Our Top 10 posts of 2014

Here is a list with our 10 most popular posts written in 2014. I hope you enjoy it again. A great 2015 for all of us!

1. The Oligopoly that is Academia
   
   
2. Listen to Durkheim delivering a talk in 1911
   
   
3. Making 3D Maps in Excel
   
   
4. Subway systems of Rio and Shanghai 1993-2013
   
   
5. Urban Density Patterns in 9 Global Cities
   
   
6. Real-time map of 202 transit systems worldwide
   
   
7. Average Commute Time in metropolitan areas across the globe
   
   
8. Spatial data analysis in R: where to start
   
   
9. The Age of Peak Academic Performance
   
   
10. The Evolution of Commute Times in Brazilian Metropolitan Areas (1992-2013) 

Bonus:

1. Population Density Maps
2. Download free Brazil Shapefiles
3. Urban Primacy 
4. Porn star demographic

Urban Picture

Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, by the great Cameron Booth. More pictures from other photographers here.

[image credit: Cameron Booth, @Chaos_Boy]

Assorted links on Fertility

1. Fertility decisions and the escape from slavery
   
   
2.  The effects of social interactions on fertility decline: An agent-based simulation
   
   
3. "Around 1 million babies are likely to have been born to Erasmus programme couples since 1987"
   
   
4. How does the UK's fertility rate compare to other nations?
   
   
5. Probabilities of failing birth control methods
   
   
6. Development and fertility in Brazil: fertility reversion for more developed municipalities? , Paper by Bernardo Queiroz
   
   
7. The causal relationship between female labor supply and fertility in the USA
   
   
8. Data! The Human Fertility Database (HFD) and the Human Fertility Collection, organized by the Max Planck and the Vienna Inst. of Demography (via Carl Schmertmann )

[image credit: Javier Pérez]

Merry Isaac Newton's Birthday

A couple of centuries ago, a man was born who changed the course of history. Merry Isaac Newton's Birthday!

[image credit: ? via Matt Dawson]

In the spirit of Christmas, I have a gift to share with my hundreds of thousands of readers out there:

Daughter: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Fieldwork in Rio + Urban Picture

I've been a little absent lately stuck in traffic for many hours doing some exploratory fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro. One day, it took me 4,5 hours to travel 29 km by car. This is 3 times as estimated by Google Maps without traffic. Google's estimate for for the same journey using public transport is 2h41m without traffic. 

The problem is: 'no traffic' is not a reasonable assumption great urban areas like Rio. Under such congested contexts, GTFS data is hardly accurate and that's when real-time data (e.g. GPS) becomes necessary for more reliable analysis.

Rio has the worst traffic conditions in Brazil and many other problems, and yet it is impossible not to love this city.

[image credit: ? ]

ps. Dear readers, I miss you too.

Soundtrack:

R Links

1. Learn about handling character data in R with this free e-book
   
   
2. International population pyramids with ggplot2, by Kyle Walker
   
   
3. Beautiful mistakes in R
   
   
4. An interactive simulation model of Ebola, via Robin Lovelace
   
   
5. Interactive maps in R
   
   
6. Series of youtube tutorials for R users and developers, by Google Developers
   
   
7. List of R packages related to networks, graphs, Bayesian models, and flow diagrams
   
   
8. Interactive Circular Migration Flow Plots in R (by Nikola Sander and Guy Abel)

A debate with D.Harvey and Ed.Glaeser

The team at Caos Planejado (a very good Brazilian blog focused on urban economics) points out to a recent event where David Harvey and Edward Glaeser discussed the 'Economics of the Creative Economy'.

It is certainly not every day that we have this kind of debate. David Harvey is one of the most influential critical geographers with a great academic history and his writings have shaped a lot of the Marxist readings on cities. On the other corner of the ring Edward Glaeser is among the greatest urban economists nowadays and has a brilliant list of publications on a variety of issues related to urban development.

