The Social Dilemma of Driverless Cars

Iyad Rahwan presents in a TEDx his recently published paper on the the social dilemma of driverless cars (arXiv version here). HT Cesar Hidalgo.

You should try out the Moral Machine. 

Related link

• Autonomous vehicles

Japan fact of the day

You know that 30-metre sinkhole on a road in Japan? It was fixed in just a couple of days.

UPDATE: November 28th, Japan's giant sinkhole is sinking again just a month after it had been repaired.

image credit: AP , The Guardian

Cycling infrastructure and gender

A few days ago, I share a paper by Roger Beecham (Twitter) exploring gendered cycling behaviors in London. The paper brings a very interesting descriptive analysis of over 10 million journeys made by members of London's Cycle Hire Scheme.

A recent study by Rachel Aldred (Twitter) and colleagues sheds some more light on this debate with a review paper on how infrastructure preferences vary by gender and by age.

Aldred, R., Elliott, B., Woodcock, J., & Goodman, A. (2016). Cycling provision separated from motor traffic: a systematic review exploring whether stated preferences vary by gender and age. Transport Reviews, 1-27.

Abstract

In this paper, we represent a systematic review of stated preference studies examining the extent to which cycle infrastructure preferences vary by gender and by age. A search of online, English-language academic and policy literature was followed by a three-stage screening process to identify relevant studies. We found 54 studies that investigated whether preferences for cycle infrastructure varied by gender and/or by age. Forty-four of these studies considered the extent of separation from motor traffic. The remainder of the studies covered diverse topics, including preferred winter maintenance methods and attitudes to cycle track lighting. We found that women reported stronger preferences than men for greater separation from motor traffic. There was weaker evidence of stronger preferences among older people. Differences in preferences were quantitative rather than qualitative; that is, preferences for separated infrastructure were stronger in some groups than in others, but no group preferred integration with motor traffic. Thus, in low-cycling countries seeking to increase cycling, this evidence suggests focusing on the stronger preferences of under-represented groups as a necessary element of universal design for cycling.

Urban Picture

Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), 2014

credit: International Space Station

Carmageddon and Jamzilla in Los Angeles

I have already posted in the blog about the The Black Hole Theory of Highway Investment. For this matter, LA's 405 freeway is quite an iconic case as it has been the stage of 'Carmageddons' and 'Jamzillas' over the years.

Happy thanksgiving to our friends in LA.

#MannequinChallenge? Traffic nearly at a standstill on the 405 Freeway https://t.co/yfahcIv8AR pic.twitter.com/ZQndXJwEA3

— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) November 23, 2016

Related links:

• The impact of public transport on traffic congestion
• The unintended consequence of licence plate schemes
• Traffic Jam without bottleneck

The Age of Data

BBC Four has a produced a fascinating documentary on The Joy of Data, presented by the great Hannah Fry (Twitter).

Python Links

1. An overview of data science in Python
   
   
2. PySAL: a Python library for spatial analysis, great collaborative by Serge Rey and Dani Arribas-Bel and others
   
   
3. Creating a route planner for road network in Python by Cyrille Rossant
   
   
4. A call for help from  me  a Python-ignorant person to parallelize a simple task. Help anyone?
   
   
5. Mesa: Agent-based modeling in Python by Jckie Kazil and David Masad
   
   
6. Python for economists, by Thomas J. Sargent
   
   
7. Geoff Boeing has created a Python package for downloading and analyzing street networks from OpenStreetMap

credit: Geoff Boeing

Quote of the day: measurement

'Not everything that can be measured is important, and not everything that is important can be measured'

I heard this sentence the other day, but apparently the original one is a bit different.

Exploring gendered cycling behaviors in London

Beecham, R., &; Wood, J. (2014). Exploring gendered cycling behaviours within a large-scale behavioural data-set. Transportation Planning and Technology, 37(1), 83-97.

Abstract

Analysing over 10 million journeys made by members of London's Cycle Hire Scheme, we find that female customers' usage characteristics are demonstrably different from those of male customers. Usage at weekends and within London's parks characterises women's journeys, whereas for men, a commuting function is more clearly identified. Some of these variations are explained by geo-demographic differences and by an atypical period of usage during the first three months after the scheme's launch. Controlling for each of these variables brings some convergence between men and women. However, many differences are preserved. Studying the spatio-temporal context under which journeys are made, we find that women's journeys are highly spatially structured. Even when making utilitarian cycle trips, routes that involve large, multi-lane roads are comparatively rare, and instead female cyclists preferentially select areas of the city associated with slower traffic streets and with cycle routes slightly offset from major roads.

credit: Beecham & Wood (2014)

ps. Interesting paper. I'm not sure what exactly the authors mean by "utilitarian cycle trips", though. I would like to see a more in depth discussion on the root causes of travel behavior differences by gender. It's a great work, though and the authors have a another paper where they focus on the methodology they've used.

