswalks.

I understand the logic of network effects that Brendon suggests, more bikes make roads safer by reminding motorists. However more signs do not do that. While the signs may hypothetically attract bicyclists (I would be interested in real counts before and after signage as a Class III bikeway on and off the bikeway, i.e. are bicyclists actually attracted by such signage, or is it just feel-good politically correct actions on the part of the bicycle bureaucracy), but the signs are more visual clutter distracting from important information about the environment (e.g. watching for actual bicycles and pedestrians rather than bicycle signs).

Many signs are ineffective (See Tom Vanderbilt on Children at play signs), and too many signs are counter-productive.

Kevin Krizek also comments.

Nexus group research will be presented at the Transportation Research Board conference in Washington DC, next week. Details of sessions are below, along with links to the papers:

	Type	No.	Sponsor	Session	Location	Time
	Workshop	173	ABE10	Analyzing the Risks and Rewards of Public-Private Partnerships	Hilton, Georgetown East	Jan 22 2012 1:30PM- 4:30PM
	Session	328	ABG20	Alternative Pedagogical Strategies and Tools for Effective Learning (paper)	Hilton, Columbia Hall 5	Jan 23 2012 1:30PM- 3:15PM
	Poster Session	352	ABE20	Issues in Transportation Economics: Marginal Cost of Travel, Value of Time, Value of Reliability, Vehicle Miles Traveled, and Economic Activity (paper)	Hilton, International Center	Jan 23 2012 2:00PM- 3:45PM
	Poster Session	600	ABJ30	Taking Urban Data to New Heights: New Sources, New Techniques,and New Applications (paper)	Hilton, International Center	Jan 24 2012 2:00PM- 3:45PM
	Session	622	ADD30	"Where" Matters: New Evidence and Approaches to Analyzing Location Choice (paper)	Hilton, Columbia Hall 7	Jan 24 2012 3:45PM- 5:30PM
	Poster Session	711	ADB10	Innovations in Activity and Travel Behavior (paper)	Hilton, International Center	Jan 25 2012 8:30AM- 10:15AM
	Session	768	ADB10	Route Choice Modeling (e-Session) (paper)	Hilton, International East	Jan 25 2012 2:30PM- 4:00PM

Robin Hanson @ Overcoming Bias: Why Hate Firms, Love Cities?:

"First, firms and cities are similar in many ways. They both vary greatly in size, and can be costly for long-time associates to leave. Both tend to be “selfish” in avoiding and excluding those who do not benefit other associates, and thus tend to favor rich folks. People can relate to both kinds of units as investors, suppliers, leaders, and customers.

Second, people tend to like cities more than firms. For example, many movies are love songs to particular cities, yet few movies have cities as villains. Many movies have firms as villains, but few have firms as heroes. Sporting teams tied to cities play in huge stadiums, while teams tied to firms play in local parks."

Tim Stonor (H/T UrbanDemographics): IBM Smart Cities, Helsinki | The power of the network: "However useful they are, digital technologies can not replace the powerful and beneficial effects of the highly connected street grid – the “essential structure” of urban living."

MinnPost: Metro Transit ridership topped 81 million in 2011:

"Ridership increased in all three types of Metro Transit bus service:

• Urban local routes — the heart of Metro Transit’s all-day service — increased 3.9 percent, or 2.2 million rides to 58.6 million.
• Ridership on freeway-oriented express bus routes was up 5.3 percent, or 479,000 rides, to 9.5 million.
• Rides on suburban crosstown routes grew 7.2 percent, or 114,000 rides, to 1.7 million.

“Ongoing fleet improvements and new technologies like the Go-To card and real-time bus departure information make riding the bus more predictable and pleasant than ever,” said Lamb.

Ridership was down slightly on Metro Transit’s two rail lines. The Hiawatha light-rail transit (LRT) line carried 10.4 million passengers, a decline of 55,000 from 2010. And the Northstar commuter rail line carried 703,000 passengers, down 7,000 from a year ago."

David Brin @ Contrary Brin: Is Libertarianism Fundamentally about Competition? Or about Property?:

"Let’s be plain here. The founder of both liberalism and libertarianism - Adam Smith - weighed in about both of these reasons for fairness, To him, they were equally important. All right, liberals and libertarians each emphasize different ones. Liberals talk about the moral reasons for fairness and libertarians the practical, competition-nurturing ones. They tend to forget that - as followers of Smith - they actually want the same end result!

What they share is something deeper that both movements ought to recognize. They want every child to hit age 21 ready and eager to join the rivalry of work, skill and ideas."

