What The Simpsons got right about Transport Planning

Many of you will remember that "Marge vs the Monorail" episode of The Simpsons*. Juliet Eldred has written a hilarious and thoughtful Twitter thread about how this episode encapsulates a lot of the common issues in Transportation Asset Management faced by transport agencies. Good food for thought about the dynamics of policy decision making, the creation of white elephants, and how routine maintenance gets sidestepped by the  hype of 'new' technologies and capital investment. This story speaks a lot to recent transport projects worldwide, including the silly idea of Elon Musk's tunnel project.

* If you haven't watched it before, waste no more time. Watch it here. You're welcome :)

Academic Outreach

While many academics would like to (or are expected to) develop research with impact on the real world outside the ivory tower, this is how the academic publication process often look like. Via SAS.

PolicySpace: agent-based modeling for public policy analysis

I've posted before about the "Humans of Simulated New York", a comprehensive agent-based model (ABM) of city life that is being led by Francis Tseng.

On a similar vein, my colleague from Ipea Bernardo Furtado has been developing the PolicySpace project, an agent-based modelling platform for public policy analysis. According to Furtado:

"PolicySpace is an agent-based model, including families, citizens, residences, businesses, markets, taxes, mobility, and municipalities, that allows “what-if” questions. It is an in silico laboratory, of extremely low relative cost. Yet, it is flexible, adaptable, that anticipates trajectories and, quantitatively, measures horizontal effects across sectors, places and times. The book reviews the literature, explains concepts, and describes the methodology. It details the model, its parameters, and the full process. It validates the proposal and illustrates with applications."

The platform allows for the ex-ante evaluation/simulation of public policy alternatives in a way that takes into account the emergent complexity of the interactions between portions of society and institutions, in space and time. PolicySpace was originally designed for the Brazilian case but it is easily adaptable to other contexts. The code is written in Python, it is open source and the full code is available on Github. The platform is also modular, so it can expanded in a flexible way to gradually incorporate different aspects considered to be relevant for a variety of policy realms. For example, Francis Tseng is further expanding the PolicySpace platform to incorporate public and private urban transportation at fine spatial scale.

Earlier this year, Bernardo published a book where he presents a literature review of ABM and where he introduces, validates and demonstrates applications of PolicySpace. The book PDF is freely available both in English and in Portuguese.

Give Bernardo a shout if you would like to collaborate on the project, use it in your own applications or just give him some feedback.  He is co-organizing a special issue on Complexity Science and Public Policy, so some of you might be interested in that as well.

image credit: Francis Tseng and Bernardo Furtado

Ex-ante evaluation of the accessibility impacts of transport policy scenarios: equity assessment of BRT expansion

About a month ago, I submitted the 4th paper of my PhD research for publication. The preprint of the paper is available at Open Science Framework (OSF), and you can download it here. Please feel free to read and cite share the manuscript. Suggestions and  criticisms  nice comments are always welcome.

Pereira, R. H. (2018). Ex-ante evaluation of the accessibility impacts of transport policy scenarios: equity and sensitivity to travel time thresholds for Bus Rapid Transit expansion in Rio de Janeiro. OSF Preprints http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/SUT7R

Abstract:

The accessibility impacts of transport projects ex-post implementation are generally evaluated using cumulative opportunity measures based on a single travel time threshold. Fewer studies have explored how ex-ante accessibility appraisal of transport plans can be used to evaluate policy scenarios and their impacts for different social groups or examined whether the results of project appraisals are sensitive to the time threshold of choice. This paper analyzes how different scenarios of full and partial implementation of the TransBrasil BRT project in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) will likely impact the number of jobs accessible to the population of different income levels under various travel time thresholds of 30, 60, 90 and 120 minutes. Compared to a partial operation scenario, the full implementation of TransBrasil that extends this corridor into the city center would lead to higher accessibility gains due to network effects of connecting this BRT to other transport modes. Nonetheless, the size of the accessibility impacts of the proposed BRT as well as its distribution across income classes would significantly change depending on the time threshold chosen for the accessibility analysis. Considering cut-off times of 30 or 60 minutes, both scenarios of TransBrasil would lead to higher accessibility impacts in general and particularly for low-income groups, moving Rio towards a more equitable transportation system. However, under longer thresholds of 90 and 120 minutes, an evaluation of this project would find much smaller accessibility gains more evenly distributed by income levels. The paper highlights how time threshold choice in cumulative opportunity measures can have important but overlooked implications for policy evaluation.

