Urban Picture

Seoul, South Korea

image credit: Maxar and Daily Overview

My interview for the Caos Planejado podcast

Today is the 5th anniversary of Caos Planejado, a great Brazilian blog focused on urban planning, economics and innovation. Long live! Anthony Ling (the head of Caos Planejado) interviewed me for their podcast a few months ago, when we talked about my PhD research, my ongoing work on the Access to Opportunities Project and other topics related to innovation, data and equity in urban mobility. The interview was recorded in Portuguese and you can listen to it here.

The influence of ride-hailing on users' travel behavior

New paper hot off the press, by Alejandro Tirachini (Twitter).

Tirachini, A., & del Río, M. (2019). Ride-hailing in Santiago de Chile: users’ characterisation and effects on travel behaviour. Transport Policy. Volume 82, October 2019, Pages 46-57

Abstract:

In this paper, an in-depth examination of the use of ride-hailing (ridesourcing) in Santiago de Chile is presented based on data from an intercept survey implemented across the city in 2017. First, a sociodemographic analysis of ride-hailing users, usage habits, and trip characteristics is introduced, including a discussion of the substitution and complementarity of ride-hailing with existing public transport. It is found that (i) ride-hailing is mostly used for occasional trips, (ii) the modes most substituted by ride-hailing are public transport and traditional taxis, and (iii) for every ride-hailing rider that combines with public transport, there are 11 riders that substitute public transport. Generalised ordinal logit models are estimated; these show that (iv) the probability of sharing a (non-pooled) ride-hailing trip decreases with the household income of riders and increases for leisure trips, and that (v) the monthly frequency of ride-hailing use is larger among more affluent and younger travellers. Car availability is not statistically significant to explain the frequency of ride-hailing use when age and income are controlled; this result differs from previous ride-hailing studies. We position our findings in this extant literature and discuss the policy implications of our results to the regulation of ride-hailing services in Chile.

 

geobr: easy access to official spatial data sets of Brazil

I'm glad to annouce that geobr is now officially available on CRAN. Here and here are quick intros on how to use geobr to get easy and quick access to shape files and other official spatial data sets of Brazil. The package currently includes several data sets for various years such as states, regions, municipalities, census tracts, statistical grid and others. The github repository is this, in case you want to keep track of the latest developments.

The package was developed by my team and I at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea). We are constantly working to expand and improve the package, so if you have any suggestions/contributions, please feel free to open an issue on Github.

Working towards deadlines

Climate change and the glass half full

Quote of the day:

"Some people complain that this is the hottest summer in the last 125 years, but I like to think of it as the coolest summer of the next 125 years! Glass half full!" (Carter Bays)

A spatial database of health facilities in sub Saharan Africa

Interesting new paper analyzing accessibility to emergency hospital care in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015. The authors have done a laborious work to map public health facilities and the data is openly available here. HT Moritz Kraemer.

Ouma, P. O., et al. (2018). Access to emergency hospital care provided by the public sector in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015: a geocoded inventory and spatial analysis. The Lancet Global Health, 6(3), e342-e350.

Abstract:

Background

Timely access to emergency care can substantially reduce mortality. International benchmarks for access to emergency hospital care have been established to guide ambitions for universal health care by 2030. However, no Pan-African database of where hospitals are located exists; therefore, we aimed to complete a geocoded inventory of hospital services in Africa in relation to how populations might access these services in 2015, with focus on women of child bearing age.

Methods

We assembled a geocoded inventory of public hospitals across 48 countries and islands of sub-Saharan Africa, including Zanzibar, using data from various sources. We only included public hospitals with emergency services that were managed by governments at national or local levels and faith-based or non-governmental organisations. For hospital listings without geographical coordinates, we geocoded each facility using Microsoft Encarta (version 2009), Google Earth (version 7.3), Geonames, Fallingrain, OpenStreetMap, and other national digital gazetteers. We obtained estimates for total population and women of child bearing age (15–49 years) at a 1 km2 spatial resolution from the WorldPop database for 2015. Additionally, we assembled road network data from Google Map Maker Project and OpenStreetMap using ArcMap (version 10.5). We then combined the road network and the population locations to form a travel impedance surface. Subsequently, we formulated a cost distance algorithm based on the location of public hospitals and the travel impedance surface in AccessMod (version 5) to compute the proportion of populations living within a combined walking and motorised travel time of 2 h to emergency hospital services.

Findings

We consulted 100 databases from 48 sub-Saharan countries and islands, including Zanzibar, and identified 4908 public hospitals. 2701 hospitals had either full or partial information about their geographical coordinates. We estimated that 287 282 013 (29·0%) people and 64 495 526 (28·2%) women of child bearing age are located more than 2-h travel time from the nearest hospital. Marked differences were observed within and between countries, ranging from less than 25% of the population within 2-h travel time of a public hospital in South Sudan to more than 90% in Nigeria, Kenya, Cape Verde, Swaziland, South Africa, Burundi, Comoros, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Zanzibar. Only 16 countries reached the international benchmark of more than 80% of their populations living within a 2-h travel time of the nearest hospital.

Interpretation

Physical access to emergency hospital care provided by the public sector in Africa remains poor and varies substantially within and between countries. Innovative targeting of emergency care services is necessary to reduce these inequities. This study provides the first spatial census of public hospital services in Africa.

Off to the UK

I'm off to the UK to participate in my graduation ceremony at Oxford and to celebrate my partner's graduation at  Cambridge  the other place. Really excited because both our parents will be there to celebrate with us. Yep, this will require some serious diplomatic skills, though :)

My graduation will happen this Saturday, on July 13th between 11am and 12pm. So, you will be able to see a bunch of academics weirdly dressed wondering around Oxford at 12pm on that day. You can actually see this through the live webcam of the Oxford Martin School in case you really need something to procrastinate with.

ps. Blog activity will be low over the next couple of weeks but you'll probably see me Tweeting regularly while I'm queuing for something somewhere in England.

We're hiring research assistants to work with Spatial Data Science at Ipea

A few readers might be interested in this post. We are hiring 4 research assistants to work with (spatial) data science on urban, regional and environmental research and policies at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), in Brasília. Great team with lots of computational resources, rich data sets and plenty of challenging data analyses to improve public policies.

*** All the positions are based in Brasília, Brazil.

 

Details here.

Music for the weekend

Soundtrack for a weekend of good bye to João Gilberto, one of the fathers of Bossa Nova. A Brazilian giant.