Kottke sends me to: Koushik Dutta - Google+: The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars :

"Google has been working on driverless cars for a few years now. The obvious selling point is that the cars will be much safer without a human behind the wheel.

Currently, a car spends 96% of its time idle. Compare that with planes which spend almost their entire lifetime in operation/airborne. Idle planes aren't making money, and they need to recoup their hefty $120M price tag. There is an unforgiving economic incentive to make sure it is always in use.

The proliferation of driverless cars will have a similar effect. Cars will spend less time idle: why would a household buy 2 (or even 3) cars, when they only need 1? Ride to work, then send the car home to your spouse. Need to go grocery shopping, but your kid also needs a ride to a soccer game? No problem, a driverless car can handle that.

What will begin as households cutting back to a single car, will expand. Why would a family need an entire car to themselves? That's crazy! It may start as extended family in the same area sharing cars, then neighbors sharing cars, and then entire apartment/condo complexes in cities offering driverless cars bundled into their HOA/rent.[2]

The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%. But back to my leading statement: there are unintended consequences. Parked cars will be a relic from the past. What happens to car insurance prices if a driver is no longer part of the equation? And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold.[1] This is the kind of disruptive change that can reshape the automotive industry. The recent GM/Chrysler bailout may have been for naught.[3]"

Kurzweil notes: A French autonomous car:

"French researchers have developed a self-driving vehicle, IEEE Spectrum Automaton reports.

IFSTTAR, a French R&D organization, and the Embedded Electronic Systems Research Institute at ESIGELEC, an engineering school in Rouen, are developing autonomous vehicle technologies to help test automotive safety systems.

The researchers modified a Renault Grand Espace by adding a “robot driver” to  control the exact trajectory, speed, and behavior of the vehicle and compare the performance of different safety systems.

"

JW sends me to Technology Review: Join the Mobility Revolution with These Five Apps Uber, Waze, NextBus, Avego, Progressive Insurance

Susan Kain in the New York Times has a pro-Introvert article: The Rise of the New Groupthink: "SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. "

In contrast, there are many who believe that cities, the machines that enables those inter-personal interactions, are the source of creativity. This is epitomized by recent books by Ed Glaeser and Ryan Avent.

We can make a simple table:

	City	Country
Introvert	Optimal amount of stimulation if quite space, Practical Creativity	Hermit alone in thoughts, Pure theory
Extrovert	Too many attractions, Connects rather than creates	Unsatisfied, No one to riff with

This is a gross oversimplification of personality and environments, and the text in the boxes is probably unfair to extroverts, who I am sure have created something in the history of humanity. It does however suggest both the risks of cities on being too stimulative (not enough time for thought), and the country (i.e. the antithesis of the city), which may be insufficiently stimulative and leave too much time for thought and not enough for testing of ideas.

Several really good ideas have come from the country though, and not just agricultural implements. My favorite story is that of Philo Farnsworth, one of the individuals credited with inventing the television. As wikipedia says: "A farm boy, his inspiration for scanning an image as series of lines came from the back-and-forth motion used to plow a field." We would not have had television as soon, or possibly in the same form, but for agricultural plowing strategies.

The key is to ensure the city has quite spaces, and the country has connecting places, both of which societies create, although one can argue whether the quantities and qualities are optimal for various things.

See also my old post: Does creativity whither with age?.

Recently published: Levinson, David (2011) Network Structure and City Size. PLoS One PLoS ONE 7(1): e29721, January 12, 2012 [doi]

Network structure varies across cities. This variation may yield important knowledge about how the internal structure of the city affects its performance. This paper systematically compares a set of surface transportation network structure variables (connectivity, hierarchy, circuity, treeness, entropy, accessibility) across the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. A set of scaling parameters are discovered to show how network size and structure vary with city size. These results suggest that larger cities are physically more inter-connected. Hypotheses are presented as to why this might obtain. This paper then consistently measures and ranks access to jobs across 50 US metropolitan areas. It uses that accessibility measure, along with network structure variables and city size to help explain journey-to-work time and auto mode share in those cities. A 1 percent increase in accessibility reduces average metropolitan commute times by about 90 seconds each way. A 1 percent increase in network connectivity reduces commute time by 0.1 percent. A 1 percent increase in accessibility results in a 0.0575 percent drop in auto mode share, while a 1 percent increase in treeness reduces auto mode share by 0.061 percent. Use of accessibility and network structure measures is important for planning and evaluating the performance of network investments and land use changes. Keywords: Connectivity, Network Structure, Transportation Geography, Network Science, City Size, Scaling Rules, Accessibility, Travel Behavior, Mode Share, Journey-to-Work

