The Transportationist

This is the third in a continuing series asking deep questions about the nature of transportation analysis. Previous episodes include:

1. Why do commute distances and times rise with income

2. The Transportationist: Are sunk costs sunk, is salvage value salvageable? A paradox in engineering economics analysis

So,

3. Can small units of time be given the same value of time as larger units of time. In other words, do 60 improvements each saving a traveler 1 minute equal 1 improvement saving a traveler 60 minutes? Similarly, does 1 improvement saving a 1000 travelers 1 minute equal the value of time of a single traveler of 1000 minutes. These are different problems, one is intra-traveler and one is inter-traveler, but related.

Several issues arise.

A. Is value of time linear or non-linear? To this we must conclude the value of time is surely non-linear. I am much more agitated waiting 3 minutes at a red light than 2, and I begin to suspect the light is broken. Studies of ramp meters show a similar phenomena, as in our paper Weighting Waiting:
Evaluating Perception of In-Vehicle Travel Time Under Moving and Stopped Conditions .

B. How do we apply this in a benefit-cost analysis? If we break one project into 60 smaller projects, each with a smaller value of travel time saved, and then we added the gains, we would get a different result than the what obtains with a single large project. For analytical convenience, we would like our analyses to be additive, not sub-additive, otherwise arbitrarily dividing the project changes the result. In particular many smaller projects will produce an undercount that is quite significant, and result in a much lower benefit than if the projects were bundled.

As a practical matter, every Benefit/Cost Analysis I have seen assumes a single value of time, rather than assuming non-linear value of time. (Alert me if you have a counter-example).

On the other hand, mode choice analyses do however weight different components of travel time differently, especially transit time (i.e. in-vehicle time is less onerous than waiting time). The implicit value of time for travelers does depend on the type of time (though generally not the amount of time). Using the log-sum of the mode choice model as a measure of benefit would implicitly account for this.

Posted by David Levinson at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have drafted a Memo to the Next President of the United States on Transportation Policy.

The memo outlines ten visions, which are summarized here, for fuller discussion, see the full memo:

1. Within eight years more cars sold in the United States will be powered primarily by electricity and bio-fuels than by fossil fuels. All buses and passenger trains will use electricity or bio-fuels.
2. Within eight years Americans will be able to ride autonomous smart cars that drive themselves in mixed traffic.
3. Within a year, an independent federally-funded Bridge Inspection Service will begin to inspect and publicly report on the quality of all bridges on the National Highway System.
4. After thorough evaluation, within eight years, bridges and pavements on the US Interstate Highway System will be upgraded to handle trucks carrying up to 100,000 pounds, increasing the efficiency of the trucking industry and by reducing the number of vehicle trips, increasing safety for other road users. These improvements will be paid for by the trucking industry, which directly benefits from the improved system. In heavily traveled corridors, a system of truck-only toll lanes will be constructed.
   
5. Within eight years American travelers can choose to travel congestion-free by car or bus through America's largest metropolitan areas.
6. Within four years American travelers will enter airports and transit, and train stations and cross borders, passing both security and immigration controls without delay while ensuring security.
7. Within eight years a new source of transportation revenue based on time and place of use will be deployed, replacing the federal and state gas tax. This funding will support highway and transit networks.
8. Returning to the vision of Democratic President Andrew Jackson, items in federal transportation legislation that do not serve a national purpose will be vetoed.
9. Extending the bipartisan efforts of transportation deregulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, within four years, highway and transit services and infrastructure will begin to be competitively provided by independent (public, private, or non-profit) organizations under appropriate local or federal oversight. Infrastructure will be provided under a public utility model, ensuring quality of service in exchange for earning a rate of return.
10. Within one year, the United States federal government will establish separate capital and operating budgets. This will be coupled with a federal program to guarantee loans and bonds for highway and transit infrastructure projects.




Full memo after the jump

Continue reading "Memo to the Next President of the United States on Transportation Policy" »

Posted by David Levinson at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Nice article on MinnPost by Amy Goetzman: : Who knew? Mn/DOT Library is little-known gem

Posted by David Levinson at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the forthcoming book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) has a new blog: How We Drive which is worth a look ....

Posted by David Levinson at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Congratulations to Tom Sorel ... Federal highway official is named state transportation chief

Posted by David Levinson at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Briefly noted: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, has a Ph.D. in Engineering and Traffic/Transportation Planning.

