Transport access to health services

As some of you might remember from an earlier post, my PhD research concentrates on questions of transportation equity, particularly focusing on issues of transport accessibility and inequality of opportunities. Because there is a substantial overlap between my PhD and the research on spatial access to health services, I've read quite a few papers in this literature.

This is a well-studied topic with plenty of publications for those interested.  if you would ask my opinion  I would strongly recommend these two papers below. Together they give a good summary of the cutting-edge research and a very thorough review of various approaches to measuring transport access to health services.

• Neutens, T. (2015). Accessibility, equity and health care: review and research directions for transport geographers. Journal of Transport Geography, 43, 14-27.
  
  
• Apparicio, P., Gelb, J., Dubé, A. S., Kingham, S., Gauvin, L., & Robitaille, É. (2017). The approaches to measuring the potential spatial access to urban health services revisited: distance types and aggregation-error issues. International Journal of Health Geographics, 16(1), 32.

Types of distance. (a) Cartesian distances. (b) Network distances

credit: Apparicio et al 2017

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.

The Landscape of Transport Studies

In a recent Editorial for the journal Transport Reviews, David Banister presents some interesting numbers about the growth of transport-related journals.

I have searched through the Ulrich’s database and have identified 85 transport journals that are refereed and are available in print. [..] the numbers of transport journals has more than doubled from 1990 – 2010, and a further 14 more have been started in the last three years.

David also reports that over the years 1945–2013 there have been 58,000 papers published with the word transportation in the title.

Irrespective of the numbers, it is again the growth that stands out. Less than 1% of these papers with the word transportation in the title were published prior to 1960, and just over 8% by 1980. Between 1980 and 2000, this figure increased to 36%, and the remaining 64% have been published since 2000. 

Related Link;

• Tim Schwanen comments on Elsevier`s list with the 25 Most Popular Papers on Transport by 2013 (The list is here, and it`s open access).

A Historic Traffic Jam: the "H-Day" in 1967

When was the last time you've heard about a traffic jam in which people were actually happy to participate?

In his amazing book 'Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)', Tom Vanderbilt gives us a glimpse of the "H-Day", when everyone in Sweden started driving on the opposite side of the road. I reproduce here a snippet of the book and two great pictures taken on "H-Day":

Just before dawn on Sunday, September 3, 1967, there was an unusually festive air in the streets of Stockholm. Cars honked, passersby cheered, people gave flowers to police officers, pretty girls smiled from the curb. The streets were clogged with cars, many of which had been waiting for hours to participate in a historic traffic jam. [...] At the moment the bell schimed for six o'clock, Swedes began driving on the right.

It had taken years of debate, and much preparation, to get to this point. [...] Undeterred, backers of right-side driving finally got a measure approved by the government in 1963.

As "H-Day" (after hoger, the Swedish word for "right") approached, the predictions of ensuing chaos and destruction grew dire. [...] And what happened when Swedes started driving on the other side of the road, many for the first time in their lives? The roads got safer. [...] Remarkably, it was not just for a few days, or even weeks, after the change over that Sweden's roads were safer. It took a year before the accident rate returned to what it had been the year before the changeover.

[images credit: ? via wired]

Related Links:

• There is also a nice piece on this published at The Wired
• A nice graphic showing traffic fatalities over time
• "Road crashes now kill 1.3m people a year, more than malaria or tuberculosis."
• Detecting traffic accident clusters with network kernel density estimation and local spatial statistics

Replay: UN Demographic Manuals On-line

Here is the link for the classical manuals and guides of demographic methods and techniques issued by the United Nations a long time ago. It presents a series of 23 manuals organized by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat.

Annals of the Brazilian population association

My friend Ricardo Dagnino alerts the annals of every meeting since 1978 of the Brazilian Population Studies Association (ABEP) are available for download Here!

Related Links:

• UN Demographic Manuals On-line
• Applied Demography Toolbox
• PAA 2013 Preliminary Program

Pop-Up Economics, by Tim Harford

Tim Harford has a new radio series on the BBC called Pop-Up Economics. It's highly recommended!

The next epidose will talk about Thomas Schelling. I'm looking forward to listening to it !

Poor Economics

I have just finished reading Poor Economics, a book by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (both professors of Economics at MIT).* It brings into a sharp perspective the complex economic lives of the poor and the failure of some anti-poverty policies. It also brings up several creative studies, including some that have used randomized controlled trials. It's a really good reading! 

There is a website of the book where you can have a glimpse of it and explore interactive charts. Or, you may watch a short presentantion by Esther Duflo:

*Thank you Lucas Mation for the gift!

Oxford short-course on Sustainable Transport

Spread the words!

From March 2013, the University of Oxford is launching a short-course programme in sustainable transport - Global Challenges in Transport Programme (more info here).

The programme offers 6 intensive, 4-day residential courses covering a range of topics:

• New Technologies and Changing Behaviours;
• Governance, Policy and Local Delivery;
• Global Networks and Logistics;
• Infrastructure, Development and Finance;
• Health, Wellbeing and Urban Mobility; and
• Energy and Climate Change.

Needless to say it sounds a great opportunity.

off-topic: Recommended film

The Intouchables. Great movie!

Applied Demography Toolbox

Dear readers, I would like to recommend this site “Applied Demography Toolbox”.

