Now at streets.mn How a chance encounter in St. Paul almost prevented World War II :
"While staying in St. Paul, Minnesota, Zeppelin encountered a fellow German who had served for the Union inflating a hot-air balloon. It was here Count Zeppelin first went airborne in 1863. The rest, as the say, is history."
We are pleased to announce the publication of Vol. 5, Issue 3 of the Journal
of Transport and Land Use.
Table of Contents
Viewpoint: Assessing the reality—Transport and land use planning to
achieve sustainability
What makes travel 'local': Defining and understanding local travel behavior
Impact of light rail implementation on labor market accessibility: A
transportation equity perspective
How built environment affects travel behavior: A comparative analysis of
the connections between land use and vehicle miles traveled in US cities
Does public transit use increase the economic efficiency of urban areas?
The paths from walk preference to walk behavior: Applying latent factors in
structural equation modeling
Delivering the 'D' in transit-oriented development: Examining the town
planning challenge
Book Review
Human transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our
communities and our lives, by Jarrett Walker
The Journal of Transport and Land Use is an open-access, peer-reviewed
online journal publishing original interdisciplinary papers on the
interaction of transport and land use. Domains include: engineering,
planning, modeling, behavior, economics, geography, regional science,
sociology, architecture and design, network science, and complex systems.
Thank you for the continuing interest in our work,
Now @ streets.mn: 2012 Best Mid-Late 20th Century Enclosed Shopping Mall: Mall of America:
"What do most urbanists want? A lively, pedestrian realm, clean, free of automobiles, with a variety of activities, the ability to interact with others and randomly encounter friends and acquaintances. This is what the shopping mall gives."
Now @ Streets.MN : In praise of contiguity :
"After seeing other places throughout the world, notably Toronto, London, Manhattan, any continental European city, even Washington DC, I believe the problem with making Minneapolis a first rate pedestrian city is the lack of contiguity. There are some really good walkable sections, but they are not connected well (or at all)."
WALKABLE Dallas-Fort Worth: Why Grids Matter and We Should Recreate Them At All Cost (Strictly for the ROI):
"A dendritic system is defined by a branching structure that funnels movement in one direction. Whereas a conventional grid provides a multiplicity of routes. The key defining factor is choice. Think about this from where you live and you're on your way to work or to pick up the kids or to get a gallon of milk. How many routes can you take? What if there is a wreck along the way? How many different modes of travel are quick and convenient?There is quite a bit of talk about the emergent nature of cities as complex systems, but few really understand the applicability to how we design our cities and the dynamics of the process. What we have to understand is that emergence implies a second level of organization that is largely beyond our control. Why? Because we can only 'design' the first level of organization, whether it is a building or a road. Because designers are only one person or group working on one problem. The second order of 'design' happens when everybody else decides how to use the system. That can't be designed en masse, only nudged in certain directions depending upon how well we understand the dynamics of this emergence."
Quartz: Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla Motors is now cash-flow positive:
"Elon Musk just disclosed on CNBC that last week, for the first time, Tesla Motors was “mildly cash-flow positive.” That’s only a couple weeks later than Musk’s earlier prediction that Tesla would become cash-flow positive by the end of November. The electric-car company is also paying back early its $465 million loan from the US Department of Energy, and the company is ramping up production to 200 cars per week."
10,000 cars per year is still a bit less than the 13 million cars per year in the US market, but it is more than zero, or what EV production has been historically. It would be about half of Nissan Leaf sales (18,000) or a third of the Chevy Volt (~30,000).
More on Electric Drive sales here at the industry trade group. Sales of hybrids + EVs are now up to 3.3% of the total market. Most of that is hybrids though.
NYT Reports: John Silva, Maker of ‘Telecopter’ Camera, Dies at 92 :
"Helicopter news footage is common today. But until myriad problems in sending live pictures from a moving aircraft were solved, television broadcasters could not show an eagle’s-eye view of a forest fire, or contemplate aerial coverage of, say, a famous man fleeing the police in a white Ford Bronco.John Silva made that now-familiar vantage possible in 1958, when he converted a small helicopter into the first airborne virtual television studio."
