This page describes how to upload and look at data in the R package. First, we will downlaod a CSV of UN population estimates on central African cities to import into R: Central Africa West.

The first thing to do is to let R know where to find the CSV. You can do this by navigating through the bottom right window in R Studio (Files/More/Set As Working Directory) or setting your working directory using the setwd command.

Note how the data are read directly printed on the command console. Next we will create a new object called pop so that we can call on the data more easily and interact with it.

Try: pop <- read.csv(“Central Africa West.csv”)

NB you can use = instead of <- but it is better coding practice to save the = sign for other uses.

You can also load data in Rstudio using a point-and-click interface. To set your working directory, click on Session at the top of the window and then click Set Working Directory/Choose Directory. To import a data file, click on File/Import Dataset.

To look at the data, try cutting and pasting the following commands into the command console and hitting enter.

str(pop)

## 'data.frame':    17 obs. of  12 variables:
##  $Year : int 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 ... ##$ Period                 : int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
##  $Douala : int 95 117 153 205 298 433 571 740 940 1184 ... ##$ Yaounde                : int  32 49 75 112 183 292 415 578 777 1025 ...
##  $Libreville : int 15 17 29 49 77 155 234 293 366 439 ... ##$ Brazzaville            : int  83 92 124 172 238 329 446 596 704 830 ...
##  $Pointe_Noire : int 16 35 64 89 116 154 217 300 363 439 ... ##$ Sub_Saharan_300kplus   : int  3923 4909 7083 10779 16335 24143 34813 47767 62327 75996 ...
##  $Central_Africa_300kplus: int 3660 4521 5651 7047 8921 11495 14465 18043 22566 28525 ... ##$ Cameroon_urban         : int  417 557 747 1011 1375 2112 2851 3761 4787 5930 ...
##  $Congo_urban : int 201 253 320 408 522 672 860 1086 1295 1535 ... ##$ Gabon_urban            : int  54 68 87 126 189 279 397 515 655 814 ...


This tells you the structure of the data. In this case, all of the variables are integers, but it is also common to see characters, factors, and other types of data.

names(pop)

##  [1] "Year"                    "Period"
##  [3] "Douala"                  "Yaounde"
##  [5] "Libreville"              "Brazzaville"
##  [7] "Pointe_Noire"            "Sub_Saharan_300kplus"
##  [9] "Central_Africa_300kplus" "Cameroon_urban"
## [11] "Congo_urban"             "Gabon_urban"


This command gives the names of all the variables in the data. The country, city, and regions contain population estimates in thousands.

summary(pop)

##       Year          Period       Douala          Yaounde
##  Min.   :1950   Min.   : 1   Min.   :  95.0   Min.   :  32.0
##  1st Qu.:1970   1st Qu.: 5   1st Qu.: 205.0   1st Qu.: 112.0
##  Median :1990   Median : 9   Median : 571.0   Median : 415.0
##  Mean   :1990   Mean   : 9   Mean   : 804.8   Mean   : 693.8
##  3rd Qu.:2010   3rd Qu.:13   3rd Qu.:1184.0   3rd Qu.:1025.0
##  Max.   :2030   Max.   :17   Max.   :2361.0   Max.   :2349.0
##                              NA's   :4        NA's   :4
##    Libreville     Brazzaville      Pointe_Noire   Sub_Saharan_300kplus
##  Min.   : 15.0   Min.   :  83.0   Min.   : 16.0   Min.   :  3923
##  1st Qu.: 49.0   1st Qu.: 172.0   1st Qu.: 89.0   1st Qu.: 16335
##  Median :234.0   Median : 446.0   Median :217.0   Median : 62327
##  Mean   :258.5   Mean   : 575.3   Mean   :293.1   Mean   : 91980
##  3rd Qu.:439.0   3rd Qu.: 830.0   3rd Qu.:439.0   3rd Qu.:137283
##  Max.   :631.0   Max.   :1574.0   Max.   :815.0   Max.   :300153
##  NA's   :4       NA's   :4        NA's   :4
##  Central_Africa_300kplus Cameroon_urban   Congo_urban    Gabon_urban
##  Min.   :  3660          Min.   :  417   Min.   : 201   Min.   :  54.0
##  1st Qu.:  8921          1st Qu.: 1375   1st Qu.: 522   1st Qu.: 189.0
##  Median : 22566          Median : 4787   Median :1295   Median : 655.0
##  Mean   : 34795          Mean   : 6835   Mean   :1723   Mean   : 819.6
##  3rd Qu.: 51883          3rd Qu.:10625   3rd Qu.:2600   3rd Qu.:1334.0
##  Max.   :107747          Max.   :20492   Max.   :4804   Max.   :2122.0
##