Posted by David Levinson at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I used the Zipcar for the 3rd time this morning. The second time was a week ago. We had a problem, the zipcard could not unlock the zipcar (Element Estelle) (all cars are alliteratively named for their models.

Fortunately when I called, they were able to unlock the adjacent car for me (Matrix McKenna), which I then took with only a few minute delay. Today I signed up for the second car (the Matrix), figuring it worked last time and the first did not. That was a wise choice, as someone else had reserved the other car this morning and had exactly the same problem I did previously, his card could not unlock Element Estelle. I realize Zipcar will do something for you (I am not clear what they will do), but this is a bad sign in general. Of my four interactions with zipcars, (three of my own and one observed for the other poor soul), two did not work correctly.

Posted by David Levinson at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bill Garrison gave the 2007 Anderson Distinguished Lecture in Applied Geography, in which he gave a talk on "Increasing the Flexibility of Legacy Systems", a topic dear to his heart. The proceedings, excellently prepared, also provide some background on Garrison, and the Legacy has provided, both to Geography and Transportation.

Well worth the read if you feel transportation is stuck, and no real progress is being made.

-- dml

Posted by David Levinson at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My friend Ben Coifman has a nice mention in a recent article in Science Daily: ScienceDaily: 'Smart' Traffic Boxes Could Help Monitor Roads, Save Money

The trade-off between local processing and use of the network for communications is fundamental, and depends on the cost of each. This is something that should be optimized to reduce system costs and improve performance.

Posted by David Levinson at 06:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From WaPo: Hefty Fees In Store for Misbehaving Va. Drivers. Speeding fines could now be in the thousands instead of hundreds of dollars. The intent is to raise money for transportation improvements. But as the old canard goes, if there were a death penalty for double parking, there will be a lot fewer double parkers. It will be interesting to see if Virginia will merely increase traffic law compliance (probably a good thing) or actually increase revenue.

Posted by David Levinson at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Speed up car pool lanes, federal officials tell state [California] Nice quote from USC professor Peter Gordon: "There's no evidence on the planet that car pool lanes have caused car pooling."

A bit of hyperbole perhaps, certainly casual carpools because of the HOV lanes in San Francisco and Washington DC caused carpools (at the expense of public transportation no doubt), but nevertheless an important point about the futility of weak incentives. The problem is further exacerbated by the attempt to use these lanes to solve other social ills, namely pollution by using them as an incentive for hybrid cars.

One problem ... one policy.

Posted by David Levinson at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Great blurb from Boing Boing: TSA donates potentially explosive liquids to homeless

Apparently the confiscated fluids in inappropriate containers are too dangerous to allow on planes, but fine to donate to poor people.

Are we really more secure because of the "war on terror", "Patriot Act", and TSA, or did our enemy just shoot their wad on 9.11 ?

Posted by David Levinson at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A list of predictions made in 1900 by the Ladies Home Journal (making its round in various blogs). Note the transportation predictions:

"Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains. Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.

Prediction #5: Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour. To go from New York to San Francisco will take a day and a night by fast express. There will be cigar-shaped electric locomotives hauling long trains of cars. Cars will, like houses, be artificially cooled. Along the railroads there will be no smoke, no cinders, because coal will neither be carried nor burned. There will be no stops for water. Passengers will travel through hot or dusty country regions with windows down.

Prediction #6: Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.

Prediction #7: There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth.

Prediction #8: Aerial War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities. Such guns will be armed by aid of compasses when used on land or sea, and telescopes when directed from great heights. Fleets of air-ships, hiding themselves with dense, smoky mists, thrown off by themselves as they move, will float over cities, fortifications, camps or fleets. They will surprise foes below by hurling upon them deadly thunderbolts. These aerial war-ships will necessitate bomb-proof forts, protected by great steel plates over their tops as well as at their sides. Huge forts on wheels will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of to-day. They will make what are now known as cavalry charges. Great automobile plows will dig deep entrenchments as fast as soldiers can occupy them. Rifles will use silent cartridges. Submarine boats submerged for days will be capable of wiping a whole navy off the face of the deep. Balloons and flying machines will carry telescopes of one-hundred-mile vision with camera attachments, photographing an enemy within that radius. These photographs as distinct and large as if taken from across the street, will be lowered to the commanding officer in charge of troops below.

Prediction #22: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.