This paper has several features:

1. The paper includes a ranking of 50 US cities by estimated accessibility (Table 3). This estimate is macroscopic, though I think quite plausible, and shows the variation in the 10 minute vs. 20 minute ... vs. 60 minute and composite accessibilities. The composite numbers are more or less what you expect, but some small cities are quite fast, so have high 10 or 20 minute accessibilities by car. Lots of work remains to be done on this (both multiple modes and multiple points in time) but this should be a valuable metric.
2. Larger cities are better connected. They are also more productive. This research suggests a hypothesis (which further research will need to test) that variations in network structure may explain variations of economic output. More connected cities are more efficient. It is not simply how many people are in the city (the classic economy of agglomeration argument) but how they are connected that affects their productivity.

I will also comment about the publication itself. It was published in PLoS One, a first for me. PLoS ONE is a newish, open content journal across part of the Public Library of Science family that aims to represent all fields of study. I did this as an experiment as much as anything. The paper is out less than 4 months after submission, and 2 months after revision. This is *fast*, much faster than for-profit publishers offer. The journal is interdisciplinary, and does not winnow for importance (letting the field do that), instead winnowing for quality of the work and its description. Everyone in the field knows how arbitrary publication is when paper is a constraint. This seems an improvement.

Understanding Bicycle Markings in Minneapolis: A guide for motorists and bicyclists

Anyone besides me think this is far too complicated?

[Complications will cause more violations (and less safety) compared with a simpler system.]

Hypothesis: to increase safety, anything that is optional or advisory ought to be eliminated.

Bikes are either allowed (in which case they should be respected) or prohibited (like freeways, in which case they should be ticketed).

Cars are either allowed (in which case they should be respected) or prohibited (like exclusive bike lanes, in which case they should be ticketed). Transitions from prohibited to allowed and allowed to prohibited should be clearly marked.

4 types of lanes:

	Cars allowed	Cars prohibited
Bikes allowed	Shared lane [standard]	Exclusive bike lane [marked or signed as such]
Bikes prohibited	Exclusive motorized lane	Not a road

From what I can tell there are at least 5 shared lane markings: Green bike lanes, Advisory bike lanes, Sharrows, Bike Blvd, and Green shared lanes. There are at least 3 exclusive lane markings: Bike lanes, Cycle track, buffered bike lanes. This should be reduced to one exclusive marking (a bicycle symbol [maybe on a green pavement] with solid white lines). Buffers (no car) areas are standard markings that have no special meaning here. Some transitionary marking indicating the beginning and end of an exclusive bike lane can be used.

Via JM: App for drivers detects and reports potholes automatically : " Developed in partnership with a local professor, the Android app uses the accelerometers and GPS technology in users’ phones to register when and where the user’s car has experienced a pothole."

Via TS: Will Handsfield @- Greater Greater Washington on How will self-driving cars change transportation? :

• They'll be more often in use, less often parked
• They'll reduce labor costs
• They'll expand access to transportation
• They'll be safer
• They'll reduce congestion
• They'll make current transit economics obsolete
• They won't last as long
• They can be electric
• They'll change culture

David Metz @ The Limits To Travel" HS2 [the UK's second HSR line after the Chunnel connection to London] is given government go-ahead.

MinnPost reports Vikes to Minneapolis: Don't forget an extra $67 million cost for dome site: "The team estimates it would earn $12.3 million less in revenues per year at the U's stadium than it would make at the Metrodome, because of space limitations, sponsorships and fan amenities."

The net present value of $12.3 million, discounted at 3 percent, for 30 years is $248 million. Go here if you want to play with alternative scenarios. (At 0 percent this is only $360.9 million)

This is less than the public infrastructure cost. In other words, just give Zygi $248 million in cash and let the Vikings play at the Bank.

Given the approximately $1 billion in total costs the stadium was estimated to cost, I just saved everyone concerned three-quarters of a billion dollars. I would like just 10 percent for my efforts today.