Despite ideological divergences, both are highly qualified scholars. They are also extremely polite, to a point that their disagreements always come in a gentle  sometimes even subtle way. I confess I was expecting some more blood.

My two highlights. Harvey and Glaser disagree on two particular questions that caught my attention: the connection between affordability issues and the idea of successful cities (29'-37'), and their different (normative) understandings of how property should be organized (1:04'-1:08'). Their disagreement on these two topics reflect markedly different positions in political philosophy more generally. More deeply, it shows rather different understandings of what justice means, and what should be the role of governments and markets in the pursuit for justice. 

I will stop here before you fall asleep with this post. Hope you enjoy the video.

ps. Glaser's body language reaction at 1:05' is hilarious.

How much space do we dedicate to cars?

Chris Bruntlett points out to this great drawing by Karl Jilg depicting 'the sad state of walking in our cities'. It's a nice way to illustrate how much public space is dedicated to cars in our cities and its health risk implications.

[image credit: Karl Jilg/Swedish Road Administration]

It is a well known and old stylized fact that cars occupy a disproportional amount of road space. Artistic expressions a aside and despite the effort of a few good researchers, no one really knows how much road space we actually dedicate to cars compared to other transport modes. This is not a trivial question to answer. There are many variables involved (including vehicle occupancy rates, vehicle speeds, the amount of road and parking spaces, fleet composition, etc), these variables change drastically across different parts of the city and different times of the day and such data is hardly available.

In the 'time of big data' with very profound and rapid changes in data collection, there are huge opportunities to advance this research agenda using computational modelling and I've been really tempted to work on this topic during my PhD. Would someone like join me? ;)

The Shortest bike lane ever

Shortest bike lane ever. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/nTUusAiBzr
— Justin S (@urban_future) December 9, 2014

Related Links:

• Real time mapping of bikeshare schemes around the world by Oliver O'Brien
• The size of bike-sharing systems Worldwide
• Bicycles access and school enrollment
• The world leader in bike-sharing is… China
• Google Maps now features elevation profiles for some bike routes
• The Impact of the Built Environment on Bicycle Commuting: Evidence from Beijing

The Rise and Fall of Manhattan’s Density (updated)

Alexander McQuilkin has written a very nice piece on the rise and fall of Manhattan’s density over the past 200 years. It's certainly worth a read.

"Between 1800 and 1910, density in urban Manhattan tripled from 200 to 600 people per hectare. Neighborhoods like Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and the East Village were significantly denser than the average, approaching 1,600 people per hectare." [This is about 4 times the population density of these neighborhoods as observed today !]

This is an interesting and not so new  map showing the 'de-densification of Manhattan', by Shlomo Angel and Patrick Lamson-Hall.

[image credit: Shlomo Angel and Patrick Lamson-Hall]

Updated: If you liked this post, you might like this interactive tool called Urban Layers that tracks Manhattan's rise, block by block, since 1765.

[image credit: @morphocode]

The invisible patterns of air travel

James Cheshire (who has one of the greatest blogs about spatial analysis and R) points out to this incredible visualization of the invisible patterns of air travel in the UK.

Related Links:

• Visualizing regional urban systems
• Animated map of Flights over NYC

Urban Picture

Cesar A. Hidalgo has pointed me to this picture showing an amazing contrast in the urban fabric of a city in Venezuela (I think this is Caracas but I'm not quite sure).

Urban contrast in Venezuela. Another example of how cities reflect society. @UrbDemogrphics @MITdusp @MITCities pic.twitter.com/g6Qj4zDfQg
— Cesar A. Hidalgo (@cesifoti) December 6, 2014

One Day on Waze

'One Day on Waze' is a series of data visualization videos showing 24 hours worth of data on Waze. The cities include: Boston, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Rio de Janeiro, San José, and Tel Aviv.

One Day on Waze from Justin Chen on Vimeo.

This is the video of Rio, where it's possible to spot some ugly red bottlenecks.