Prediction #29: To England in Two Days. Fast electric ships, crossing the ocean at more than a mile a minute, will go from New York to Liverpool in two days. The bodies of these ships will be built above the waves. They will be supported upon runners, somewhat like those of the sleigh. These runners will be very buoyant. Upon their under sides will be apertures expelling jets of air. In this way a film of air will be kept between them and the water’s surface. This film, together with the small surface of the runners, will reduce friction against the waves to the smallest possible degree. Propellers turned by electricity will screw themselves through both the water beneath and the air above. Ships with cabins artificially cooled will be entirely fireproof. In storm they will dive below the water and there await fair weather."

Of course they missed the airplane, and were optimistic about how people should deal with traffic. But number 6 about the replacement of the horse was spot on

What will 2100 look like, or are we just so cautious now that we don't make 100 year predictions anymore?

Posted by David Levinson at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From today's Strib: Editorial: Want heavier trucks? Fully fund highways. Again misanalyzing the issue they say
"Oberstar was right; raising the gas tax is doing the right thing. In the case of allowing heavier trucks on state roadways, it is also the necessary thing. "

Raising the gas tax on cars is not necessary to allow heavier trucks on the road. Raising the diesel tax on trucks might be somewhat more appropriate, after all, at least the class that benefits would be the class that pays. Even better would be charging trucks a weight-distance tax (pdf).
The cited issue brief (Legislative Committee Services Oregon Legislature, Dec. 2000) notes
"Most of the ongoing revenue collected by states and the federal government for highway construction and
maintenance is from vehicle fuel taxes. To the extent that a vehicle’s fuel use correlates with its road use
and wear, a fuel tax is an equitable way to “charge” for use of the road system. Variations in vehicle fuel
economy, however, weaken the correlation between a fuel tax and road wear. This is true for all vehicles,
but especially for heavy vehicles. An increase in truck weight that nearly doubles road wear may only
increase fuel use by 10%. A weight-mile tax can be structured to more accurately assess for costs of wear."

This of course would not be popular among truckers, who would love to get all the benefit for one-tenth the cost by having light vehicles pay per distance instead.

Posted by David Levinson at 01:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition for driverless cars, the third of which will be held in an urban environment in November 2007. These challenges are excellent ways to motivate research (read Longitude by Sobel on earlier challenges). This is getting some buzz as one of the contestants is being parked at the London Science Museum, (an excellent Science Museum by the way).

Let's hope this ends better than the Automated Highway System demonstration of 1997, which despite technical success resulted in cancellation of the program.

I believe Driverless cars will succeed where AHS did not, as this is a much better design path, as it does not require both new networks and new vehicles, only new vehicles which can operate (we hope without incident) in mixed traffic.

Posted by David Levinson at 06:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Transportation Research Board , a unit of the National Academies, hosts an annual conference in Washington, DC every January. This year attendance exceeded 11,000 (both professionals and academics), so I was told when attending last week. It overflows three of the largest hotels in the city, and so must from some respects be seen as a success.

One trouble that TRB has is quality control. The organization is divided into committees. Some committees have strong leadership and a high volume of paper submission (with a scarce number of slots), and so are able to exert quality control on the papers that are presented at the conference and ultimately published in the Transportation Research Record. Other committees don't, dragging down the average quality, and discouraging some from submitting research to TRB.

A second, related problem that TRB has is its low citation rate compared to other journals. Few papers published in other journals cite articles published in TRB.

An advantage that TRB's publications have is their open-ness, I retain full copyright on anything published there, and TRB doesn't make the same claims on my intellectual content that some for-profit publishers do.

However, TRB has yet to make its publications freely available online, continuing to produce paper copies and charge for electronic copies (except to those participating in the conference).

There is no faster way of increasing availability of content, and making it useful, citable, and thus cited, then making it freely available online. The physics community has learned this with arXiv.org, a e-print archive, described here. TRB would be a perfect host for a similar institution in transportation research, if it could only find the imagination to host a free, publicly-accessible pre-print archive (basically the conference submissions, but other papers as well), that was properly indexed. The physics journals accept papers that are hosted on arXiv , so later publication is not a problem.

The journal Transportation Research Record is a separate problem. Credibility is established through history. It is not that most TRR papers are wrong, just that they are not given credit because TRR does not act as an effective enough filter against the mundane. In part this is because TRR tries to be all things to all transportation, each committee gets its slots. Other journals within transportation tend to specialize, while TRR's sister publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is much more selective, though relatively general within the sciences.

It should be noted that PNAS "is notable for its policy of making research articles freely available online to everyone 6 months after publication", which helps increase readership and citations.

