Hacking the system with virtual traffic congestions

In a brilliant artistic performance, Simon Weckert generated virtual traffic jams in Google Maps by pulling a wagon full of smartphones. HT Steven Crowley.

Navigation Before Google Maps

Before Google Maps: A navigation hotline in 1963. pic.twitter.com/s6agMnOVzR

— Max Roser (@MaxCRoser) 20 November 2016

webinar "Unlocking the Power of Big Data and Analytics for Mobility"

Heads Up: Urban Engines will be webcasting a promising seminar on March 22: “Faster. Better. Personalized. Unlocking the Power of Big Data and Analytics for Mobility.”

Google has a call on urban mobility

Google has a call on urban mobility, via Cecilia Mascolo

Assorted Links

1. Beijing Quadrupled in Size in a Decade, NASA Finds
   
   
2. Delhi metro could soon run completely on solar power
   
   
3. 25+ Of The Most Majestic Libraries In The World
   
   
4. What the coast cities of US and China might look like if predictions of rise sea levels are confirmed
   
   
5. Great pictures of "International Borders Around The World"
   
   
6. Good Dani Rodrik powerpoints on labor migration (pdf) via MR
   
   
7. Self-driving Toilets might be the next 'invention' of Google
   
   
8. Google has built a virtual simulation of California to test its self-driving cars (via Francesco M. Cerroni)

Assorted links

1. Google is starting a new company to improve cities
   
   
2. paper - Why the racial gap in life expectancy is declining in the United States
   
   
3. Research Questions in Urban Ecological Sustainability
   
   
4. Einstein on Socialism (ht Pedro Souza)
   
   
5. The anatomy of urban social networks (ht Anna Hushlak)
   
   
6. What is the origin of the word ‘posh’?
   
   
7. Routledge has recently launched a new intriguing  peer-reviewed journal on porn studies
   
   
8. Nathan Yau has done a great job in recreating the 1874 Statistical Atlas of the United States using the 2010 Census data
   
   
9. A great interactive data visualization of urban expansion in Las Vegas

[image credit: ProPublica]

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]

Accessibility Observatory + GTFS data

David Levinson, Andrew Owen and their team at the University of Minnesota have recently created the Accessibility Observatory. If you're interested in the topic, you may read a nice piece written by Emily Badger for TAC.

One of the greatest aspects of this project is about the data sources and methods they use for accessibility evaluation. Instead of relying on traditional household travel surveys, they combine open source data from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and from General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), developed by Google. With this sort of data it is possible to analyze jointly the public transport system as a whole (routes, stops, and schedules) plus pedestrian routes and walking times. There is a more detailed explanation of how it works here. 

I've bee thinking a lot about this 'empirical strategy' since I'm planning to dedicate part of my PhD to research socio-spatial inequalities in the distribution of accessibility. The more I think about this, the more I become a passionate skeptic, more passionate than skeptic.

To be honest, I believe that these data/methods are probably not going to revolutionize accessibility research in transport studies. However, this new 'empirical strategy' allows us to expand accessibility analysis so as to incorporate hundreds of cities where no travel survey has been undertaken. It also provides a tool with great potential to compare accessibility levels across space and time and to assess how certain modifications in the public transport system can affect accessibility levels. Not to mention the research questions you could address by combining these data/methods with Census data.

By the way, the use of GTFS in accessibility analysis is quite new. I have found a few applications that have been using GTFS since 2010 but none seems to be as advanced the Accessibility Observatory at Minnesota. Here is a list with some of those other initiatives:

• Stefan Wehrmeyer started in 2010 a project called mapnificent. Today it has perhaps the most comprehensive collection of cities so far.
  
  
• Comercial initiatives by Trulia in the US and by Mapumental in the UK.
  
  
• In 2011, Brookings Institution published the report 'Missed Opportunity - Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America' analysing job accessibility based on GTFS for 100 metropolitan areas in the US.
  
  
• Renato Vieira and Haddad (2012) proposed a similar approach to build an accessibility index to São Paulo.

In 2013 we saw many more initiatives:

• Yuval Hadas published a paper in the JTG: Assessing public transport systems connectivity based on Google Transit data
  
• WNYC came up with this map of Transit times in NYC
  
• Andrew Hardin has also created his version of the map covering four other cities. Here is a recent study where he explains how he calculates city wide travel times by simulating walking and public transit
  
• and finally, Sean Barbeau and Aaron Antrim wrote a nice piece on the many uses of GTFS data (slides)

I must be missing some other initiatives and publications, so please leave a comment to this post with suggestions and links if you remember any.