One Day on Waze - Rio de Janeiro from Takashi Kawashima on Vimeo.

Related Links:

• How we move in cities
• A day in the life of a city
• Visualizing Disabled Freedom Pass trips on the London Underground 
• NYC Taxi Trips Data from 2013

Assorted links

1. All papers published in Nature will be made free to read in screen-view format (ht Cheli Cresswell)
   
   
2. The world's most beautiful metro stations in pictures
   
   
3. Nature explores the most-cited research of all time
   
   
4. Mind-blowing post "Visualizing Algorithms" (ht Andy Boneau) 


5. Louis Smith has written a great piece to celebrate the 100th anniversary Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian architect who designed MASP in Sao Paulo and the Bowl Chair
   
   
6. Some common ways we're misled with charts
    
7. Migrants account for 70% of the increase in working-age population in OECD area
   
   
8. How big is #67P? Compare size of the comet with cities across Europe
   
   
9. World population predictions keep getting upward revisions these days (ht Sander Wagner)

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Scientific American]

Finding time for academic writing

#truestory

 

[#FAIL image credit: ? ]

Mobile Lives

A good idea for Xmas gift.

[image credit: Liam Walsh/The New Yorker, via Arthur Charpentier]

Related quote of the day.

The remains of a ghost town 28 years after Chernobyl

Danny Cooke has used a drone to give a bird's eye view of Pripyat (Ukraine), a beautiful and sad footage of the remains of a ghost town 28 years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which happened in 1986. A great piece of work.

***Soundtrack 'Promise land' by Hannah Miller

Real-time map of 202 transit systems worldwide

The team at geOps have used GTFS feeds to create an incredible real-time map of 202 transit systems around the world (mostly USA and Europe but there are a few cities in Mexico, Australia and Israel). If you zoom in enough you can see the vehicles moving, click on stops and vehicles to get information etc  (via @BrendnCasey).

You can check the map here and read some more information here, in German.

[image credit: geOps nor the University of Freiburg]

Related Links:

• Modeling Transport accessibility with open data
• Accessibility Observatory

What a neuroscientist is doing at Uber

Bradley Voytek writes about what a a neuroscientist is doing at Uber* (ht MR).  In short, Voytek is finding network patterns, mapping different types of users, etc etc (ie data science at its broadest sense).

Some of San Francisco’s Uber Networks

[image credit: Bradley Voytek]

*By now, you should have heard about Uber. If you haven't, I would recommend you to check this Freakonomics episode where they talk about Uber, what it is, its promises to the future of urban transport and some of its controversies. 

Quote of the Day

Man is born free, but everywhere he is checking work-related email.
— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) November 23, 2014

Soundtrack for the weekend:

Incorporating Cognitively Perceived Urban Space in Economic Models

Furtado, B. A. (2011). Neighbourhoods in urban economics: incorporating cognitively perceived urban space in economic models. Urban Studies, doi:10.1177/0042098010391288.

Abstract:

This paper proposes that urban economic analysis would benefit from the use of cognitively perceived neighbourhoods, which are discussed within urban studies. Georeferenced data should be aggregated by spatially bounded units that are identifiable by citizens in order to enrich one-dimensional distance as the sole variable to bring urban complexity into economic models. Multivariate analysis is applied to data from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to formulate four indices, ranked by neighbourhoods that together represent a spatially complex, non-linear influence on urban real estate markets. The results of the indices by neighbourhood are then tested against a traditional specification in an econometrics exercise that does not include the concepts and indices put forward. The definition of neighbourhood used and the empirical results provide a thorough description of urban fabric that can fully and more accurately represent urban influence in economics while avoiding abstract distance measurement.

Urban Picture

[image credit: ?]

Soundtrack:

NASA's high-resolution computer model of CO2 emission

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote a short post about NASA's project to monitor Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Space using a new satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2).

