TSU/Oxford is recruiting a Departmental Research Lecturer

The Transport Studies Unit (TSU) and the School of Geography and Environment are recruiting a Departmental Research Lecturer. This post is a full-time, 5-year departmental appointment, research intensive position (75% research). More details here.

TSU is a relatively small research group with some brilliant researchers in an incredibly vibrant department at one of the top universities in the world. This is a great opportunity and I would strongly encourage competitive candidates to apply. The closing date  is 29-Mar-2019.

How Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars

The team at Vox have produced some interesting videos on urban-related topics. I've posted a few of them here in the blog before. This one below covers the urban planning in Barcelona, which uses superblocks as a means to build more liveable and inclusive urban environments in parts of the city.

This video is actually from 2 years ago but I only saw this video last week (thanks to the recommendation of  Telmo Amand, who was my high-school geography teacher!)

Evidence-based transport planning - event in Rio

In case you're around Rio de Janeiro this Feb 21-22, I'll be joining members of ITDP Brazil and others in a conversation about evidence-based transport planning, GTFS data and accessibility modelling. The event will be broadcast live (in Portuguese) at https://bit.ly/2NgYNTq

On the second day, before the closing of the event, I will give a short presentation on the Access to Opportunities Project, the first steps of the project and our plans for the next couple of years. The program of the event (in Portugese) is in these images below. Click on them to enlarge the image. 

Quote of the Day

Urban Picture

A very cold Chicago (2019), processed by Pierre Markuse using Copernicus Sentinel data.

Travel time to closest healthcare facility in Rio de Janeiro

The map shows how long it takes (in minutes) to travel by public transport and walking to the closest healthcare facility across the city of Rio de Janeiro. The analysis is disaggregated for facilities providing low-, medium- and high-complexity services. 

The first thing to note here is that physical accessibility to public health is relatively high in Rio. Approximately 94% of Rio`s population could reach at least one facility providing low-complexity services under 30 minutes. Under the same time, medium- and high-complexity services could be reached by 81% and 72% of the population, respectively. This is explained to some extent by the spatial planning of healthcare in the region, which has been relatively successful in spreading low- and medium-complexity facilities across the city. The map also gives a good sense of how the distribution of healthcare facilities vis-à-vis the public transport network varies across space, and how access to public health tend to be much lower in the west and particularly in the urban fringes of the city.

ps. This is a map I created for my PhD research but I didn't include it in the thesis in the end . To create this map I used a 2015 dataset of healthcare facilities and the GTFS of Rio's public transport network from March 2017. The dataviz and data wrangling were done in R. In case you're interested in doing similar analyses, I've created a simple tutorial with reproducible example on how to use OpenTripPlanner (OTP) to estimate travel times.

[click on the image to enlarge it]

Assorted Links

1. Nice website to compare the area footprint and density of metro areas at the same scale, by Brandon M-Anderson
   
   
2. How population growth is affecting the declining dynamism in the economy
   
   
3. The city of Zurich published its 50,000 detailed 3D buildings as Open Data, via Christian Hürzeler 
   
   
4. “Economics to Sociology Phrase Book”: a guide “to help economists adjust their way of speaking in a manner that will make it comprehensible to Sociologists” via Leo Monasterio
   
   
5. Interesting paper bridging the fields of human geography, sociology and personality psychology to improve current models of mobility and tie formation. by Laura Alessandretti, Andrea Baronchelli and Sune Lehmann
   
   
6. Google Maps, but for emissions modeling via Eli Knaap
   
   
7. Extraordinary 4 minute tram-ride, along the streets of Rochdale (UK) in 1900, via Tim Dunn
   
   
8. Alasdair Rae has written a tutorial on working with high resolution global population data in QGIS

Why you should probably share your preprints

Among researchers, a preprint is known as the version of a scientific study that precedes official publication in a peer-reviewed journal or book. In hard sciences and computer science, it is quite common for researchers to put their preprints openly available online, mainly through the Arxiv repository. This practice is also common in Economics, where researchers often publish 'working papers' via SSRN, NBER or their own institutions before getting the paper published in a journal. This practice is becoming more common and there are new repositories popping up in different areas such as biorxiv, chemrxiv and the SocArXiv focused on the social sciences more broadly.

Why you should share your preprints:

Preprints are not meant to replace peer-reviewed publications. Nonetheless they can importantly contribute to (1) speeding up the process of getting your ideas out in the public, (2) increasing the readership of your work, and (3) making your research accessible to people who cannot read articles behind paywalls. I've been sharing the preprints of my last papers on SocArXiv and highly recommend others to do the same. There are a few good reasons to use SocArxiv. One of them is that they create a permanent link and a permanent DOI identification for you preprint. This helps making the manuscript searchable and citable on academic databases.

Be aware, though, that some journals for example do not allow the use of preprints as they claim that this practice undermines the novelty of manuscripts. As a rule, though, social science journals published by Elsevier and Taylor & Francis (Routledge) do not see any problem in authors sharing their preprints before paper submission. There is also an interesting debate about whether preprints undermine the double-blindness of peer review and the differential impacts it might have for the publications of senior and junior researchers. As I've mentioned before, the use of preprints is not without controversy. 

The true size of Chile

Nice map by Boris van der Spek, using The True Size of

The Schrödinger Professor

This permanent/temporary position is also indicated in the author's profile on Google Scholar (I saw this on Twitter via the brilliant Drunkeynesian).