Why cities should focus on promoting accessibility, not mobility

Amit Bhatt (WRI) has written a very eloquent piece on why cities should focus on promoting accessibility, not mobility. Good read.

Call for Applications: ITF Young Researcher of the Year Award

The International Transport Forum (ITF) at the OECD has opened a call for applications for the 2020 Young Researcher of the Year Award. The winner of the Award will be invited to present her/his work at the ITF Annual Summit.

"The principal aim of the International Transport Forum’s Young Researcher of the Year Award is to highlight the importance of transport research for sound transport policy formulation and implementation, and to foster closer links between transport policy and research. For 2020, the theme of the Summit is 'Transport Innovation for Sustainable Development'."

I was really honored to receive this award last year and it was a truly great experience. If you are eligible, I would highly recommend you apply for this award. The application is "open to researchers under 35 years of age at the time of closing of applications who have undertaken the research presented in the submitted paper in an institution, university or consultancy firm located in a member country of the ITF/OECD".

First results of Access to Opportunities Project are now online

Last week, we officialy launched the Access to Opportunities Project. In this first edition of the project (2019) we present accessibility estimates by active transport modes (walking and cycling) for the 20 largest cities in the Brazil, and by public transport for 7 major cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Fortaleza, Porto Alegre e Curitiba).

At the occasion of the event, we launched the website of the project where one can find:

1. a published report analyzing inequalities in access to opportunities in Brazil's largest cities (report only available in Portuguese)
2. an interactive map to explore the results
3. the data outputs of the project
4. the computational code used to process, analyze and visualize the data

Here is a quick demo of the interactive map but please go ahead and try it for yourself. The app scales fairly well despite the massive amount of data, thanks to Kauê Braga's work using in R to create a mapdeck application in shiny.

Is this Transit Oriented Development (TOD) ?

Aerial footage of the Maeklong Rail Market, Thailand. Captured by the talented Demas Rusli ( Instagram, Twitter).

Plotting the metropolitan areas of Brazil in R

Here is a simple R script to download the shape files of Brazilian metropolitan areas by year and plot them in R.

obs. It's important to note that, since the 1988, metro areas are created by state governments. As a rule, this is done with absolutely no transparency nor any technical criteria. It is this legal issue, rather than the urbanization process in the country itself, that led to such an inflated increase in the number of metro areas in the country over the past two decades.

Number of metro areas in Brazil:

1970: 9

2001: 24 

2018: 77

Using R and the geobr package to plot Brazilian metropolitan areas in different years.

library(geobr)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(sf)
library(ggthemes)


# download sf of Brazilian states
  states <- read_state(code_state = 'all')


# download metro areas sf and pille them up
  download_metro <- function(y){
    tmp <- read_metro_area(year = y) %>% select(name_metro, abbrev_state)
    tmp$year <- y
    return(tmp)
  }

  metros_sf <- lapply(X= c(1970, 2001, 2018), FUN=download_metro) %>% do.call('rbind', .)


# plot
  temp_lot <- ggplot() +
                geom_sf(data=states, color="gray90", fill="gray80", size=.4) +
                geom_sf(data=metros_sf, aes(color=as.factor(name_metro), fill=as.factor(name_metro)), show.legend = FALSE) +
                facet_wrap(~year, nrow = 1) +
                theme_map() +
                theme( strip.background = element_rect(colour = "white", fill = "white"),
                       strip.text.x = element_text(size = 8, face ="bold"))

# save plot
  ggsave(temp_lot, file= "geobr_metros_1970-2001-2018.png", dpi = 300, width = 15, height = 6, units = "cm")

view raw metro_areas_brazil_geobr.md hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Procrastination is not about productivity

Procrastination is “a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, self-doubt”. At its core, it’s about emotions, not productivity. 

This is from this brilliant article written by Charlotte Lieberman for the NYT, probably the best piece on procrastination I’ve ever read.