TRB staff seems to be compaining of recent budget cuts. Without discussing other aspects of the organization, but focusing on TRR and the conference if the organization cannot obtain value from the research that thousands of volunteers produce (for free) and review (for free), and could be distributed for free (minus some server and bandwidth costs), while charging over $200 per head for a conference attended by over 11,000 people, something is wrong in its management structure.

Posted by David Levinson at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to an article in SFGATE: Woman escapes carpool carjacker / Man said he had a bomb, then hit her and stole her car.

The title basically summarizes the article. Casual carpooling has been quite successful for several decades enabling people to use the HOV lane by getting non-drivers to ride as passengers, with very few if any reported violent acts.

It is used in Washington along the Shirley Highway, as well as San Francisco, where it is called Slugging.

Posted by David Levinson at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to an article in the Strib Road toll is lowest since 1945, the number of traffic fatalities was down to 475 people in Minnesota for the year 2006 (from 655 people in 2003 and 1060 in 1968). This is a significant and non-random improvement in traffic safety, and notable given the continuing increase in total travel (indicating safety per trip or per mile has improved even more).

How much of the improvement is due to better vehicles, better weather, better roads, better drivers, better law enforcement, or better emergency response is an important question, as it may help direct resources toward the most productive areas additional improvements. I suspect a large part of the recent trend is emergency response, especially with the advent and widespread adoption of cell phones in the last decade leading to faster notification and response, as well as better medical treatment in hospitals for injured persons.

Posted by David Levinson at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A find from Digg: Asia's Craziest Intersection .

Is this what Hans Monderman who believes in designing for negotiation, had in mind?

Posted by David Levinson at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Security is the enemy of efficiency". I don't know if anyone has said it before, but it has become clear to me that the primary outcome of most security systems is to make my (and others') life less productive. Whether I am safer as a result I have no evidence to produce.

Continue reading "Security is the enemy of efficiency, or attention is a scarce resource" »

Posted by David Levinson at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article from Spiegel Online:Controlled Chaos: European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs Hans Monderman was able to get some press again for his idea of eliminating traffic signs.

The idea is this, eliminating signs forces drivers to be more careful, and therefore safer (they are less likely to hit someone). It also makes them slower, and therefore safer (they do less damage once they hit someone).

This is an interesting notion perhaps appropriate in some contexts (the street in front of my house e.g.). I do not believe it is a universally-applicable notion however (and I am not claiming Monderman does either).

The hierarchy of roads serves two purposes. One is access to land. I need a street in front of my property to get to and from my property (otherwise I am landlocked and require aircraft, tunnels, or boats). This street in residential areas is designed to be relatively slow moving, allowing travelers to reach their final destination (or leave their origin).

The second purpose is movement, I want to be able to go long distances between places at a low cost (time, money, etc.), and roads (e.g. highways) are important for this as well. Roads designed exclusively for this purpose include interstate highways, which are grade-separated and limited access.

The problem lies especially in roads that serve dual purposes, where non-locals want to move quickly, while locals want people to move slowly (or better yet, not at all except for the locals). Managing these roads requires especially creative solutions that are in many cases.

However, one needs to think about what problems traffic controls solved in the first place, why were they invented and deployed. A congested intersection without control, or with stop sign control, moves many fewer people per hour than one with traffic lights. If your objective is moving people, this is an important consideration.

Interestingly his ideas are supported both by liberatarians

as well as greens

Posted by David Levinson at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The city of Forest Lake, Minnesota is going to deploy a slew of roundabouts to control traffic, replacing traffic lights. This article describes the plan: St. Paul Pioneer Press | 09/09/2006 | Roundabout plan may get a trial spin

In most studies of the issue, roundabouts improve on safety and reduce delay compared with traffic signals. They have the advantage of minimizing conflict points at intersections, and help keep drivers moving, while slowing them down and making them more alert.

This wikipedia article describes roundabouts in more depth.

Unfortunately, traffic circles have given roundabouts a bad name, and becaues they are not so complicated, they are often not even taught in Traffic Engineering classes, so they are not given due placement in the traffic engineers toolbox.

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

In an op-ed published in today's Washington Post: Peace On the Roads, Oscar Arias, President of Costa Rica and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize decries the lives lost on roads, particularly in the developing world. Clearly this is an under-appreciated problem, because it does not have the flash of a plane crash or terrorism, but we lose more people in the US each month to traffic crashes than we do each year (or decade) to terrorism. The toll in the developing world is much worse on a per-vehicle-km traveled basis, because roads are worse, drivers are worse (have less driver education), enforcement is worse, and vehicles are worse. While zero deaths is a long way off, 1.2 million per year can certainly be reduced.

