On my way to Washington DC

I'm flying to DC in the next few days. Thanks to the Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship I was awarded in 2017, I am going to present part of my doctoral research at both the TRB annual meeting and Transforming Transportation. In both occasions, I will be presenting an in-progress version of the 3rd paper of my thesis, which you can read below. In case you're in DC next week and would like to grab a  coffee or beer, drop me line or a tweet.

Pereira, R. H. M., Banister, D., Schwanen, T., & Wessel, N. (2017). Distributional effects of transport policies on inequalities in access to opportunities in Rio de Janeiro. SocArXiv. doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/CGHX2. Available at https://osf.io/cghx2

Abstract:

The evaluation of the social impacts of transport policies is attracting growing attention in recent years. Yet, this literature is still predominately focused on developed countries. The goal of this research is to investigate how investments in public transport networks can reshape social and geographical inequalities in access to opportunities in a developing country, using the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) as a case study. Recent mega-events, including the 2014 Football World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, have triggered substantial investment in the city’s transport system. More recently, though, bus services in Rio have been rationalized and reduced as a response to a fiscal crisis and a drop in passenger demand, giving a unique opportunity to look at the distributional effects this cycle of investment and disinvestment have had on peoples’ access to educational and employment opportunities. Based on a before-and-after comparison of Rio’s public transport network, this study uses a spatial regression model and cluster analysis to estimate how accessibility gains vary across different income groups and areas of the city between April 2014 and March 2017. The results show that recent cuts in service levels have offset the potential benefits of newly added public transport infrastructure in Rio. Average access by public transport to jobs and public high-schools decreased approximately 4% and 6% in the period, respectively. Nonetheless, wealthier areas had on average small but statistically significant higher gains in access to schools and job opportunities than poorer areas. These findings suggest that, contrary to the official discourses of transport legacy, recent transport policies in Rio have exacerbated rather than reduced socio-spatial inequalities in access to opportunities.

The most visited posts of 2017

1. Mexicans didn’t cross the US border. The border crossed them
   
   
2. The people who keep us company throughout our life cycle
   
   
3. The long-term effect of slavery on inequality today
   
   
4. Creating an animated world map of life expectancy changes from 1950 to 2100 in R
   
   
5. An open dataset with 6,000 years of global urbanization
   
   
6. Two new libraries for working with Spatial data in R
   
   
7. The impressive expansion of subway systems in China
   
   
8. The effect of Uber on traffic congestion
   
   
9. Using deep learning and Google Street View to estimate the socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods
   
   
10. The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion

Making a geogif with QGIS

In case you would like to make geogifs using QGIS, Alasdair Rae has recently created a really good tutorial.  Topi Tjukanov has also written a post showing the step-by-step process of how you can use QGIS Time Manager to create a stunning geogif like this one below. 

obs. Alasdair and Topi have worked in many other great projects and they are extremely generous, often sharing their data and code openly. These two are definitely worth following on Twitter.

5 hours of train GPS points in Finland

credit: Topi Tjukanov 

Assorted Links

1. paper: carpooling options from companies like Uber and Lyft could reduce the number of vehicles on the road by a factor of three without significantly impacting travel time
   
   
2. Istanbul Urban Database: digitizing the historic urban archives of Istanbul , via @geog.an.mod
   
   
3. "Bussed Out: How America moves its homeless"
   
   
4. The effect of population age structure on innovation. In short, younger societies are more innovative. Via Tyler Cowen
   
   
5. Loud orgies of Mexican fish could deafen dolphins, say scientists.
   
   
6. Place matters: A longitudinal study estimating the influence of neighbourhood walkability on walking behaviour in across different life-stages via Ahmed el Geneidy
   
   
7. The science myths that will not die. The `population bomb` myth is included in the list
   
   
8. Carl Schmertmann‏ pointed out on Twitter to a new open access book "Visualizing Mortality Dynamics in the Lexis Diagram". You might also like this really great interactive interface to explore how mortality patterns change over time and across countries , developed by Jonas Schöley

My personal Christmas story

#truestory 

ps. This is that time of the year we celebrate the birth of a person who changed our understanding of the world in in many different ways.