Assorted Links

1. Rejected designs for the Eiffel Tower
   
   
2. The effects of China's universal two-child policy
   
   
3. What your political ideology tells about your ideal neighbourhood
   
   
4. Kendra Levine has put together a superb collection of sources for transportation data and statistics. It's mostly focused on the US but there are some international resources too
   
   
5. Historical maps of inequality in the US
   
   
6. A Halloween hero
   
   
7. Papers with shorter titles get more citations, apparently
   
   
8. New research on human genomic variation refines previous models of historical human migration HT Marcelo Medeiros

125,000 years of human migration in 1 minute

The world’s most violent cities

For the most part, the most violent cities are either in deep economic crisis (or long economic stagnation), with high levels of inequality or involved with drug gangs. via The Economist. You can follow their daily charts on twitter here.

Urban Picture

Shinjuku sunset, Tokyo by Yoshiro Ishii. More here.

WTF

I've never felt so ashamed of being American... and I'm not even American.

There will be a flood of articles on this issue. I have really liked these two so far.

• P. Krugman on 'WhatHappened on Election Day '
• "The Simpsons predicted President Trump 16 years ago as ‘a warning to America"

Racial discrimination and the sharing economy

Last year, a study by Edelman and Luca found robust evidence of racial discrimination among New York City landlords on Airbnb. More recently, a new study also brought evidence of racial discrimination among drivers of ride-sharing services including Uber, Lyft, and Flywheel (see abstract of the paper below).

The new era of big data opens lots of opportunities for research on social and racial discrimination on the web, including an emerging issue of algorithmic discrimination. On a related topic, Zeynep Tufekci has a great Ted talk about machine intelligence and morality.

Ge, Y., et al. (2016). Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies (No. w22776). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Abstract:

Passengers have faced a history of discrimination in transportation systems. Peer transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft present the opportunity to rectify long-standing discrimination or worsen it. We sent passengers in Seattle, WA and Boston, MA to hail nearly 1,500 rides on controlled routes and recorded key performance metrics. Results indicated a pattern of discrimination, which we observed in Seattle through longer waiting times for African American passengers—as much as a 35 percent increase. In Boston, we observed discrimination by Uber drivers via more frequent cancellations against passengers when they used African American-sounding names. Across all trips, the cancellation rate for African American sounding names was more than twice as frequent compared to white sounding names. Male passengers requesting a ride in low-density areas were more than three times as likely to have their trip canceled when they used a African American-sounding name than when they used a white-sounding name. We also find evidence that drivers took female passengers for longer, more expensive, rides in Boston. We observe that removing names from trip booking may alleviate the immediate problem but could introduce other pathways for unequal treatment of passengers.

Income segregation at the block level

Herwig Scherabon, an incredibly talented graphic designer, has created this artistic representation of income segregation of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York at the block level. These pieces are shortlisted for the Information is Beautiful Awards. Thanks Linda Regber for the pointer.

Click on the images for higher resolution.

                           Chicago                                                        Los Angeles

New York

Assorted Links

1. NYC's Busy Streets photoshopped into beautiful desolation
   
   
2. Your Friendly Guide to Colors in Data Visualisation, by Lisa Rost
   
   
3. Forget autonomous vehicles, this is the solution that will solve road congestion with a 'smart' use of space
   
   
4. Great source of data for comparative studies in demography : Contextual Database of the Generations and Gender Programme. More info here
   
   
5. Will the internet set us free? A great discussion on freedoms and the potential of the web, with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. I was lucky enough to be in the audience
   
   
6. Some people should read this paper looking themselves in the mirror (via Leo Monasterio)
   
   
7. Interesting study on racial reclassification and black identity in Brazil , by Vitor Miranda. Quote: "By 2010 at least one in every three people in the black population was a newly reclassified black. The increase was particularly strong among males and the younger generations."
   
   
8. How the world perceives China! via my supreme friend Xi (Sisi) Hu

Is a scientific career predictable?

Very interesting new paper by Roberta Sinatra, Barabási et al. on the evolution of individual scientific impact. Here is a 5-minute summary video of the paper and a neat interactive data visualization. Via Cesar Hidalgo.

Related posts:

• The Age of Peak Academic Performance
• The Art of Communicating Science
• Unhelpful Research Advice
• Does anyone actually read your research?

The Impact of Urban Appearance

We have mentioned the work of Cesar Hidalgo (twitter) in this blog a few times already but he keeps coming up with new interesting research . As many will know, Hidalgo and his team have a project called Place Pulse, in which they use computer vision techniques to analyze snapshots of google street view and crowdsource people's perception on city’s physical appearance. Here are my three highlight of the project so far.

• In its initial phase, the project focused on 19 American cities. Some of the research findings show how perceived safety of streetscapes has strong positive correlation with household income, population density and income inequality (PDF of the paper).
  
  
• In a more recent paper, led by Marco De Nadai (twitter), the authors combine Place Pulse with mobile phone data to show how the safety scores of neighbourhoods in Rome and Milan are also strongly correlated with urban liveliness, and that visual features like greenery and street facing windows contribute to a positive appearance of safety. This is an extension of Nadai's previous work, where he engages more directly with Jane Jacobs's ideas on urban vitality.
  
  
• Finally, the Place Pulse project has been recently updated and expanded to create the first global dataset of urban appearance "...containing 110,988 images from 56 cities, and 1,170,000 pairwise comparisons provided by 81,630 online volunteers along six perceptual attributes: safe, lively, boring, wealthy, depressing, and beautiful". 

The research possibilities here are endless, so I'm sure I'll be posting updates on this project again in the future. Don't forget to input some of your own perceptions to the project.