Ahmed El-Geneidy and Ehab Diab @ McGill have a new paper out: Understanding the impacts of a combination of service improvement strategies on bus running time and passenger’s perception 10.1016/j.tra.2011.11.013 in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice :

"This study uses stop-level data collected from the Société de transport de Montréal (STM)’s automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automatic passenger count (APC) systems, in Montréal, Canada. The combination of these strategies has lead to a 10.5% decline in running time along the limited stop service compared to the regular service. The regular route running time has increased by 1% on average compared to the initial time period. The study also shows that riders are generally satisfied with the service improvements. They tend to overestimate the savings associated with the implementation of this combination of strategies by 3.5–6.0 min and by 2.5–4.1 min for both the regular route and the limited stop service, respectively. "

Time savings produce a "time illusion" in transit just as in HOT lanes, where travelers over-estimate their time savings from paying the toll and traveling at free-flow speed compared to the parallel untold road. This time illusion is a good thing for service providers, as customers over-credit the benefits they receive. This might, however, imply people overestimate the time loss from a reduction in service. In general, people overestimate their actual travel time (Parthasarathi et al. working paper).

Schneier on Security: The TSA Proves its Own Irrelevance: "That's right; not a single terrorist on the list. Mostly forgetful, and entirely innocent, people. Note that they fail to point out that the firearms and knives would have been just as easily caught by pre-9/11 screening procedures. And that the C4 -- their #1 "good catch" -- was on the return flight; they missed it the first time. So only 1 for 2 on that one. "

Building America's Future Educational Fund: Decision 2012: GOP Candidates on Infrastructure [Ron Paul comes out for abolishing the TSA].

Preston Schiller sends this along from Canadian Civil Engineer: Thinking outside the transportation box (pdf) Goto p. 10

Quantum Levitation via Rafael Pereira @ urbandemographics.blogspot.com

Crossposted at streets.mn and transportationist.org Photos of skyways by author from Sydney (1), Portland (2), Minneapolis (3), Tokyo (1), and Harrogate (1) respectively.

Everyone seems to be hating on Minneapolis's world-beating skyway network. Sam Newberg is the latest in a recent post at streets.mn: Is it Time to Remove Those Pesky Skyways? :

"The following post shares a similar argument as an article I wrote four years ago for the Downtown Journal (in Minneapolis). I was chastised at the time and suppose I will be again. However, with the recent opening of a new, $3 million skyway link to better connect the Accenture tower to adjacent blocks, as well as the new Downtown 2025 Plan taking on the “Skyway Paradox,” I was persuaded to bring it up again. So here goes: Isn’t it about time to start removing our skyways? A few years ago, Jen Gehl, a notable and well-respected Danish urbanist, was in town for an Urban Land Institute presentation. He noted downtown Minneapolis was “no longer up to the beat” of other world-class winter cities, blaming the skyways for striking a “defensive posture” against nature. Save for perhaps one bitter cold winter week per year, I couldn’t agree more. It doesn’t make sense to spend more than $1 million per skyway to perpetuate this anti-world class defensive posture. Gehl’s comments made it into the Skyway Conundrum section of the recently-released Downtown 2025 Plan, so someone is listening! While the plan doesn’t suggest removal, at least they admit the problem, and that, my friends, is the first step to recovery."

I don't go downtown much for a variety of reasons, but pedestrian traffic-starved streets are not that reason. Following the model of Victor Gruen, downtown business interests made a decision in the early 1960s to build skyscrapers and skyways and reinforced that decisions continuously. While I am not convinced building skyscrapers was economically wise, given skyscrapers and an arterial street network on which every street and avenue is an entrance or exit to a radial freeway, skyways are a reasonable way to connect buildings. In economic jargon, while no cars downtown might be a "first-best" solution for pedestrians, we don't live in that world. Given the world where cars dominate streets, a pedestrian-only level is a viable "second-best" solution.

• Why should all of the modes interact on all levels. In principle, I like shared space as much as anyone, but I don't like walking on a sidewalk next to 3 or 4 or 5 lanes of motorized traffic, why should I be confined to a narrow building hugging strip rather than travel on a strictly pedestrian level.
• Tall buildings should generate sufficient traffic to support retail on both the street level and the internal skyway level. In Planning for Place and Plexus we have a box "Ground Floor Retail Everywhere" which estimated that if all retail trips were home-based, 10 story apartment buildings would be sufficient to generate 1 floor of retail. A similar calculation could be done for non-home based (i.e. work-based) retail trips, and given the higher density of people per square foot in office buildings, should generate similar numbers. Short buildings don't justify skyways, but tall buildings do.
• Skyways reduce inter-building transportation costs. This should increase inter-building activity and thus economies of agglomeration. Given the only purpose of cities is to connect people at low cost for some mutual advantage, the better cities connect people, the better off everyone is.