Chart of the Day: socket patterns worldwide

via Carlos Goes

Apparently, the image has a few minor errors including Uruguay, Malaysia, Indonesian, Switzerland. I guess this does not change the main message here.

credit: xkcd

The impact of international long-distance flights on the spatial allocation of economic activity and inequality

Very interesting paper on the intersection of economic geography, development and transport economics. From a quick glance at the paper, I believe it could probably bring some interesting insights into network science as well.

Campante, F., & Yanagizawa-Drott, D. (n.d.). Long-Range Growth: Economic Development in the Global Network of Air Links. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. doi:10.1093/qje/qjx050

Abstract

We study the impact of international long-distance flights on the global spatial allocation of economic activity. To identify causal effects, we exploit variation due to regulatory and technological constraints which give rise to a discontinuity in connectedness between cities at a distance of 6,000 miles. We show that improving an airport’s position in the network of air links has a positive effect on local economic activity, as captured by satellite-measured night lights. We find that air links increase business links, showing that the movement of people fosters the movement of capital. In particular, this is driven mostly by capital flowing from high-income to middle-income (but not low-income) countries. Taken together, our results suggest that increasing interconnectedness induces links between businesses and generates economic activity at the local level, but also gives rise to increased spatial inequality locally, and potentially globally.

ps. The authors are also on Twitter in case you would like to follow their work more closely. Campante, F., & Yanagizawa-Drott

credit: Campante & Yanagizawa-Drott, 2017

Population density across Europe

Nice little geogif created by Alasdair Rae.

Okay, one more geogif, just because it's Friday - this time population density across Europe, using 1km grid data #dataviz #geogif (source: https://t.co/FFtFCv5KnE) pic.twitter.com/DCSDnTzRXf

— Alasdair Rae (@undertheraedar) 15 December 2017

High-resolution data sets on global man-made impervious surfaces and urban extents

In 2012, we posted about a big research project on global forecasts of urban expansion and its environmental impacts, by Karen C. Seto and her lab at Yale. On a related topic, SEDAC (a NASA data center hosted at CIESIN in Columbia University) has released two new high-resolution data sets that some of you might find useful for your own research:

1. Global Human Built-up And Settlement Extent for the target year 2010, derived from global 30m Landsat satellite data
   
   
2. Global Man-made Impervious Surface for the target year 2010, derived from global 30m Landsat satellite data

Happy data crunching!

Related links:

• Where to find high spatial resolution data on population distribution
• 200 years of Urban Expansion
• Visualizing surface changes over time in every corner on Earth
• The Dynamics of Global Urban Expansion

Assorted Links

1. Interactive visualization of all the world's flight paths, by Callum Prentice
   
   
   
   
2. Chile is using mobile data to find out how and why women use the city differently than men
   
   
   
   
3. The Actual Voices of Enslaved Black People Recorded From The 1800s, via Danilo Freire
   
   
   
   
4. A research agenda on geospatial big data and cartography, by Anthony C. Robinson et al
   
   
   
   
5. Researchers produce images of people’s faces from their genomes
   
   
   
   
6. Alex Singleton, Seth Spielman and David Folch have a new book called Urban Analytics. The book looks really promising! I haven't had the chance to read it need to work on my phd thesis and it is packed with GitHub resources that you can access here
   
   
   
   
7. A photographer has documented life in this Chinese square for 30 years. via Peter D Smith
   
   
   
   
8. Does causation imply correlation?
   
   
   
   
9. The transition from more than 6 to fewer than 3 children per woman took the UK almost a century. This change took 26 years to happen in Brazil, and only 11 years in China - Max Roser (ht Leo Monasterio)