NASA has recently released a new stunning animation using the results of a high-resolution computer model of CO2 emissions on Earth's atmosphere'. (HT Franziska Gaupp, who is working with drought modeling and food supply here at Oxford)

Assorted links

1. Epic Extreme commute: From New Zealand to rural Iceland !(ht Vanessa Nadalin)
   
   
2. The economics of population imbalance
   
   
3. The paradox of Space and Time explained with  8-Bit Philosophy
   
   
4. 7 ways to make your Google Scholar Profile better
   
   
5. The Urban Fabric of English Cities and the Urban Footprint of Scottish Cities
   
   
6. Find Where The Streets Have Your Name, literally
   
   
7. Penguins are being raped by seals. Warning, strong images NSFW (thanks to my poor sick friend Leo Monasterio)
   
   
8. Locations of every photo from International Space Station via Flowing Data

[image credit: Nathan Bergey]

Modeling Transport accessibility with GTFS, OpenStreetMap and OpenTripPlanner Analyst

David Levinson points out to this great presentation by Kevin Webb talking about Modeling Transport accessibility with open data. Kevin and his team at Conveyal combine GTFS data, OpenStreetMap and OpenTripPlanner Analyst to make simple and yet sophisticated analysis of transport accessibility.

I feel very enthusiastic about Kevin's presentation because part of my PhD thesis will be closely connected to some of the questions he raised. In one of my papers, I will analyze the distributional aspects of how the addition of new transport infrastructure/services in Rio de Janeiro (particularity related to mega events) will impact urban accessibility across the metropolitan area. I'll post some updates about my PhD research in the near future as I suffer to make some progress on it.

There are dozens of other thoughts, papers and Links on GTFS and transport accessibility I would like to share here (including the research conducted by Andrew Owen, D. Levinson and other researchers), but I'm sure we will have many more posts to do this in the near future.

Related Links:

• Interactive map about Accessibility to Jobs in NY from the Regional Planning Association 
• Apps that help you get around using GTFS data 
• Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the New York City transit system 
• A set of Python 3.4 tools for processing General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data
• How to convert GTFS to GIS shapefiles and KML
• The World Bank, Columbia University and MIT co-organized a workshop on GTFS Data in 2013. The follow-up materials (including notes, slides, codes and videos) can be accessed through this link.

[image credit: Andrew Byrd and OpenTripPlanner Team]

The Evolution of Commute Times in Brazilian Metropolitan Areas (1992-2013)

 shameless self-promotion alert  Tim Schwanen and I published a working paper in 2013 where we analyzed how commute times have evolved in Brazil between 1992 and 2008, with special attention to differences between metropolitan areas, income levels and gender (Portuguese version here). 

The Brazilian newspaper O Globo took our study and made a great work of data visualization a couple of days ago, when they published a much improved and interactive version of Chart #2 in our study. This is their static version of the chart, comparing the evolution of average commute time across Brazilian metropolitan areas between 1992 and 2013. Click here for the interactive version (or here).

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Daniel Lima with data from Pereira and Schwanen, 2013]

I would love to make some comments on these findings since we have a marked contrast between different areas, both in terms of trends and levels. I will spare you from reading my typos here, though. In case you are interested, you may read the original publication, here.


Related Links:

• Average Commute Time Worldwide
• Public incentives to private transportation in Brazil

The Reason I am so Inefficient

[image credit: xkcd ]

Postdoc position, LSE and Oxford - Urbanization in Developing Economies

Prof Henry G Overman (LSE) points out to this great opportunity of a Postdoc position to do research on Urbanization in Developing Economies in a joint programme between Serc/LSE and the University of Oxford.

A major joint research programme on urbanisation in developing economies, with particular reference to Africa, has been launched at Oxford's Department of Economics and LSE's Spatial Economics Research Centre with support from the World Bank. Professors Tony Venables, Paul Collier (Oxford) and Vernon Henderson (LSE) are seeking to recruit up to two postdoctoral research economists. This will involve conceptual and econometric work on the overall urbanisation process in developing countries and on the internal development of cities, in particular large African cities. There will be intensive use of satellite data (to classify land use), night lights data, demographic census data, DHS data, survey data, mapping and planning data. The programme offers outstanding opportunities to contribute to cutting edge research in the field, based in two of Europe's leading social science research and training institutions.