I have coauthored two papers about their evolution, I encourage you all to read the first: Corbett et al. (2009) Evolution of the second-story city: the Minneapolis Skyway System. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design volume 36, pages 711 - 724, which goes into the history of the Minneapolis system. Could the skyways be better. Of course. Some ideas:

• First, they can better connect to the street network with staircases or lifts adjacent to the sidewalks.
• Second, they can follow a more regular topology. More importantly the internal skyway level network inside the buildings themselves could be far more navigable than it is. While it is fine for regular commuters who learn the ins and outs, its medieval labyrinth is horrible for the unfamiliar traveler.
• Third, perhaps the skyway level should be on the 10th or 20th floor instead of the 2nd (The Petronas Towers at Kuala Lampur puts them at the 41st floor). This would require more coordination, but may be more useful in reducing the total amount of vertical movement required for inter-building personal transportation. It is probably a bit late to retrofit Minneapolis, but should be considered in cities newly adopting skyways.

Skyways are Minneapolis's Cable Cars, our London Underground or Route-Master Bus, our Venetian Canals. Skyways are the iconic transportation system of Minneapolis. With all else (roads, LRT, etc.) we are copy cats. We need to embrace skyways as such, and not listen to others who want Minneapolis to fit into the conventions of relatively weather-less European cities.

Betty McCollum @ StarTribune: St. Croix River Crossing is an albatross : "There are as many as 1,170 structurally deficient bridges across Minnesota. You may be one of the estimated 2.4 million Minnesota drivers traveling over these deficient bridges each day. Or maybe it's your child's school bus?"

Price Roads A new blog about one of our favorite subjects.

Technically Incorrect @ CNET NewsThe joy of Microsoft's 'avoid ghetto' GPS patent:

"Pedestrians have sometimes felt neglected when it comes to GPS directions.

Indeed, not so long ago, one lady sued Google because the directions its map offered led her (she believed) to be struck by a car.

Now Microsoft has been granted a patent that is designed to make its maps more pedestrian-friendly.

Somehow, this patent has immediately been dubbed the "avoid ghetto" feature.

The gist of it seems to be that Microsoft's GPS--which will reportedly be inserted into Windows Phones in the future--will use input from more varied and up-to-date sources in order to create suggested routes."

Marianne Lavelle @ National Geographic (via JM) Better Road Building Paves Way for Energy Savings:

"When considering how cars and trucks generate such a large part of the world's greenhouse gas pollution, it's easy to overlook what lies beneath them. But under all that traffic, there are roads. And the paving material itself-the asphalt, concrete, and rock-and how it is placed, have an important impact on the atmosphere."

Charles Q. Choi @ National Geographic Why Tornadoes Take the Weekends Off in Summer (via AM):

"Tornadoes and hailstorms may take the weekends off during the muggy summer months, according to a new study that reveals new ways human activity can inadvertently sway weather."

[Hint, it's a new externality of driving]

Adrian Moore posts: The Detailed Concerns of the CA HSR Peer Review Group:

"Since the Peer Review Group report is curiously still not available on their website (but you can email them for a copy) I thought a summary of their analysis would be useful.  Here, concisely as I can, are the key points, with some commentary.

1. "[I]t is hard to seriously consider a multi-billion dollar Funding Plan that offers no position on whether [the first operating section should be from almost Bakersfield to almost San Jose, or from Fresno to almost LA]."

2. The first section to be built will not be "a very high-speed railway (VHSR)" capable of operating at top speeds.  "Therefore it does not appear to meet the requirements of the enabling State legislation." "The [first section] will not be electrified, and thus cannot serve as a high-speed test track for the future VHSR rolling stock."

3. "The only clear remaining basis for the [first section] is that it can serve as a vehicle for the use of Federal money that has specific deadlines."

4. "The fact that the Funding Plan fails to identify any long term funding commitments is a fundamental flaw in the program." "The CHSRA has also made it clear there will be no private sector interest in the project until the full public sector role is defined and funded, which means that significant private funding will not be available for many years."  "The legislature could, of course, rectify this by enacting [a new tax or fee]. Lacking this, the project as it is currently planned is not financially 'feasible'."

5. "[W]e do not think that the current description constitutes a 'feasible' business model for a number of reasons." (bullets paraphrase)

The draft business plan relies on 'illustrative' concepts not decisions by the CHSRA.
There is no identified funding for the plan presented.
The biggest risk is system integration, but the plan requires all integration to happen very late in the project.
6. "We have repeatedly said that we do not believe that the current approach to project management, with the CHSRA's staffing, salaries and procurement controlled by California public agency rules, will suffice if the project gets fully underway and the CHSRA has to suddenly manage a construction effort larger than that currently managed by Caltrans."(emphasis added)

7. "Unfortunately, despite a strong recommendation from this group, the demand forecasts remain an internal product of the CHSRA and its internal peer review panel. The forecasts have not been subjected to external and public review, and many of the internal workings of the model. . . remain unclear."