If anyone was wondering why Google is interested in self-driving vehicles ... imagine the future as robot black cabs. The Next Web: London’s black cabs to get free high-speed WiFi hotspots from early 2013
London Reconnections: In Pictures: London Underground Stamps & £2 Coin :
"Earlier this year, the Post Office confirmed that they would be issuing a number of stamps to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the opening of the Underground. The designs for these stamps have now been made public, and are featured below. The set features two second class stamps, which focus specifically on the Metropolitan Railway, and four first class stamps taking a broader look at the Underground. In addition, there are four long-format commemorative stamps each of which features a variety of Underground posters."
Recently published
Carrion, Carlos and David Levinson (in press) Valuation of travel time reliability from a GPS-based experimental design Transportation Research part C [doi]:
"In the Minneapolis–St. Paul region (Twin Cities), the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) converted the Interstate 394 High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes to High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes (or MnPASS Express Lanes). These lanes allow single occupancy vehicles (SOVs) to access the HOV lanes by paying a fee. This fee is adjusted according to a dynamic pricing system that varies with the current demand. This paper estimates the value placed by the travelers on the HOT lanes because of improvements in travel time reliability. This value depends on how the travelers regard a route with predictable travel times (or small travel time variability) in comparison to another with unpredictable travel times (or high travel time variability). For this purpose, commuters are recruited and equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices and instructed to commute for two weeks on each of three plausible alternatives between their home in the western suburbs of Minneapolis eastbound to work in downtown or the University of Minnesota: I-394 HOT lanes, I-394 General Purpose lanes (untolled), and signalized arterials close to the I-394 corridor. They are then given the opportunity to travel on their preferred route after experiencing each alternative. This revealed preference data is then analyzed using discrete choice models of route. Three measures of reliability are explored and incorporated in the estimation of the models: standard deviation (a classical measure in the research literature); shortened right range (typically found in departure time choice models); and interquartile range (75th–25th percentile). Each of these measures represents distinct ways about how travelers deal with different sections of reliability. In all the models, it was found that reliability was valued highly (and statistically significantly), but differently according to how it was defined. The estimated value of reliability in each of the models indicates that commuters are willing to pay a fee for a reliable route depending on how they value their reliability savings."
Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends slideshow: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update
Nice slides on Asset-Heavy vs. Asset-Light dealing with transportation.
Jonas Eliasson gives a TEDx talk on Congestion pricing:
Andrew has a nice, long-awaited post unlocking the Twin Cities street alphabets @ streets.mn: When You Plan, You Begin With A B C :
"I was driving through Uptown with a friend in 2004 when it hit me: these streets are in alphabetical order! As a visitor I was impressed by such orderliness; a month later I moved to Minneapolis (not because of the street names—or at least, not entirely because of them). I learned about the second alphabet while visiting friends in Linden Hills, but it wasn’t until several years later than some random Google Maps browsing revealed not two but eight (okay, maybe just 7 and 1/13th) sequences of alphabetically-ordered street names extending west from Aldrich. By this time I also knew of the presidential sequence in northeast Minneapolis, and more map browsing revealed some others."
NY Times: Tunnel Collapses Outside Tokyo Kills Nine :
"The police said they were investigating the cause of the collapse on Sunday at the Sasago Tunnel — a three-mile passage near the city of Otsuki and about 50 miles west of Tokyo — and for evidence of negligence by the company that operates the highway.News reports said investigators believed that supports in the ceiling of the 35-year-old tunnel might have grown brittle, allowing hundreds of the slabs to fall onto passing vehicles. Each slab weighed 1.2 tons, officials said."
In City Journal, Brandon Fuller writes: The Genius of Dirt Roads :
"Angel writes that governments in the developing world, whose financial capacity is often limited, should focus on what may sound unglamorous: establishing an arterial grid of dirt roads throughout each city’s future territory, much as the commissioners did in Manhattan. The grid should connect to the city’s existing network of roads, of course, and it should cover an area that the city expects its future population growth to require. These arteries will one day carry public transportation and private traffic, and such infrastructure as water mains, sewers, storm drains, and telecommunications networks will follow their routes."