Another good way to get a sense for the data is to look at the first or last entries, using the head or tail commands.

head(pop)

##   Year Period Douala Yaounde Libreville Brazzaville Pointe_Noire
## 1 1950      1     95      32         15          83           16
## 2 1955      2    117      49         17          92           35
## 3 1960      3    153      75         29         124           64
## 4 1965      4    205     112         49         172           89
## 5 1970      5    298     183         77         238          116
## 6 1975      6    433     292        155         329          154
##   Sub_Saharan_300kplus Central_Africa_300kplus Cameroon_urban Congo_urban
## 1                 3923                    3660            417         201
## 2                 4909                    4521            557         253
## 3                 7083                    5651            747         320
## 4                10779                    7047           1011         408
## 5                16335                    8921           1375         522
## 6                24143                   11495           2112         672
##   Gabon_urban
## 1          54
## 2          68
## 3          87
## 4         126
## 5         189
## 6         279


For help with any of these commands, use the help function by typing ? before the command name. For example, try typing ?head into the command console

EXERCISE

Walk through this brief introduction to R and R Studio.

## Exploring US bus ridership with the National Transit Database

I frequently use the National Transit Database for analysis or quick summaries of key information about public transportation in the US. I also have my students use it to perform a back-of-the-envelope cost benefit analysis for a proposed light rail system in one of my transportation planning courses. In both instances, I find the downloadable excel sheets to be a bit clunky and slow to manipulate. Most recently I wanted a quick comparison of bus ridership per route kilometer for a system in Indonesia. As usual, I downloaded the excel sheets and spent about an hour playing with the data until I got a single reasonable answer. As usual, I’d have to do another bit of work if I wanted to change anything. Instead, I decided to clean up a subset of the data and rearrange it into a long-format panel. For a description of the data and some of the choices made (like when to make an entry a 0 or an NA), see here.

I’m also hoping that the clean data set will encourage my students to choose to work with the data in R. I use R in my Planning Methods and Transportation Planning courses because:

1. Data sets are ever larger and more readily available. Many are useful to planners and for planning. The ability to manage and work with large amounts of data is an important skill for planners, particularly transportation planners.
2. It’s a great program for managing, visualizing, and analyzing data. Many of its primary competitors are only really good at the third. Poor data management can be embarrassing.
3. It has a strong user community that builds add-on packages to accomplish a range of tasks, provides tutorials, and answers questions online. It’s also frequently used in free, online courses and is a program that grows with users as they learn more. Here are some links to great free courses from professors at Johns Hopkins and Stanford.
4. It’s free, so even the most cash-strapped municipality has access.

Unfortunately, the learning curve can be steep for new users. Processing data, in particular, can be slow and is rarely immediately rewarding. New users are unlikely to see much benefit to downloading, cleaning, and formatting data just to use it in a class assignment. I wouldn’t either.

Now back to my original question: how does the number of passengers per kilometer on my Indonesian city stack up to ridership in US cities?