Some of the core findings of the paper mentioned in the abstract are illustrated in the figure below. The figure brings box plots that show the distribution of gains in job accessibility via public transport by income groups under partial and full operation scenarios of the TransBrasil BRT project in Rio de Janeiro. The results are shown separately given different choices of travel time thresholds in the accessibility analysis.

call for papers: Complexity Science and Public Policy

The journal Complexity has opened a call for papers for a special issue on applications of complexity science for public policy.  Thanks Bernardo Furtado for the pointer and co-editing the special issue

This Special Issue aims at collecting both novel research and reviews on Public Policy Modeling and Applications, showing not only the cross-disciplinary nature of the field but also how rigorous scientific studies have already contributed towards understanding the complexity of social systems and to policy making.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Complex social systems and applications in public policy
• Complexity methods and analysis for policymakers
• The effects of governance in complex social systems
• Management of financial networks, real estate, and financing spillovers
• Smart cities, mobility, and flows in complex urban environments
• Dynamic risk management in complex scenarios
• Analyses that explicitly include political-spatial governance boundaries
• Design and analysis of complex sociotechnical systems for public services

photo credit: Armando G Alonso

The paradox of collective choice

In the early 1950s, Kenneth Arrow published his PhD thesis where he demonstrated that it does not exist a method of converting individual preferences into a single group preference that is not limited by a 'voting paradox' at some point. Here is a great video explaining in layman's terms how Arrow's impossibility theorem works.

Needless to say how important this idea is for social choice theory and that it gave Arrow a Nobel Prize in economics. Curious fact. Five of Arrow's former students have won the Nobel Prize.

VotingParadoxes from Paul stepahin on Vimeo.

Modeling Complex Systems for Public Policies

Some of my colleagues at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea - Brazil) are organizing a seminar on 'Modeling Complex Systems for Public Policies'. It is a great initiative to bring some of the cutting edge developments in academia to discuss critical challenges faced in the policy world.

The event will have the participation of some great researchers, including Luis Bettencourt and Michael Jacobson (full programme here). The seminar will be held in Brasilia in the beginning of September 2014.

[click on the poster to enlarge it]

Assorted links

1. Lessons From Brazil’s War on Poverty
   
   
2. What makes most restaurant reviews worthless
   
   
3. The present and future of Google Maps
   
   
4. The world cup impact on porn websites traffic
   
   
5. 2014 total malware volumes in the first 3 months already surpassed entire 2013 total(via Anchises)
   
   
6. The Billion Prices Project - an academic initiative at MIT that uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct economic research (e.g. comparing Inflation in Latin American Countries). - via The Drunkeynesian
   
   
7. Other things I'd rather be doing
   
   
8. Watch 220 years of U.S. state population growth

[click on the image to enlarge it]

Does anyone actually read your research?

The World Bank have asked themselves this question and here is what they found: almost 87 percent of  their policy reports were never cited (ht Patricia Morita Sakowski).

If you're, like me too lazy  busy to read the WB report, you can check Christopher Ingraham's piece in the Washington Post.

Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. Since most World Bank reports have a stated objective of informing public debate or government policy, this seems like a pretty lousy track record.

ps. If you would like to track your own citations, you could subscribe to Google Scholar Citations.