The grid has advantages and drawbacks. In Planning for Place and Plexus we write:
The morphology and queuing properties of the plexus (its supply and demand) ultimately determine both the efficiency of the network in moving people and the efficiency of the land use. Radial (hub-and-spoke) networks allow easy access to the center but create inconvenient sharply angled parcels. In contrast, 90-degree grids maximize travel times (for anyone traveling in a diagonal direction) but create efficient parcels. A major issue with network topology is the interconnectedness of the network. Interconnected networks, be they grid or radial in nature, enable and even encourage through traffic, while a tree-like network discourages that problem. The topology of the network, grid, radial, organic (curvilinear) or otherwise, affects its performance.The regular grid (with occasional interruptions) is arguably the most common topology for cities. It has been employed in cities for millennia. In the United States, the most influential legislation affecting the morphology of roads was the Land Ordinance of 1785. In many respects, it laid the foundation for future land use-transportation policy by adopting the Public Land Survey System, creating townships and subdividing them into 36 sections of one square mile (259 hectares) and 144 quarter-sections of 0.25 square mile (65 hectares) each. Roads delineating each of the sections were referred to as “section roads.” Subsequently, many urbanizing areas continued to use the centerlines of those roads as the location of present day arterials; the arterial networks are often further broken down into a finer grid of blocks.
A key point that has not been generally considered is the flexibility that the uniform and undifferentiated mesh networks (termed “grids” here) provide to changes in land use. A uniform grid allows alternative spacing between activities, spacing that can change with economies of scale. For instance, consider retailing. As described in Chapter 9, many stores—especially grocery stores—have been getting larger, while their numbers have dropped. Many New Urbanists, who advocate small-scale neighborhood retail, bemoan this phenomenon. Suppose that economies of scale indicate that it is efficient for the average retail store of a certain kind to increase in size from 1,000 to 2,000 ft2 (93 to 186 m2). Previously there may have been one such store every 10 blocks (one for every 100 square blocks); now there can be one every 14 blocks (one for every 200 square blocks). A grid allows the flexibility for re- spacing while keeping nearly optimal size stores. ...
A tree network, in contrast, fails to provide such flexibility; a store can locate either at the neighborhood center, at the community center, or at the regional center; it can serve perhaps 5,000 people, 15,000 people, or 60,000 people. A store optimally sized to serve 10,000 people cannot be located at a consistent node level—or, if it is, it cannot be efficient. A firm may need to locate stores in some neighborhood centers and not others, causing people to go into other neighborhoods in some places.
Recognizing that grid-based road networks might not lend themselves to locations that were not situated on flat, featureless plains, designers introduced several variations. To conform to the contours of the land, Frederick Law Olmstead employed curving streets in many of his designs (e.g. Roland Park, Maryland). Permutations continued to evolve over the years, and the “loop” and “lollipop” designs became the standard in suburban settings
I think the idea of a particular network topology (grid vs. tree) depends a lot on the topography. Getting this right is important. The idea of laying something out in advance (Angel's main point), so that property rights and development can occur on that lattice, seems a very good one.
Wired Autopia: The Next Big OS War Is In Your Dashboard :
"‘The theme I hear time and time again from every single one of our customers is you’ve got to help us move at the pace of consumer electronics,’ Derek Kuhn, vice president of sales and marketing for QNX Software Systems, told Wired. ‘It’s no longer acceptable to innovate at the pace of automotive.’"
Friday saw two reports drop:
Minnesota Transportation Finance Advisory Committee
Summary Report and Recommendations
In short, what transportation will cost
and
What spending money on new transit infrastructure in the Metro area will get us.
[I was on the Technical Advisory Committee of the latter report, which constitutes neither endorsement nor lack thereof. The final technical report has not dropped as far as I can tell.]
Now @ streets.mn Won’t you take me to … Dinkytown :
"Dinkytown, immortalized in the eponymous 1980 Lipps Inc. hit song, is the neighborhood just north of the University of Minnesota."