After loading the file, this code does the trick. I only include directly operated routes (Service == “DO”) because the privately operated routes (Service == “PT”) are less accurately reported. Unlinked passenger trips (UPT) aren’t the same thing as total bus passengers–riders who transfer once count as two unlinked passenger trips–but they’re collected in the same way that corridor bus counts in Indonesia would likely have occurred. I divide directional route miles (DRM) by two because DRM counts 1 mile of bidirectional service as 2 miles and is closer to what the Indonesian counts measure.

summary(with(subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "MB" & Year == 2013 & Service == "DO" & UPT != 0), (UPT/365) / ((1.61*DRM)/2) ))  ## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. NA's ## 0.2915 14.9500 32.9000 67.7300 64.3100 1582.0000 162 And this provides even more information about the distribution of ridership (Unlinked Passenger Trips anyway) per kilometer of bus route. plot(density(with(subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "MB" & Year == 2013 & Service == "DO" & UPT != 0), (UPT/365) / ((1.61*DRM)/2) ), na.rm=T))

And this tells me how many systems perform better than my Indonesian system, which carries only 16 passengers per kilometer.

table(with(subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "MB" & Year == 2013 & UPT != 0), (UPT/365) / ((1.61*DRM)/2) )<16) ## ## FALSE TRUE ## 317 158 Before going any further, I recommend trying these three commands to get a better feel for the data: head(NTD.ts) str(NTD.ts) summary(NTD.ts) In the interest of space, I’m excluding the outputs. One of the handiest features of R is the ease with which it handles multiple data sets, so I’m going to add a couple variables and then create a new new data set that only looks at buses in 2013 that are directly operated by public agencies. I switched from Stata to R halfway into my dissertation (an otherwise foolish decision) because this made it so much easier to interact with and combine several large data sets. NTD.ts$passenger.km <- (NTD.ts$UPT/365) / ((1.61*NTD.ts$DRM)/2)
NTD.ts$fare.recovery <- NTD.ts$FARES / NTD.ts$OPEXP_TOTAL new.dat <- subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "MB" & Year == 2013 & UPT != 0 & Service == "DO")

Now let’s plot passengers per kilometer against fare recovery.

plot(new.dat$fare.recovery, new.dat$passenger.km)

I’m a bit suspicious of the systems drawing more fare revenue than they spend on operations, so I want to look at them more closely: two University systems, an airport shuttle, and one I’m not sure about.

subset(new.dat, new.dat$fare.recovery>1) ## Year TRS.ID Mode Service Last.Report.Year ## 58601 2013 2166 MB DO 2013 ## 59799 2013 2132 MB DO 2013 ## 59988 2013 4180 MB DO 2013 ## 60326 2013 8107 MB DO 2013 ## System.Name ## 58601 Orange-Newark-Elizabeth, Inc.(Coach USA) ## 59799 New Jersey Transit Corporation-45(NJTC-45) ## 59988 University of Georgia Transit System(UGA) ## 60326 The University of Montana - ASUM Transportation(ASUM OT) ## Small.Systems.Waiver City State Census.Year ## 58601 N Elizabeth NJ 2010 ## 59799 N Newark NJ 2010 ## 59988 N Athens GA 2010 ## 60326 N Missoula MT 2010 ## UZA.Name UZA UZA.Area.SQ.Miles UZA.Population ## 58601 New York-Newark, NY-NJ-CT 1 3450 18351295 ## 59799 New York-Newark, NY-NJ-CT 1 3450 18351295 ## 59988 Athens-Clarke County, GA 249 98 128754 ## 60326 Missoula, MT 348 45 82157 ## OPEXP_TOTAL OPEXP_VO OPEXP_VM OPEXP_NVM OPEXP_GA FARES VOMS ## 58601 15077606 9014072 4403391 708772 951371 16883604 52 ## 59799 8299771 5067517 2285398 217667 729189 10034922 41 ## 59988 5355484 4052395 791332 52669 459088 6281720 47 ## 60326 598190 327957 164685 13613 91935 601851 6 ## VRM VRH DRM UPT PMT CPI passenger.km fare.recovery ## 58601 1750683 191541 69.8 10294583 32942666 1 501.9548 1.119780 ## 59799 1079382 135429 68.9 5504389 8461884 1 271.8950 1.209060 ## 59988 853644 114959 96.0 11058944 4202399 1 392.0610 1.172951 ## 60326 153163 11578 6.3 421694 737965 1 227.8076 1.006120 In case I want to only look at a few items. subset(new.dat[c(2, 6, 15, 24, 25, 26, 28,29)], new.dat$fare.recovery>1)
##       TRS.ID                                              System.Name
## 58601   2166                 Orange-Newark-Elizabeth, Inc.(Coach USA)
## 59799   2132               New Jersey Transit Corporation-45(NJTC-45)
## 59988   4180                University of Georgia Transit System(UGA)
## 60326   8107 The University of Montana - ASUM Transportation(ASUM OT)
##       OPEXP_TOTAL  DRM      UPT      PMT passenger.km fare.recovery
## 58601    15077606 69.8 10294583 32942666     501.9548      1.119780
## 59799     8299771 68.9  5504389  8461884     271.8950      1.209060
## 59988     5355484 96.0 11058944  4202399     392.0610      1.172951
## 60326      598190  6.3   421694   737965     227.8076      1.006120