[image credit: Transit Accessibility for the Minneapolis St. Paul region from the Accessibility Observatory]

Crowdsourcing road congestion data

Nathan Yau points out to this interactive map showing county-level commute time estimates for 2011 in the US. The data source is the American Community Survey organized by the United States Census Bureau. Pretty good job!

Now imagine if you could have acess to real time data on traffic conditions on arterial roads in several cities around the globe. There is one company that generates these data. I know what you're thinking: "Damn these guys from Google are awesome!"

Acutally this is not a new project. Google has started it aroud 2009 and now it covers. several cities around the globe. They basically track anonymous locations from smartphones to gauge traffic conditions in real time:

When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

The Google Maps Traffic Layer (web version) also inclues traffic prediction for any day of the week and time of the day, based on past conditions. Neat! Now it should be very interesting to compare/validate Google's traffic data to "real data" from more traditional sources.

Any volunteers?

Assorted Links

1. The ultimate question: What drives taxi drivers?
   
   
2. What City Skies Would Look Like Without Light Pollution
   
   
3. Every dataset from Guardian Datablog
   
   
4. Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics
   
   
5. Cost of living during the war period - Britain, 1941 (via Simon Rogers)
   
   
6. Where the Internet Lives 
   
   
7. Call for papers for the 6th international conference on migration and development
   
   
8. Beijing's air pollution crisis as seen from space (via Per Square Mile)
   
   
9. Phone-Call Cartography of Great Britain and USA

Great Britain

USA

Famous watchwords in Urban Planning

Some of you might have heard of the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Basically, it's a tool that charts the usage of any word over time in published books (Google books database has over 20 million scanned books).

So this time, I have used it as as a proxy for the popularity of famous watchwords in Urban Planning, such as smart growth, compact city, new urbanism, creative class and world city.

Here is what I've found. You can click on the image to enlarge it or you can click here and try your own combination of words.

[Click on te image to enlarge it]

Perhaps you might ask 'why would someome do that? for what purpose?' the ultimate answer!

You may also play around using google trends, which shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume in google's search engine.

Related Link:

• The rise and fall of Urban Sociology (?)
• The Global Lab Episode 18 . Smart Cities

Assorted Links

• Auguste Comte (yes it's him) on the Natural Progress of human society
  
  
• My wife has just told me that today is the World Population Day (thanks cute!)
  
  
• The 7th annual edition of Demographia World Urban Areas - a report containing "population, land area and population density for all 780 identified urban areas (urban agglomerations or urbanized areas) in the world with 500,000 or more population as of the volume date."
  
  
• India’s Urban Slum Population (via Urban Planning Blog)
  
  
• Do you know the The WebGL Globe? It's a not so new open platform for visualizing geographic data by the Google Data Arts Team. (via UrbanTick)

[image credit:UrbanTick]

The rise and fall of Urban Sociology (?)

Google has scanned 15 million books originally published from 1800 on. And they have also developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer. It's a tool that charts the usage of any word over time in literature and other books (Google books database). One could irresponsibly use it as a proxy for the popularity of words in literature. And I did!

This chart above shows how often "Urban Sociology" has appeared in the literature (Google database - english literature only) since 1800. It looks to me that the Chicago School have had played an important role in the rising 'popularity' of Urban Sociology*. And it looks that Urban Sociology is not as 'popular' as it used to be....

*obviously, it would be necessary to scrutinize other keywords to conclude this (such as the major researchers in the first Chicago School)

And here are some queries of other keywords of interest:

• Aging Population; Demographic Transition; Demography related words; urban mobility, housing bubble, 'Great Cities' as urban hierarchy (?), Space Syntax, GIS, urban, regional and environmental studies, urban and rural, etc.

And my favorites:

Traffic Jam:

Urban sprawl, compact city, smart city, smart growth, compact growth, New Urbanism.

Thanks Vinicius Netto for the tip!

Commute Map

What could you do if you had origin-destination commute data, zip codes and Google Maps API ?

Great job Harry Kao !

(via The Map Room)

The best stats you've ever seen

A great "talk" of Hans Rosling showing powerful visualization.


Thanks Mark D. Hayward for the tip.

And here you can explore his dataset, or google's dataset here.