What is the city, according to Shakespeare

[via Shoot The Shit]

Other ways to follow Urban Demographics

You may want to follow us on Twitter! There are many more interesting things going on there than I could possibly post here.

Follow @UrbDemogrphics


You may subscribe to the blog on a reader using our RSS feed.  Feedly is by far the best alternative to Google Reader so far.
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You can also get our updates on Facebook:

Assorted Links

1. Using cellphonedata to map population mobility in the Ebola epidemic 
   
   
2. A race between the world's fastest elevators
   
   
3. A waterfall flowing in the `wrong` direction
   
   
4. Is low fertility really a problem? Population aging, dependency, and consumption. (via Bernardo Queiroz)
   
   
5. Chinese ghost cities: between 2008 and 2012, the total urban area of cities in China expanded by 9,700km, which is the equivalent of 50 cities the size of Wenzhou (via PD Smith)
   
   
6. How to code a cat (nerd alert)
   
   
7. 8,000 glowing balloons trace the Berlin Wall to mark 25 years since its fall (via Gabriella Nunes)

[image credit: kulturprojekte berlin_2014 WEW FU berlin IGB]

Top 10 most populous cities in 2014 and 2030

[image credit: Thompson Reuters, via Pedro Damiao]

Public incentives to private transportation in Brazil

Brazil fact of the day:

The amount of governmental subsidies to private transportation in Brazil totaled R$ 19.38 billion in 2013. This figure is larger than all transport investments for the World Cup (R$ 14.38 billion) and it is almost twice the investments made in public transport in the whole country in the same year (R$ 10.2 billion).

This is from a nice piece published yesterday by Cassia Almeida and her team in O Globo, one the the biggest Brazilian newspapers . You may read the story [in Portuguese] here.

Urban Picture

Great picture by Chris Hadfield (NASA) showing the bright lights of Cairo and hundreds of smaller cities along the Nile river. The lights on the northeast show of Gaza, Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Chris Hadfield/NASA via Leo Mirani]

Assorted Links

1. Where on earth is the Berlin wall?   Full story here
   
   
2. You could fit all the planets of the Solar System within the distance between the Earth and the Moon
   
   
3. The gradparents of smartcars  via MR
   
   
4. A Visual Survey of Text Visualization Techniques
   
   
5. A Globe-Spanning Accent Map for the Word 'Potato'
   
   
6. OECD report: How was life? Global well-being since 1820 via Leo Monasterio
   
   
7. Varian on Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics via Gary King
   
   
8. The Twitter map of the Brazilian Elections

Manhattan Inside the Grand Canyon

Gus Petro has an amazing artwork to illustrate what it would look like if you dropped Manhattan into the Grand Canyon (via Mark Byrnes). 

[image credit: Gus Petro]

[image credit: Gus Petro]

Petro has another amazing work putting London by the sea. You should check it out and consider this as a Christmas Gift for someone like me. #justsaying

[image credit: Gus Petro]

World population and human capital (webcast)

Heads up:

Prof. Wolfgang Lutz (IIASA / Wittgenstein Center) will deliver a public lecture on 'world population and human capital in the 21st century', next week (November 3, 2014 17:00 GMT). This event is also being live webcast on here. The event is organized by the the Oxford Martin School and will be followed by a panel discussion with other demography professors from Oxford.

Prof. Lutz and his team are in the forefront of incorporating educational attainment in population projections and have many influential papers in Nature, Science, PDR, etc.  Highly recommended event! 

ps. By the way, you might like this interactive population pyramids of population projections and education composition.

[Image Credit: Lutz and KC, 2011]

Which cities have least affordable housing?