Which systems are busiest?

subset(new.dat[c(2, 6, 15, 24, 25, 26, 28,29)], new.dat$passenger.km > 750) ## TRS.ID ## 58641 2008 ## 59050 5066 ## 59876 5158 ## System.Name ## 58641 MTA New York City Transit(NYCT) ## 59050 Chicago Transit Authority(CTA) ## 59876 University of Michigan Parking and Transportation Services(UMTS) ## OPEXP_TOTAL DRM UPT PMT passenger.km fare.recovery ## 58641 2487134393 1659.0 770962014 1614997081 1581.6043 0.3417458 ## 59050 764280757 1311.2 300116357 728561319 778.9902 0.3909879 ## 59876 6995443 20.7 7263234 20293476 1194.1832 0.2824377 I might also want to see how DRM and UPT look against eachother, since these two numbers for them basis of the calculation. It looks an awful lot like fare recovery against productivity. plot(new.dat$DRM, new.dat$UPT) Lastly I want to look at how passengers for kilometer has changed over time. First I’ll edit new.dat to include the other years. Then I’ll do a box plot by year. new.dat <- subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "MB"  & UPT != 0 & Service == "DO" & is.na(passenger.km)==F)
boxplot(passenger.km ~ Year,data=new.dat, na.rm=T,
xlab="Year", ylab="UPT per kilometer of busway")

Clearly thereâ€™s some bad data. This merits further investigation, but for now Iâ€™ll just remove the worst offenders.

new.dat <- subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "MB" & UPT != 0 & Service == "DO" & is.na(passenger.km)==F & passenger.km < 1000 ) boxplot(passenger.km ~ Year,data=new.dat, main="Bus ridership desnity over time", na.rm=T, xlab="Year", ylab="UPT per kilometer of busway") There’s so much variation that it’s hard to read so I’ll make two plots, one for high productivity systems and one for low. new.dat <- subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "MB"  & UPT != 0 & Service == "DO" & is.na(passenger.km)==F & passenger.km < 1000 & passenger.km > 200 )
boxplot(passenger.km ~ Year,data=new.dat, na.rm=T,
xlab="Year", ylab="UPT per kilometer of busway")

new.dat <- subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "MB" & UPT != 0 & Service == "DO" & is.na(passenger.km)==F & passenger.km < 200 ) boxplot(passenger.km ~ Year,data=new.dat, na.rm=T, xlab="Year", ylab="UPT per kilometer of busway") Posted in Transportation Planning | | Comments Off on Exploring US bus ridership with the National Transit Database ## National Transit Database panel by system, mode, and service This page contains links to a long-formatted panel of the National Transit Database’s TS2.1 – Service Data and Operating Expenses Time-Series by Mode. I maintain the NTD data conventions, so that the column names match the NTD’s data glossary. I also added a column labeled CPI that is generated from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Inflation Calculator and provides the 2013 value of one dollar in the reported year. I have not reformatted the other time series NTD data, which I use less frequently and which are not available at the same level of disaggregation. For example, the capital expenditures data include system, mode, and year, but not service type. Some data products have also been discontinued, such as the detailed sources of local revenues data. The reformatted panel is available in the following formats: R (password: NTD1), Stata (password: NTD2), and as a CSV (password: NTD3). I haven’t looked closely at the Stata file but exported it using the foreign package. The code used to format the data is available here (password: NTD4), if you want to make any changes. Below, I describe three important choices about when to treat missing values as an NA or a 0. The NTD data do not take a particularly clear approach to the problem. For example, entries for missing cost data vary between a null entry and$0 with no apparent pattern. For additional information about how the data were constructed, see the code above.

