Urban Picture

Seoul, South Korea

image credit: Maxar and Daily Overview

My interview for the Caos Planejado podcast

Today is the 5th anniversary of Caos Planejado, a great Brazilian blog focused on urban planning, economics and innovation. Long live! Anthony Ling (the head of Caos Planejado) interviewed me for their podcast a few months ago, when we talked about my PhD research, my ongoing work on the Access to Opportunities Project and other topics related to innovation, data and equity in urban mobility. The interview was recorded in Portuguese and you can listen to it here.

The influence of ride-hailing on users' travel behavior

New paper hot off the press, by Alejandro Tirachini (Twitter).

Tirachini, A., & del Río, M. (2019). Ride-hailing in Santiago de Chile: users’ characterisation and effects on travel behaviour. Transport Policy. Volume 82, October 2019, Pages 46-57

Abstract:

In this paper, an in-depth examination of the use of ride-hailing (ridesourcing) in Santiago de Chile is presented based on data from an intercept survey implemented across the city in 2017. First, a sociodemographic analysis of ride-hailing users, usage habits, and trip characteristics is introduced, including a discussion of the substitution and complementarity of ride-hailing with existing public transport. It is found that (i) ride-hailing is mostly used for occasional trips, (ii) the modes most substituted by ride-hailing are public transport and traditional taxis, and (iii) for every ride-hailing rider that combines with public transport, there are 11 riders that substitute public transport. Generalised ordinal logit models are estimated; these show that (iv) the probability of sharing a (non-pooled) ride-hailing trip decreases with the household income of riders and increases for leisure trips, and that (v) the monthly frequency of ride-hailing use is larger among more affluent and younger travellers. Car availability is not statistically significant to explain the frequency of ride-hailing use when age and income are controlled; this result differs from previous ride-hailing studies. We position our findings in this extant literature and discuss the policy implications of our results to the regulation of ride-hailing services in Chile.

 

geobr: easy access to official spatial data sets of Brazil

I'm glad to annouce that geobr is now officially available on CRAN. Here and here are quick intros on how to use geobr to get easy and quick access to shape files and other official spatial data sets of Brazil. The package currently includes several data sets for various years such as states, regions, municipalities, census tracts, statistical grid and others. The github repository is this, in case you want to keep track of the latest developments.

The package was developed by my team and I at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea). We are constantly working to expand and improve the package, so if you have any suggestions/contributions, please feel free to open an issue on Github.