8. "Capital cost estimates for the system have been steadily rising in every Business Plan." "The reasonableness of the capital budgets would be improved by development of a risk-based, cost-loaded construction schedule that makes a more explicit attempt to allow for a broad range of outcomes in cost and schedule."

9. "[T]he decision to put the entire initial effort into the Central Valley maximizes the risk to the State if no significant funding appears after the initial Federal contributions."

10. "In our judgment, a finding of feasibility in the Funding Plan would require that the following assumptions be found reasonable:" (bullets paraphrase)

The first section can be completed within budget and on time despite a lack of construction experience, managerial resources, and potential delays from lawsuits.
The $24-$30 billion still needed to connect the first section to either San Jose or San Fernando valley when the state is the only likely source, and is broke.
That the cost once up and running will be on budget, ridership will be close to estimates, and an inexperienced CHSRA can manage all the tricky integration issues.
All these same things will be true of adding the next part of the system, including another $14-$35 billion.
"[O]ur experience with [other HSR projects in the US and around the world] strongly suggest that each of these assumptions alone is slightly optimistic, and taken together, strongly so.""

Adrian Moore @ Reason writes: > Small MN Town Privatizes its Police Force:

"Foley, MN has privatized its police.

Yesterday, wearing uniforms and carrying sidearms, security guards began doing 24-hour patrols every day of the week on the shady streets of Foley, a community of 2,600 surrounded by farmland, northeast of St. Cloud.

The cost-saving move has triggered worry among some that town leaders may have gone too far, taking some life-or-death responsibilities out of the hands of those with the legal authority to enforce the law.

“It’s a social experiment and it’s polarizing,” said Steve Olson, a Foley Town Council member who called the deal “the best we could do with the resources we’ve got.”"

I am not clear on the moral or significant practical difference between a town hiring a bunch of private individuals who join a guild or union to police streets from a town hiring a firm comprised of a bunch of private individuals (who may or may not also be unionized) to police streets. It seems just a very slightly different formulation of the contracting process, with one situation involving the town in a lot of micro transactions (directly employing police officers) and the other involving the town in one contract with an organization that engages in a lot of micro transactions. Yet it is unusual, and thus is an experiment worth watching closely to see if it results in lower/higher costs or better/worse safety.

[I had to look up Foley on the map].

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The Telegraph: High-speed rail: A £250m lesson for Britain's rail enthusiasts:

"The new “Fyra” high-speed service in the Netherlands — opened just two years ago — is close to financial collapse with passengers shunning its premium fares and trains running up to 85 per cent empty.

The line, between Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Breda, cost taxpayers more than £7 billion to build but is losing £320,000 a day amid disastrous levels of patronage.

A Dutch passenger pressure group, Voor Beter OV (For Better Public Transport), is now taking the national rail operator to the Netherlands’ competition tribunal after it slowed down services on the regular network in an apparent attempt to drive passengers on to the high-speed line."

Planet Money @ NPR: A Man. A Van. A Surprising Business Plan. :

Everyone, it seemed, was facing the same problem he was. And this is when Adam Humphreys had his big idea. He called his buddy Steven Nelson. And they rented a van.

A large Penske cargo van.

And they parked it in front of the Chinese consulate. Right in front of the exit door, where frustrated visa applicants wandered out into the sunshine wondering what to do. These lost souls, like Adam a few days earlier, would now be greeted by a sign on the van: Lucky Dragon Mobile Visa Consultants.

Inside, Adam had tricked out the van to be a mobile solution to Chinese bureaucracy. There are a couple of Mac laptops and a printer, plus an old couch, Christmas lights and bamboo mats. It's as cozy as a dorm room. And confused visa applicants line up outside.

Peter Gordon sends me to the LA Times, who write an awful editorial: Keeping faith with California's bullet train: "Worthwhile things seldom come without cost or sacrifice. That was as true in ancient times as it is now; pharaoh Sneferu, builder of Egypt's first pyramids, had to try three times before he got it right, with the first two either collapsing under their own weight or leaning precipitously. But who remembers that now? Not many people have heard of Sneferu, but his pyramids and those of his successors are wonders of the world."