1. Keep zeros. In 1992, Denver did not have a light rail. Instead of replacing entries of zero with NAs, I keep the data. This will make it easier to analyze influence of new light rail in the future. It is, however, worth noting that this is somewhat inconsistent and introduces some problems. It is inconsistent because Honolulu, which as never had a light rail system, is excluded from the panel and effectively the data are treated as NAs not zeros. It is potentially problematic, because if I will miscalculate average light rail ridership or operating expenses in 1992, if I’m not careful:
with(subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "LR" & NTD.ts$Year == 1992), summary(OPEXP_TOTAL) )
##     Min.  1st Qu.   Median     Mean  3rd Qu.     Max.
##        0        0        0  6334000  5050000 62260000
with(subset(NTD.ts, NTD.ts$Mode == "LR" & NTD.ts$Year == 1992 & NTD.ts\$OPEXP_TOTAL > 0), summary(OPEXP_TOTAL) )
##     Min.  1st Qu.   Median     Mean  3rd Qu.     Max.
##   261200  4800000 11440000 17730000 21360000 62260000
1. Replace known missing data with an NA. For example, the NTD does not report fare revenues earlier than 2002, so I replaced all fare entries with NAs.
2. Systematically coerce likely incorrect zeros into NAs. The NTD are frequently messy, particularly for small systems and privately operated systems. In one year, an agency might report unlinked passenger trips, but fail to report any operating costs or passenger miles. Since ridership is particularly important, I used PMT and UPT to identify unreported data treated as zeros. There were only 12 instances where an agency reported positive PMT but no UPT. By contrast there were numerous instances where an agency reported positive UPT, but no PMT. I first coerced these 12 cases of UPT to be NAs. I then replaced zeros in remaining columns (including PMT) with NAs whenever the agency reported positive UPT. Note that this does not remove any data, but makes it a lot less likely to generate bad data (if for example dividing total fare revenues or operating expenses by unlinked passenger trips or passenger miles).
Posted in Transportation Planning | | Comments Off on National Transit Database panel by system, mode, and service

## The New Suburbs: Evolving travel behavior, the built environment, and subway investments in Mexico City

Mexico City is a suburban metropolis, yet most of its suburbs would be unfamiliar to urbanists accustomed to thinking about US metropolitan regions. Mexico City’s suburbs are densely populated—not thinly settled—and its residents rely primarily on informal transit rather than privately-owned automobiles for their daily transportation. These types of dense and transit-dependent suburbs have emerged as the fastest-growing form of human settlement in cities throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Wealthier and at a later stage in its economic development than other developing-world metropolises, Mexico City is a compelling place to investigate the effects of rising incomes, increased car ownership, and transit investments in the dense, peripheral areas that have grown rapidly around informal transit in the past decades, and is a bellwether for cities like Dakar, Cairo, Lima, and Jakarta.

I begin this dissertation with a historical overview of the demographic, economic, and political trends that have helped shape existing urban form, transportation infrastructure, and travel behavior in Mexico City. Despite an uptick in car ownership and use, most households—both urban and suburban—continue to rely on public transportation. Furthermore, suburban Mexico City has lower rates of car ownership and use than its central areas. In subsequent chapters, I frame, pose, and investigate three interrelated questions about Mexico City’s evolving suburban landscape, the nature of households’ travel decisions, and the relationship between the built environment and travel behavior. Together, these inquiries tell a story that differs significantly from narratives about US suburbs, and provide insight into the future transportation needs and likely effects of land and transportation policy in these communities and others like them in Mexico and throughout the developing world.