This page is developed by Eddie Hunsinger (Tumblr) and it presents a large collection of applied demography programs, scripts, spreadsheets, databases, and texts that data users can use to carry out demographic research and modeling. 

Strongly recommended!

Traffic - Why we drive the way we do and....

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by  Tom Vanderbilt

I've read this book last year, but finally I stopped procrastinating   got time to write a post about it.

It's a really  interesting book, full of curiosities about traffic bevaiour flirting with sociology and economics. Here is the NYT's review

I selected four quotes that I would like to use as an epigraph:

1. "The problem, as is so often the case in traffic, is that the collective result of everyone’s smart behavior begins to seem, on a larger scale, stupid" p.149
   
   
2. “Traffic patterns are the desire lines of our everyday lives. They show us who we are and where we are going” p. 151
   
   
3. "Traffic is thus a living laboratory of human interaction, a place thriving with subtle displays of implied power. When a light turns green at an intersection, for example, and the car ahead of another driver has not moved, there is some chance that a horn will be sounded. But when that horn will be sounded, for how long and how many times it will be sounded, who will be sounding the horn, and who the horn will be sounded at are not entirely random variables." p.34
   
   
4. "If you look at trip rates by male versus female, and look at that by size of family…the women’s trip rates vary tremendously by size of family. Men’s trip rates look as if they didn’t even know they had a family. The men’s trip rates are almost independent of family size. What it obviously says is that the mother’s the one doing all the hauling." p.135

Exceptional Space - book recommendation

I would like to reccomend a book for those Space Syntax enthusiasts: Exceptional Space by Prof. Frederico Holanda (this is the English edition of his doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor Bill Hillier). I have read the portuguese version and it is a terrifc book for urban planners, geographers or sociologists with focus on the spatial dimension of human relations.

Fertility Transition in Brazil

Mapping the Timing, Pace, and Scale of the Fertility Transition in Brazil - a recent paper by Potter, Cavenaghi and others published at PDR.

It's a very interesting paper even if you are not into fertility studies. And you can have some fun with their data and maps !

Figure7 - Bayesian estimates of the duration of fertility transition (t90–t10)

Source: Potter et al , 2010.

soundtrack: you wish

Cities and Climate Change (Article Collection)

Routledge has just published on its website the 'Cities and Climate Change Article Collection'.

They have put together more than 60 articles, both FREE and recommended further reading, across a range of subjects, including

• transport and the environment

• adaptable cities

• sustainable urban housing, green building design

• pollution and the city

• regional environmental planning

soundtrack: Find my baby

NeW! 'Prata da Casa' session: regional and urban economics handbook

I'm starting a new post session called "Prata da Casa" to recommend some good research and publications by my colleagues here at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA).

"Prata da Casa" is a Portuguese expression that in this case refers to some good 'homegrown research'. So I'm inaugurating this session with a recent regional and urban economics handbook with emphasis on Brazil:

Regional and Urban Economics: Theories and methods with emphasis on Brazil (organized by Bruno Cruz, Bernardo Furtado, Leonardo Monasterio and Waldery Rodrigues Júnior) - Portuguese Version Only

off-topic: Modernist Modernist Monuments

I bumped into these bizarre and still beautiful Modernist Monuments. I would say that we have something similar here in Brasília in a much smaller scale with the Crystals Square (by Burle Marx).

This reminded me of a book with fascinating photos from Frederic Chaubin depicting socialist architectural eccentricities: 

Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed 

soundtrack for the weekend: Legião Urbana

New blog on Brazilian demographics

My friend Ricardo Ojima and some other researchers have just started a new demography blog focused on the Northeast Region of Brazil.

The Blog is called "Demografia do Nordeste". Long live to the blog!

off-topic: Suicide Paradox

"There are twice as many suicides in the US each year than murders."

I heard this startling stantement at the Freakonomics Radio. So I decided to write this post for two reasons. First, to recommend this podcast: The Suicide Paradox. It's really informative and  depressive  funny .

Freakonomics Radio: The Suicide Paradox.

Second, I woud like to recommend a book that I believe to be a masterpiece in Sociology. "Suicide: a study in Sociology" by Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). If you want to understand what Sociology is about and don't have anything else better to do , than you should read this book.

My favorite quote from this book is this one on suicide rate:

It "[...] express the suicidal tendency with which each society is collectively afflicted.... Every society is predisposed to produce a certain number of voluntary deaths." It sounds even better in Portuguese. "Cada sociedade está predisposta a fornecer um contingente determinado de mortes voluntárias"

in time: Greece sees suicide rates on the rise. Durkheim Would Have Predicted That One (by The Global Sociology Blog).

[Image Credit]

soundtrack for this post: Titãs.

Demographic trends in Brazil

Fabio Giambiagi presents (here) what are the main demographic trends in Brazil over the next few decades. Good news: here is no need to panic.... at least not now. (this post was gently stolen from Leonardo Monasterio)

By the way, I would like to share this excellent chart.

Total Fertility Rate in Brazil, Sweden and England, 1900-2000.

[Click on the chart to enlarge the image]

apud Wong and Carvalho (2006) The rapid process of aging in Brazil: serious challenges for public policies. (portuguese version only).

soundtrack for this post: Caetano.