In addition to Peter Gordon's point about slaves building the pyramids, I will reiterate Dick Soberman's (U Toronto) point that "the Pyramids have lower operating costs". I am sure three millennia from now people will visit the ruins of the earthquake-ravaged island of California to visit the random spurs of metal and concrete that were once a High-speed rail line which had operated for about a year before technology obsoleted it and the operator went bankrupt. This is much like today when veritable hoards of people visit closed Underground stations and other abandoned infrastructure. This future tourism (discounted to the present at an appropriate discount rate of negative 7 percent) is perhaps the best justification for HSR yet.

The education system in California has clearly deteriorated far beyond what we once understood when editorial writers either believe supporting HSR construction at this point is good policy, or believe their audience will be moved by this.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Cross-posted at streets.mn and transportationist.org. Wells Fargo Bank has shuttered the drive-thru bank part of its branch at University and Emerald in Minneapolis (on the St. Paul City Line). [Google Street View image shown.] This may be for several reasons, the branch is immediately across the street from a Central Corridor LRT station (under construction), its road access has consequently been constricted. It would make a nice redevelopment opportunity, so this may simply be a real estate transaction. But perhaps there are other reasons. We have achieved peak travel in the US, and internet and electronic banking has replaced much drive-thru business. I, like many pedestrians and bicyclists, am annoyed with the hostility the drive-thru gives to non-auto modes. I was reprimanded for walking up to a drive-thru ATM at a Maryland National Bank in Columbia (after many acquisitions, now part of Bank of America) ... of course there was no walk-up ATM there, or I would have used that. If I don't want to or can't deal with a person, I still have to walk-up to the drive-thru ATM at my Credit Union on University Avenue, which still does not have a walk-up (and their machine looks circa 1980). The annoying part is not just the wrong height of the ATM and the poor User Interface, it is the cross-subsidy non-driving customers give to the driving customers, who pay no extra for the larger building and infrastructure they require. Drive-thru businesses have a long history in the US, dating at least from 1930 in the banking sector. Obviously gas stations were drive-thru, and I suppose it expanded from there. I had a fascination with these types of businesses as a child, both because of their (at least banks) use of pneumatic tubes, and just because of the futuristic feeling one had doing business from a car. I was impressed when I visited my aunt who went to a drive-thru dairy store in the Philadelphia suburbs. In the planned community of Columbia, Maryland, we did not have these, though drive-thru banks were allowed in the Village Centers, at first drive-thru restaurants were not, and certainly not drive-thru groceries. We eventually got a Fotomat knock-off, and I was fascinated by the miniaturization of retail. Visiting some southern town (I'm guessing Tallahassee, but it was a couple of decades ago) when I was in college, there was the drive-thru liquor and gun store (like this one, but different), everything for good-ole-boys to have a really good time on a Friday night. There is also a drive-thru romance store in Alabama, which seems less awful and gives a different meaning to the term 'quickie'. Of course there are drive-thru 'quick-serve' restaurants, and even Starbucks, which was once aiming to be a third space, in addition to these other oddball collections. Tom Vanderbilt in a Slate article on the subject notes McDonald's gets 65 percent of US sales from drive-thru. An hour of Googling does not give me a solid number of drive-thrus in the US, but Rheitt Allain estimates about 100,000. There is better data on all restaurants, apparently the number of restaurants in the US is dropping about 2 percent according to Nation's Restaurant News to 574,050 in 2011. One assumes drive-thrus are dropping as well, though independents are experiencing most of the fall. Overall, spending for food away from home has been dropping the past few years as a function of the recession and high gas prices. The total number of bank branches seems to have peaked in 2009 (i.e. it was down in 2010, whether this is short term or permanent is of course unclear), while the number of institutions is way off the peak due to consolidation and merger. All of this portends that the US may have saturated the drive-thru market, and the direction is moving down. It is still speculative, and future data will be required to confirm this, but if so, we may be facing a more walk-up America.

Tyler Cowan @ Marginal Revolution sends me to The Atlantic: A Single Boeing 777 Engine Delivers Twice the Horsepower of All the Titanic's in "Facts about engines":

The RMS Titanic weighed almost 50,000 tons and could carry 3,500 people. Before it sunk, it was world-famous as the massive titan of the sea. Its multiple engines, powered by 159 coal furnaces, were designed to deliver 46,000 horsepower.

Compare that to today’s beastly mode of transport: the Boeing 777. Bangalore Aviation points out that a single GE90-115B engine puts out over 110,000 horsepower, or more than twice the design output of all the Titanic’s steam engines.

And that power is obviously hooked up to a much smaller vehicle. The Titanic had to carry 14,000,000 pounds of coal alone; the 777 has a total weight of only 775,000 pounds.