First, how has the influence of the built environment on travel behavior changed as more households have moved into the suburbs and aggregate car use has increased? Using two large metropolitan household travel surveys from 1994 and 2007, I model two related-but-distinct household travel decisions: whether to drive on an average weekday, and if so, how far to drive. After controlling for income and other household attributes, I find that the influence of population and job density on whether a household undertakes any daily car trips is strong and has increased marginally over time. By contrast, high job and population densities have a much smaller influence on the total distance of weekday car travel that a household generates. For the subset of households whose members drive on a given weekday, job and population densities have no statistical effect at all. Contrary to expectations, a household’s distance from the urban center is strongly correlated with a lower probability of driving, even after controlling for income. This effect, however, appears to be diminishing over time, and when members of a household drive, they drive significantly more if they live farther from the urban center. The combination of informal transit, public buses, and the Metro has provided sufficient transit service to constrain car use in the densely populated suburban environments of Mexico City. Once suburban residents drive, however, they tend to drive a lot regardless of transit or the features of the built environment.

Second, how much are the recent trends of increased suburbanization, rising car-ownership, and the proliferation of massive commercially-built peripheral housing developments interrelated? To investigate this question, I first disentangle urban growth and car ownership trends by geographic area. The fastest-growing areas tend to be poorer and have had a much smaller impact on the size of the metropolitan car fleet than wealthier, more established neighborhoods in the center and western half of the metropolis. I then zoom in to examine several recent commercial housing developments. These developments, supported by publicly-subsidized mortgages, contain thousands of densely-packed, small, and modestly-priced housing units. Their residents remain highly reliant on public transportation, particularly informal transit, and the neighborhoods become less homogeneous over time as homeowners convert units and parking spaces to shops and offices. Finally, I use the 2007 household travel survey to model households’ intertwined decisions of where to live and whether to own a car. As expected, wealthier and smaller households are more likely to purchase vehicles. However, they prefer to live in more central areas where households with cars tend to drive shorter distances. If housing policy and production cannot adapt to provide more centrally-located housing, growing incomes will tend to increase car ownership but concentrate more of it in areas where car-owning households drive much farther.

Third, how has the Metro’s Line B, one of the first and only suburban high-capacity transit investments, influenced local and regional travel behavior and land use? To explore this question, I compare travel behavior and land use measures at six geographic scales, including the investment’s immediate catchment area, across two time periods: six years before and seven years after the investment opened. Line B, which opened in stages in 1999 and 2000, significantly expanded Metro coverage into the densely populated and fast-growing suburban municipality of Ecatepec. While the investment sparked a significant increase in local Metro use, most of this increase came from people relying on informal transit, rather than cars. While this shift reduced transit fares and increased transit speeds for local residents, it also increased government subsidies for the Metro and had no apparent effect on road speeds. Furthermore, the Metro remains highly dependent on informal transit to provide feeder service even within Ecatepec. In terms of land use, the investment increased density around the stations but appears to have had little to no effect on downtown commercial development, where it might have been expected to have a significant influence. In short, the effects of Line B demonstrate much of the promise and problem with expanding high capacity transit service into the suburbs. Ridership is likely to be high, but so too will be the costs and subsidies, while the effects on car ownership and urban form are likely to be modest.

View of Ecatepec from Line B (2012)

Individually, each chapter contributes to a specific body of transportation and planning literature drawn from the US as well as developing countries. Collectively, they point to connection between land use and transportation in Mexico City that is different from the connection in US and other rich-world cities. In particular, there is a physical disconnect between the generally suburban homes of transit users and the generally central location of high-capacity public transit. Addressing this disconnect by shifting housing production from the periphery to the center or by expanding high-capacity transit to the periphery would require significant amounts of time and public subsidy. Thus, contemporary policies to reduce car use or increase accessibility for the poor in the short and medium term would do well to focus on improving the flexible, medium-capacity informal transit around which the city’s dense and transit-dependent suburbs have grown and continue to grow.

http://www.uctc.net/research/UCTC-DISS-2013-01.pdf

## Is a Half-Mile Circle the Right Standard for TODs?

Planners and researchers use transit catchment areas—the land around stations—as geographic units for predicting ridership, assessing the impacts of transit investments and, recently, for designing transit-oriented developments (TODs). In the US, a half-mile-radius circle has become the de facto standard for rail-transit catchment areas.