Posted by David Levinson at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our first report in the Access to Destinations Series: Development of Accessibility Measures
has finally been released.

The most interesting finding (which still awaits corroboration) is that despite the rising congestion of the past decade, accessibility in the Twin Cities region (measured as the number of things (jobs, workers, etc.) that you can get to in a fixed period of time) has been improving. Clearly this would be because there are more things per unit time, not because you can cover more distance per unit time. Increasing density increases accessibility, this is why cities form in the first place, it is nice to see it in the data. More in the final report. Thanks to my colleague Ahmed El-Geneidy who did most of the number crunching.

Continue reading "Access to Destinations Report Released" »

Posted by David Levinson at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A reported asked what happened in transportation this year. While the field of transportation is slow moving, a few things came to mind:

The Stockholm congestion tax trials were held this year a referendum
will be coming up soon . This is an important experiment both in the technology, but also in public acceptability of using tolls to help regulate traffic (other examples are in London and Singapore), but in Sweden there will actually be a referendum on the subject.

In general tolling is coming back as a means to pay for roads and to manage traffic, see
Ken Orski's article.

Privatization is also a related and important trend, as Indiana sold off a concession for their toll roads to Australian-based Macquarie Infrastructure Group

Hybrid vehicles broke X% market share in US (from 0% 5 years ago), but what is X is a bit hard to track down. see this article for an example

US road deaths rose for first time in 20 years according to this article

On the other hand, there have been no large commercial airplane crashes in US in several years (since 2001) (which I believe is the longest timespan between large crashes since the onset of large planes) according to this wikipedia entry

The ULTra PRT system started construction at Heathrow, will be first operational personal rapid transit system when it opens in 2008

Energy prices reached their highest (inflation unadjusted levels) in 2006.

The Big Dig of course faced some difficulties this year with the failing construction.

More historically, 2006 was the 50th anniversary of the US Interstate Highway System

-- dml

Posted by David Levinson at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From today's newspaper: Concrete collapses in Boston tunnel, killing 1.

Clearly there have been a number of problems with this megaproject. At what point do projects become too big to successfully manage?

Posted by David Levinson at 04:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece on speed limits: OpinionJournal - Featured Article which argues that raising the speed limit has been correlated with an increase in safety.

Continue reading "Correlation is not causation" »

Posted by David Levinson at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Washington Post article: Whither the Women? it is noted that since the turn of millenium the percentage of women in the labor force has been dropping. This has many important implications for travel demand.

Continue reading "Female labor force participation down" »

Posted by David Levinson at 07:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Interstate Highway System turns 50 this month and there are some interesting blogs about people part of the celebratory convoy. It was amusing to read about the RV industry's difficulties maintaining the route on time (problems with weather, permits, etc.). Even something this well-planned goes awry, though things are certainaly better than when Eisenhower tried his convoy after World War I.

Continue reading "Interstate is 50" »

Posted by David Levinson at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We returned from a road trip from Minneapolis to Pittsburgh last night. We went to Pittsburgh to attend the lovely wedding of Jason Hong, a friend of ours from Berkeley quizbowl, who is now a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. We stopped for the night outside Toledo on the way there and outside Milwaukee on the way back.

Random observations in roughly chronological order.

Continue reading "Road Trip" »

Posted by David Levinson at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I wrote this letter to Senator Mark Dayton in 2002 concerning Airline security. Given his crackerjack reputation overall and for constituent services, I suppose it is no surprise that I received no response.

Continue reading "Airport Security" »

Posted by David Levinson at 07:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

According to the Strib, the City of Minneapolis is trying to keep strangers out of alleys:A back-alley approach to fight crime in Minneapolis. The alleys will essentially become private streets for the residents.

From the article '"If you don't live there on that block there's no reason to be in the alley," said Killebrew, who proposed the ordinance to the city attorney.'

Well I can think of reasons, namely taking a walk and looking at the backs of houses, which provides lots of entertainment for law-abiding folks in the summer, doubling the amount of entertainment that can be had from simply looking at the fronts of houses.

I just don't understand how this is supposed to help. If you have already broken the law (or intend to), the alley ordinance doesn't seem like much of a disincentive. Neighbors might now report more suspicious activity (where "strangers" in the alley are suspicious), but nosy neighbors are pretty good at that in Minneapolis already.