A new report by McKinsey Global Inst. compares housing affordability across 100 cities. HT/ the Daily Charts team at The Economist, who came up with a nice interactive chart.

[image credit: The Economist]

Assorted Links

1. What happens when you try to bring your Nobel Prize through airport security?
   
   
2. 1907-1915 - Russia Before the Revolution, in Color
   
   
3. Spain is the elevator capital of the world. ht Matt Phillips
4. Transport costs and inequalities in vaccine coverage in Africa
   
   
5. Heads Up: UC Berkeley seeks applications for faculty positions in Transportation Planning and in Housing and Urban Development
   
   
6. Vertical ballet
   
   
7. Sad pictures of the rapid deterioration of Detroit, captured by Google Street View
   
   
8. A camera filter that makes it possible to see carbon emissions, literally

FLIR: The Invisible Made Visible from Oceanic Preservation Society on Vimeo.

Comparing population densities in the US

A great interactive map comparing population densities in the US, by Ben Blatt.

Related Links:

• Population distribution in European capitals
• Urban Density Patterns in 9 Global Cities
• The footprint of the world’s largest metros

World Median Ages, and a few papers and links on population aging

Simran Khosla designed this nice map to compare median age across the globe. You may see it in more details in each continent, here. Simran has also done a similar map comparing Life Expectancy at Birth.

click on the image to enlarge it

[image credit: Simran Khosla via Urban Geographies]

And a few papers and links on population aging.

1. Map of the Day: Where Seniors Are Moving to in the US
2. Is low fertility really a problem? Population aging, dependency, and consumption (ht Bernardo Queiroz)
3. The pace of aging: Intrinsic time scales in demography
4. Handbook of Sociology of Aging 
5. Population Change among the Elderly: International Patterns 
6. The dependence burdens of aging babyboomers: a cross-national view

Global Ph.D.s Gender Gap (2010)

Scientific American has recently published an interesting chart showing the gender gap in Ph.D.s across different countries. It's amazing how the distribution varies so much between different fields of study. You should check the interactive version here.

Spatial income inequality in Brazil, 1872–2000

Reis, E. (2014). Spatial income inequality in Brazil, 1872–2000. Economia,15(2), 119-140. 

*Thanks Leo Monasterio for the tip.


Abstract:

The paper provides historical perspectives on spatial economic inequalities in Brazil making use of a database on Brazilian municipalities from 1872 to 2000. A suit of maps and graphs describe the geographic factors shaping the historical development of the Brazilian economy highlighting the role of transport costs and its consequences for the spatial dynamics of income per capita and labor productivity. The remaining of the paper estimates econometric models of growth convergence for municipal income per capita and labor productivity. From 1920 onwards analyses are refined, firstly, by disaggregating the models for urban and rural activities; secondly, by assuming spatial correlation among variables of the model; and, thirdly, by enlarging the model to take account of the long run determinants of spatial growth convergence. Empirical results endorse the historical preeminence of geographic factors – in particular accessibility and transport conditions – as opposed to institutional conditions. The conclusion summarizes the results and proposes research extensions.

DeadLine, personal note

Always keep it in mind and you won't need to kill yourself for it.

[image credit: by Don Motta]

My working soundtrack:

Urban Picture

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

[image credit: Antonello]

Soundtrack:

Assorted links

1. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded for locating brain’s GPS (via Anastasios Noulas)
   
   
2. Japan's Shinkansen bullet train marks 50th anniversary
   
   
3. AC/DC + Bee Gees mashup
   
   
4. 3 PostDoc positions at the Center for Metropolitan Studies in Sao Paulo (USP/Brazil)
   
   
5. Historical Slang Terms For Having Sex since 1351
   
   
6. Confronting Urban Planning & Design with Complexity: round table with M. Weinstock, M. Batty & Gert de Roo
   
   
7. The 2014 Sony World Photography Awards Shortlist
   
   
8. Germany removes University Fees

[image credit:? ]

Monitoring Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Space

NASA's recently launched Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite is capable of detecting the enhanced levels of carbon dioxide over the world's largest cities and is beginning to study LA in coordination with the Megacities team.