Yglesias @ Moneybox: The Perils Of Privatization: "Mike Konczal attempts to construct a 2 x 2 ideological classification of different modes of municipal parking provision in order to attempt a critique of a deal whereby Chicago have J.P. Morgan a 75-year lease on all its city's parking revenues:

Bill Lindeke @ Streets.Mn Cars vs. Phones: The Battle Begins n: "Over the next few days, I’m going to make a few observations about this debate. My main point is that the debate between cars and phones is interesting because it pits two crucial technologies, and two forms of urban space, against each other. The automobile and the ubiquity of driving is something that’s been fundamental to both 20th century cities and the 20th century economy. Meanwhile, smart mobile devices and the ubiquity of the internet are the prime example of what is predicted to dominate 21st century cities and the 21st century economy."

Michael Cooper @ NYTimes: For High-Speed Rail, Support in the Past From G.O.P. Presidential Hopefuls : "President Obama’s program to bring bullet trains to the United States has been left on life support by the strident opposition of Republicans in Congress and in statehouses around the nation. But the idea may carry more favor with some of the Republican candidates vying to unseat Mr. Obama, who have a history of supporting high-speed rail."

Anonymous @ The Economist: Crowd dynamics: The wisdom of crowds : "IMAGINE that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?" [Some nice quotes from Dirk Helbing, I have a Helbing number of 2]

Lauren Goode at AllThingsD: Uber CEO Responds to New Year’s Eve Complaints - Lauren Goode - Commerce - AllThingsD: "Complaints arose on Twitter about the high price of Uber car rides due to so-called surge prices that were put into effect across multiple cities. One user, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur named Brendan Mulligan, described in a blog post how a two-minute, half-mile Uber ride cost him $75. He also offered some tips for improving the app." [Uber calls it Pulse pricing rather than Dynamic pricing or Congestion pricing. Customers dislike all the same. Yglesias also has some comments].

JS sends me to Wendell Cox at New Geography (via Sam Staley): The Driving Decline: Not a "Sea Change" : "The Decline in Context: Among the potential causes, certainly the most important is the economic situation,with steeply declining household incomes and the worst economic situation since the 1930s. The longer term driving trends will be more apparent when (and if) prosperity restores healthy growth in employment. Moreover, with only a small part of travel being attracted to transit, a more significant shift could involve substitution of access by information technology (on-line). Even with the decline, however, there has been nothing like a "sea change" in how the nation travels."

JS then writes:

I agree with Dr. Cox and Dr. Stalely that this is not "a sea change". However, it would not be hard to find MPO's across the nation still projecting 1.5% to 2.0% annual growth. So while the change in vehicular travel is not a sea change, a sea change in forcasting future traffic is appropriate. New cheap mobile energy would spark renewed traffic growth, but is unlikely to be right around the corner, and the non-government tech sector is outperforming the bricks, mortor and pavement sector by a mile in connecting people. My own comments reflected in February 2009 that traffic rates are not ever inceasing. 7. Based on FHWA Transportation Statistics 12 month moving average nationwide the November 2008 Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) for the US is approximately equal to the January 2004 VMT (2.89 trillion VMT). The change in the last year is highly correlated to the higher gas prices. One should also look at the trend line of VMT growth over time and look at the trend growth.

• a. January 83 to January 88 average annual VMT growth 3.8%
• b. January 88 to January 93 average annual VMT growth 3.1%
• c. January 93 to January 98 average annual VMT growth 2.7%
• d. January 98 to January 03 average annual VMT growth 2.2%
• e. January 03 to January 08 average annual VMT growth 1.0%

I would add that FHWA's Oct 2011 traffic is at the same level as December 2004 level so it is looking nationally like a 7 year stretch without a significant rise.

[I guess it depends on what you mean by "sea change". Something that used to always go up now goes down, seems striking to me. - dml]

Ed Stych @ Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal reports: Minneapolis opens its first new skyway in years : "A new skyway that links the Accenture Tower to the Ameriprise Financial Center in downtown Minneapolis opened Friday. Some Accenture Tower tenants along with building general manager Bob Traeger held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to officially open the $3 million skyway. ... Traeger said it's Minneapolis' 84th skyway, and he believes it's the city's first skyway to be built in about 10 years."

Brendon notes:

Streets.MN is the culmination of a lot of work by some great land use and transport thinkers in Minnesota.  I’m please to be part of this project.  Today the new website was launched so please head on over and check it out.

Of course make sure to do the Twitter and Facebook thing too.

It has the makings of the best urban blog in the US. I'm glad to be a part of it as well.