There is surprisingly little evidence to justify any particular catchment area. Why a half mile? Why not a quarter mile or two-fifths of a mile? Is there anything special about a half mile or is this simply a convenient figure that has become an industry standard? A half mile roughly corresponds to the distance someone can walk in 10 minutes at 3 miles per hour and is a common estimate for the distance people will walk to get to a rail station. The half-mile ring is a little more than 500 acres in size.

## Accessibility, it’s not just a wonkish term for being near stuff

I was recently at a transportation conference, where one of the speakers admonished academics for not doing more to get their research out the academy and into the hands of policy makers and the public. He compared this with think tanks, which spend around a quarter of their budgets on marketing.

Perhaps even more than marketing budgets,  inaccessible language, research methods, and publication practice help keep too many books and articles locked away in the ivory tower. While simplifying methods may not always be desirable–and it often is–we could certainly do a lot more to make our writing and publications more accessible.

I recently had the opportunity to rewrite an article with Robert Cervero in the Journal of the American Planning Association into an ACCESS article. If you click on the former, you will likely be directed to an abstract and the opportunity to purchase the article. Unless you have an institutional proxy server that grants you free access to the pdf,  you may look for a free draft working paper that’s available through University of California Transportation Center. This working paper, however, did not benefit from JAPA‘s peer review process (many thanks to David Sawicki, Randy Crane, and three anonymous reviewers), which led us to make serious modifications to our data collection and analysis methods. In short, it shows a much earlier iteration of a work in progress.

If you click on the ACCESS link, by contrast, you will be taken directly to a 2,000 word rewrite and summary of the full JAPA article. You can view this as an html, download a pdf, or order a paper subscription. If you have additional questions about the findings or how the study was conducted, the article provides the JAPA citation. ACCESS‘s goal “…is to translate academic research into readable prose that is useful for policymakers and practitioners. Articles in ACCESS are intended to catapult academic research into debates about public policy, and convert knowledge into action.”

Since the ACCESS piece came out, I have received far more inquiries about the work, Robert Cervero was on the local news, and a friend working in New Zealand pointed me to this discussion. This kind of feedback has been important to me, as a young, and hopefully budding, academic. I’m grateful to Don Shoup and the rest of the ACCESS editing team for their hard work. I’ll strive to remember that accessibility is a lot more than a measure of desired destinations, opportunities, and experiences that can be reached in a given amount time.

## Informal Public Transportation Networks in Three Indonesian Cities

“As Indonesian cities today become more prosperous, the demand for mobility among the urban poor is rapidly growing. This is nowhere more the case than in Jakarta – each day city streets become frozen with congestion. Government efforts to supply public transportation are insufficient at best. Informal transportation providers driving ojeks are a common sight weaving among unmoving traffic, simultaneously offering a faster route and contributing to congestion. Growth is also coming to other medium-sized Indonesian cities like Jogja and Solo in Central Java and Palembang in Sumatra—and so is the traffic. Yet while motorized transport is increasing in these cities, the environmental problems of congestion and pollution have not reached the scale of Indonesia’s biggest cities. In fact, as this report describes, informal public transportation offers potential alternatives to the negative stresses of growth on urban transportation systems as well as innovative approaches to provide service to people in poverty.

This report looks at informal public transportation (IPT) from different perspectives and reconsiders its value not just in improving urban mobility, but also as a provider of employment and backbone of the informal economy.”

## 2011 Tranportation Research Board Presentation: Valuing Transit

A preview of the presentation is available here.

I’ve also uploaded a low-resolution pdf.

## Kill a camel. Save the world.

I recently read this AP story in the Boston Globe. Apparently, the Australian government is considering awarding carbon credits for killing wild Australian camels. Each year, every six camels produces about the same amount of carbon as an average American car. Given the 1.2 million camels, that’s the equivalent of 200,000 cars. The article goes on to quote a government official about the menace that non-native camels pose to the Australian ecosystem and brand the animals a national menace. Even killing the creatures from helicopters, not a carbon-light mode of transportation, would qualify for credits, but only if the killing were humane.

The story reminded me a lot of how we’re approaching climate change and transportation in the US.

Whatever the merits of culling Australian camels or building a high speed rail network, carbon emissions play a small role in the costs and benefits. Yet, quantifiable, concrete, and topical, they often seem to be a central focus.