See enclosure and private road.

Posted by David Levinson at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via TechCrunch: SuperOyster: Monetizing the Waiting List, which is a lot like the idea of reservation pricing (See Appendix G) with trading. If only we could figure out how to make the transaction in a dynamically changing system with roads and cars.

Posted by David Levinson at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting article at ZDNet: A traffic control system for molecules. I don't know if there are practical applications for transportation any time soon, but neat nonetheless.
(link courtesy Slashdot).

- dml

Posted by David Levinson at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For your amusement: Boing Boing: Having fun with roadside alert signs

Posted by David Levinson at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There has been a lot of discussion about "network neutrality" as being a core property of internet service. This discussion includes a number of inter-related concepts, which not every advocate agrees to. In particular, the wikipedia article on the subject identifies:

"* Non-discrimination means that all traffic over the network (typically or exclusively digital packets or bits) is treated the same by the network, including the traffic originating with the network operator. This principle of 'bit parity' means that all bits are treated as 'just bits', and no bit traffic is prioritized over other bits, and none is hampered or disabled.

* Interconnection means that network operators have both a duty of interconnection and a right of interconnection to any other network operator. Networks must be constructed so that there are a reasonable number of accessible interconnect points; that traffic is carried to and from rival networks at reasonable rates; and that the network is built with sufficient excess capacity to accomodate the reasonably foreseeable traffic that may be presented at the head-ends or peering points. Without a right of interconnection, there is no network.

* Access means that any end user can connect to any other end-user. End users may be people, but the term could also mean devices (modems, routers, switches) or even other networks. Access means that a piece of content, say, an email message, has a right to enter the network, and if properly addressed, be received by the other end user, even if said user is on another network. In other words, traffic can begin at any point on the network and be delivered to any other point."

Continue reading "Network Neutrality and Quality of Service" »

Posted by David Levinson at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From today's Star Tribune: State of our roads is getting bumpier

The article says "Department officials say they don't consider the condition of the roads a safety concern," and there is no evidence unsmooth roads (at least in the range considered in Minnesota, where roads are much better than, say, Africa), reduce capacity, so what is the rationale for smooth roads?

The answer seems to be to prevent future deterioration.

""You can reconstruct the roads already in poor condition or you can keep the roads that are about to go into the poor category from ever getting there by doing something first," Janisch said. "It's cheaper to keep them up.""

But is there a value to smooth roads? How much of a premium would travelers pay, all else equal, to have a smoother ride?

-- dml

Posted by David Levinson at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the most recent episode of The West Wing(the penultimate episode "Institutional Memory"), White House Chief of Staff C.J. Cregg is being recruited to help run a foundation loosely based on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and her idea of what the best use of $10 billion would be to criss-cross Africa with highways, which would enable the delivery of medicine, expand trade, and do all sorts of good things.

Continue reading "Highways in Africa" »

Posted by David Levinson at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

An example of a recent line of reasoning ... Bring On The $6 Gallon Of Gas / It would revolutionize America. It would make us all better humans. But could you handle it?

Another example from Andrew Sullivan

Or this from Thomas Friedman

Continue reading "From the "The price of gas is high, let's make it higher" deparment" »

Posted by David Levinson at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whether entering a city for the first time, or entering it for the five-thousandth, a traveler interacts with the environment to obtain cues. A first time traveler is very concerned about issues of navigation … where should I go? … how should I get there?, while the experienced resident may rely on memory and history to make those same decisions. Yet in complex cities, there are many places even the most experienced residents may never have explored, there are paths untaken, and like Heraclitus’ River, you never really step into the same city twice.

Continue reading "The Urban Interface, some initial musings" »

Posted by David Levinson at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The website Visualcomplexity.com has some really nice transportation graphics, which I became aware of after seeing Manuel Lima present at Meshforum. In particular, the travel time remapping of the London Underground is quite slick.
--dml

Posted by David Levinson at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A View Of Urban Sprawl From Outer Space by Jenny Hall

Hall writes: 'Roads, on the other hand, have no impact on the extent to which development is scattered, despite commonly held beliefs to the contrary. "We looked at a lot of measures of road density - miles of road per area, average distance to a road, distance to an interstate exit - and we could find no relation between those measures and the scatteredness of development," Turner says.'

Continue reading "A View Of Urban Sprawl From Outer Space" »

Posted by David Levinson at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)