Assorted links

1. PhD Scholarships for students in Latin America, by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
   
   
2. 100 historic photographs of Brazil
   
   
3. Watch Water Boil And Freeze At The Same Time Read (via Mariana Rossi)
   
   
4. What happens when governments try to help poor people move to better neighborhoods? 
   
   
5. A 3200 year old tree, possibly the biggest tree on Earth
   
   
6. African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data
   
   
7. A short video dedicated to my friends with obsessive compulsive disorder
   
   
8. The first-ever asteroid with rings has recently been discovered. A nice video and the paper.
   
   
9. 40 years of Chicago's rising inequality, in one GIF via Demografía_CSIC

[image credit: Daniel Hertz via The Atlantic Cities]

80 MOOCs Getting Started in April

Open Culture points out to about 80 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) getting started in April. Here is their comprehensive list of MOOCs.

Some of the courses that caught my attention include:

• Evaluating Social Programs  – MIT on edX – April 1 (4 weeks)
• An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python  – Rice on Coursera – March 24 (9 weeks)
• The Data Scientist’s Toolbox  – Johns Hopkins University on Coursera – April 7 (4 weeks)
• Getting and Cleaning Data  – Johns Hopkins University on Coursera – April 7 (4 weeks)
• R Programming  – John Hopkins on Coursera – April 7 (4 weeks)
• Justice  – Harvard on edx – April 8 (12 weeks)
• Climate Change in Four Dimensions  – UCSD on Coursera – April 8 (10 weeks)
• Fairness and Nature: When Worlds Collide  – University of Leeds on FutureLearn – March 31 (2 weeks)
• An Introduction to Population Health  – University of Manchester on Coursera – April 14 (6 weeks)
• Modelling and Simulation using MATLAB® - Hochschule RheinMain on iversity – April 22
• Identity, Conflict, and Public Space  – Queen’s University Belfast on Futurelearn – April 28 (6 weeks)
• Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1  – Stanford on Coursera – April 29 (6 weeks)
• Maps and the Geospatial Revolution  – Penn State on Coursera – April 30 (5 weeks)

Urban Policies and Public Space Allocation

A couple of months ago, I shared a post with a short presentation by Janette Sadik-Khan talking about the recent low-cost interventions on public space in NY City. The fact is that these interventions have been around for years now, and Clarence Eckerson and the team at Streetfilms have been documenting these changes since their early stages.

Here is one of their short films showing the remarkable before-and-after transformation of several streets and intersections in NY City. (via Sarah Goodyear):

What makes me particularly interested in such urban transformations is the way they make evident the idea that public space is a scarce resource in large cities. Though unnoticed by some policy makers, great cities face a clear resource dilemma in the allocation of public space in general and road space in central areas in particular. In some large cities like London, transport authorities have acknowledged this issue a long time ago.

Deciding upon who should have the priority to use urban space in certain areas of the city (drivers, cyclists, pedestrians and/or public transport users), however, is quite complex. These decisions are complex both because of the technical aspects in the construction of bike lanes, bus lanes and corridors, congestion charging schemes etc. and especially because of the public and political acceptability of such decisions (Banister, 1994).

In the way I like to read these 'urban interventions', they all come down to the role played by policy makers in mediating conflicts that arise from unjust/asymmetrical appropriation of space by individuals and social groups. And as in any other field of public policy, it is crucial to evaluate such urban policies in order to identify those types of interventions that work and to learn from those that do not work. I will probably dedicate more attention to this topic in my research, so hopefully I'll post more on this theme in the future.

Related Links:

• Banister, David (1994).
• Equity Issues in Transport Policy
• An experimental confirmation of the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis

Equity Issues in Transport Policy

As some of you may know, I have just started my PhD and I will be focusing on 'Equity Issues in Transport Policies' with bits of spatial and demographic analysis.

So I was very glad to watch this short talk by Enrique Peñalosa (former mayor of Bogota): 'Why buses represent democracy in action'. You know, it's always good to hear big names saying you're working on important problems.