This part of a larger project by NASA to develop robust methods for assessing carbon emissions in the world’s largest cities, including Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Paris. Click here to read more about the Megacities Carbon Project.

[image credit: Megacities Carbon Project]

São Paulo from above (and its parking reform)

If you're interested in parking policies and urban planning, check this post by Paul Barter on the parking reform that is going on in São Paulo.

Even if you're not interested in this topic, I'm sure you'll like this picture (which I saw in Paul's post).

Greater São Paulo from above

[image credit: NASA/Paolo Nespoli]

Soundtrack for the weekend:

Brazilian Elections

Big day for Brazil tomorrow with the elections. It's hard to say we don't have a solid democracy.

How to make your pie chart less terrible

The team at Darkhorse Analytics have already shared a nice tip for how to make tables less terrible. Now it is time to 'improve' your pie charts!

Urban Picture

Located in Siberia, Norilsk is the world's northernmost city with a population of more than 100,000, and it's not just one of the coldest cities of the world—it's also one of the filthiest. Nickel ore smelting has transformed the landscape into one of the ten most polluted places on Earth.

Norilsk (Russia)

[image credit? ]

More pictures of this wonderful place here.

Average Commute Time Worldwide

This chart was taken from this study here. In general, commute times are relatively long in Brazilian metropolitan areas, especially when their wealth/population size is taken into account.

Obs.1: If you know of data sources (preferably household surveys) with commute time information for other metropolitan areas across the globe, I would to receive a message from you.

Obs.2: If you spot a name in the chart you've never heard of, it's probably a Brazilian metropolitan area.  

[image credit: Pereira and Schwanen, 2013]

Related Link:

• Parking Rates Worldwide
• Wendell Cox recently wrote a post about the 10 cities with the worst traffic in the world, according to the Tom Tom Traffic Index.  

The Timing of Urbanization: a global analysis

Motamed, M.J. et al. (2014) Agriculture, transportation and the timing of urbanization: Global analysis at the grid cell level. Journal of Economic Growth, v.19,issue 3. 

(thanks Leo Monasterio for the tip) 

Abstract:

This paper addresses the timing of a location’s historical transition from rural to urban activity. We test whether urbanization occurs sooner in places with higher agricultural potential and comparatively lower transport costs, using worldwide data that divide the earth’s surface at half-degree intervals into 62,290 cells. From an independent estimate of each cell’s rural and urban population history over the last 2,000 years, we identify the date at which each cell achieves various thresholds of urbanization. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across countries through fixed effects and using a variety of spatial econometric techniques, we find a robust association between earlier urbanization and agro-climatic suitability for cultivation, having seasonal frosts, better access to the ocean or navigable rivers, and lower elevation. These geographic correlations become smaller in magnitude as urbanization proceeds, and there is some variation in the effects across continents. Aggregating cells into countries, we show that an earlier urbanization date is associated with higher per capita income today.

Related Links:

• Global forecasts of urban expansion
• 200 years of Urban Expansion
• Urban Growth Trajectories

Solving a problem as a PhD student

[Credit: Kostas Siozios ht Franzie]

I started my PhD almost one year ago. I think this is going better than I expected in many ways, although quite often I feel like this.

Assorted Links

1. The Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning at the MIT found a great way to visualize their faculty members
   
   
2. Suprise in an Abandoned Bangkok Shopping Mall
   
   
3. You will thank me for this: How much underwear to bring on a trip
   
   
4. Prisons Are Facing Aging Populations, Too
   
   
5. Call for Papers: New Directions in Geospatial Simulation
   
   
6. Diver-less Cars With Adjustable Ethics Settings? via Karel Martens
   
   
7. The world population will not stabilize this century, says a new report that Patrick Gerland et al. published yesterday in Science.

UN 2012 population projections by continent [click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Patrick Gerland et al.]