Assorted Links

1. Road pricing: What’s not to love?
   
   
2. Top 20 things politicians need to know about science and Top 20 things scientists need to know about policy-making (ht Paulo Nascimento)
   
   
3. Turning-point years in history according to the most frequent dates used dissertation titles
   
   
4. Up all night to get data, a music parody
   
   
5. San Francisco Aerial Views. 1937-1938
   
   
6. Urban street networks, a comparative analysis of ten European cities
   
   
7. Declining fertility rates will transform the Asian family
   
   
8. Coldest spot on Earth identified by satellite (minus 93.2 Cº)
   
   
9. Snapshot: Global Migration
   
   
10. African polygamy over space and time

Assorted Links

1. The world's tallest slum (via Pedro Souza)
2. Observing the Earth with Incredible Satellite Photos
3. Tweet City: Building Heights by Number of Tweet
4. Things I'd rather be doing
5. The Gap Between Schooling and Education
6. Is Regional Policy a Waste of Time? (via Leo Monasterio)
7. Driverless vehicles are not going to solve congestion problems
8. A scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998
9. How much of your salary would you need to spend to rent a room in London?

[Image Credit: FT]

Low-cost interventions on public space

A short presentation by Janette Sadik-Khan (New York transportation comissioner) talking about the recent low-cost interventions on public space in NY. I am keen to read new studies assessing these interventions under different perspectives (urban mobility, housing, segregation, accessibility, real state, market sales etc). I hope there is someone out there doing research on this.

Bicycles access and school enrollment

Análise Real (a Brazilian economics Blog) called my attention to this paper by Profs. K. Muralidharan and N. Prakash where they analyze an Indian program "... aimed to reduce the gender gap in secondary school enrollment by providing girls who continued to secondary school with a bicycle that would improve access to school."

By the way, their results show the Cycle program has impressive results when compared to more traditional programs (i.e. conditional cash transfer). 

This paper is going to the top of my reading list! Here is the paper. And here is a video briefing on the study.

Assorted links

1. OECD Health Data 2013
   
2. The infrastructure behind Dutch cycling (via MR)
   
3. How people get to work across England and Wales?
   
4. Red Bull Illume Photo Contest 2013
   
5. Many transit visualizations in one place (via David Levinson)
   
6. INDEPTH launches a repository of (longitudinal) demographic and health data for low/middle-inc.countries (via Emilio Zagheni)
   
7. A century of jittery oil production and prices
   
8. Effect of a conditional cash transfer programme on childhood mortality in Brazil (via @HansRosling)
   
9. Chinese Food and Population Density by Neighborhood in NYC

Academic Impacts on Governments

It has become much easier to assess the academic impact of published papers and authors (Google Citations Page* and T. Reuters). However, the assessment of academic impact on public policy is not that straightforward, although it's a crucial issue for Research Institutes, Think-thanks and Funding Agencies.

A team at LSE leads a project on the subject and they are developing quantitative metrics for measuring the impact of research in the 'public sphere'. It's the Impact of Social Sciences Project.  self-recommending  Some podcasts of their latest events should be available here:

• The Future of Academic Impacts
• From Research to Policy: Academic Impacts on Government

*I encourage you to register at Google Scholar Citations. This is one of the best ways for academics to compute citation metrics and track them over time. You only need a gmail account and Google does the rest for you. Besides, anyone can register!

Assorted Links

1. Most common Origins and Destinations of international refugees
   
   
2. Location, Location, and Pacification: The Effect of UPPs in Rio (via Brandon Fuller)
   
   
3. March 15 marked the 200th anniversary of John Snow’s birth, aka the father of modern epidemiology
   
   
4. Foreign-Borns in the US: Then and Now
   
   
5. Woody Allen Answers 12 Unconventional Questions
   
   
6. PDR Journal has recently published a supplemental issue in honor to Paul Demeny focusing current themes in population and public policy
   
   
7. The lasting effect of the initial allocation of land
   
   
8. Demographic convergence in US metro areas by Alan Berube (via Peter Gordon)
   
   
9. A neat animation by Oliver O`Brien (CASA/UCL) showing the touch-ins (red) and touch-outs (green) at London’s tube and train stations