Dickens on Los Angeles Transit

The LA Times checks out the new rail line with a UCLA English Professor who just published a neat looking book titled "Charles Dickens's Networks, Public Transport and the Novel." (I haven't read it yet.) Here is one takeaway:

By 1870, the year Dickens died, London's transit system was arguably better than the one serving Los Angeles today.

I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that statement from the story, but it's interesting to think about. This is a better takeaway and what makes the book sound worth reading:

"Dickens would have been surprised at how long it has taken Los Angeles to build its rail system," the professor said as our Gold Line train eased into Chinatown. "He was so into the power of rail. Amazed by the sense of making you fly without effort. He'd say that creating a network can change the way a place views itself."

I'm not so into the aspect of speed, but this may be a novel (pun intended) take on transport networks.

Of Interest: More Crashes on Tax Day and The Evolution of Street Networks

Today's First Link:

The LA Times reports on a study where researchers find that U.S. auto accidents increase on April 15, tax day. From the story:

Deaths from traffic accidents rise 6% on tax day, that mid-April paroxysm of collective financial agony, according to a study published in Wednesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

A pair of Canadian researchers tallied up U.S. tax day traffic fatalities for each year between 1980 and 2009, then compared the figures to those from two "control" days, exactly one week before and one week after. On average, they found, there were 226 deaths on tax day — 13 more than on non-tax days.

The rise in e-filing — which would presumably keep procrastinators from speeding recklessly to the nearest post office — doesn't appear to have put a dent in the trend, said Dr. Donald Redelmeier of the University of Toronto's Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, who led the study.

Perhaps that's because the heightened danger involves more than a deadline dash to a mailbox. Stress is a likely culprit, Redelmeier said: In general, most accidents are the result of human error, not mechanical failure, and stress has been shown to significantly worsen performance behind the wheel.

I haven't read the study, so I can't comment on the methodology, but it's a provocative thought nonetheless.

And The Second:

A new paper examines the growth of street networks. The authors highlight 'densification' and 'exploration' in network growth. Here is a nice article in Scientific American about the work. From SA:

The world's cities are absorbing one millionadditional people every week—and by 2030, they could consume an extra 1.5 million square kilometers of land, or roughly the area of France, Germany and Spain combined. What would be the best ways for those cities to grow? A new study examines how—before urban planners existed—a group of Italian villages evolved into suburbs outside Milan today. Such studies may eventually help planners optimize future developments.

"We know few things about how cities grow naturally," says Emanuele Strano, a doctoral candidate studying urban geography at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne who authored the study. "Urban planners believe that with regulations we can control the growth of cities. The question is, how can we control a thing if we don't really know how it behaves?"

The new study takes a step toward that essential understanding. Strano and his colleagues—a group of computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists and urban scholars—teamed up to provide the first quantitative analysis of how unplanned street networks evolve over time. Their results were published March 1 in Nature's "Scientific Reports." (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

"Historically, a lot of these analyses have been done using not such a substantial quantitative basis," says Stephen Marshall, an urban theorist at University College London (U.C.L.) who was not part of the study. "In the areas that I'm familiar with, people might produce a map of a city, and compare and contrast two maps on a more qualitative basis." Marshall also says that this work marks the first time anyone has looked at how those properties change over time.

It's very interesting work. If interested in similar research check out David Levinson's Nexus Group. Here is a link to a newly published paper from Levinson and Arthur Huang that examines network connectivity.

Public Connections for Privately Owned Public Spaces

The New York Observer reports on a plan to create the "Holly White Way" along 6 1/2 Avenue through midtown Manhattan. Holly White (also known by William Whyte, the article seems to misspell his last name) studied and advocated for better urban spaces, especially the privately supplied public spaces required through the zoning code. These public spaces in midtown are underutilized, and part of why they are underutilized is that the spaces are not connected. The new plan is to connect the network of spaces through new pedestrian connections. This will effectively make a pedestrian thoroughfare through the area:

What if the city built a huge public park in the heart of Midtown,  stretching half a mile over seven city blocks, about as big as the first phase of the High Line? What if that park already existed, dating to the 1980s, largely ignored but for the most knowing New Yorkers?

“We’re basically building a new pedestrian avenue in the heart of Midtown, one of the densest, busiest places on Earth,” Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said during an interview last week.

...

Now, in an effort to create safer connections between these spaces while encouraging their use and also unclogging the avenues along the way, the Department of Transportation is creating a series of traffic interventions to link up these disparate shortcuts. The result should be somewhere between the Brooklyn Heights Promenade (though the Brooklyn Bridge may be more apt, given the crowds) and the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center. It should be a nice place to pass through, but also possibly to stop for a coffee or lunch, without fear of being mowed down on the way back to the office. 

And for good measure, you can't possibly threaten any of the existing parking spaces in the city. Fortunately:

The plan is currently parking neutral.

That's a relief. We certainly don't want to lose a parking space to benefit the thousands of people walking around.

Paying Access Fees on Congestable Networks

When road networks congest it's pretty obvious that the problem is too many vehicles are trying to use constrained capacity at the same time. One solution to this congestion is to charge the drivers a toll, thus nudging some drivers to switch the time or mode of their travel and limiting the demand for road space.

In the United States our internet access is through congestable networks, and we are now reaching the limits of free-flowing data in many areas, especially on mobile networks. (Other countries feature data plans where you pay more based on usage. Such plans are deeply unpopular in the US, just like congestion pricing!) AT&T has a novel solution to congestion on their mobile data networks, and that is to sell the data usage from apps and services to the companies who develop the apps and services. Here is a bit about how this works from Gizmodo:

Comparing it to the data equivalent of a toll-free 1-800 number, AT&T's network and technology head John Donovan, said that AT&T is working on creating a service that would let developers foot the bill for data usage in its apps. Like if all the data you used in an app would be free to the user and not count against data usage limits.

 Gizmodo is largely in favor of this arrangement as it will keep costs down for consumers. For a more nefarious take on this arrangement, here is conclusion from a piece from Digitopoly:

Add this up and it is worrisome for smaller developers. And it is precisely the sort of development that Net Neutrality advocates were worried about. To be sure, given sufficient competition between mobile carriers, this is all shifting around the deck chairs. But if competition isn’t strong enough, the money will stay with the power.

And if that doesn’t worry you, think about what this means for Netflix. On one level, it sounds like opportunity — they could pay for user’s data and open up the mobile viewing space. But on another level, so then can AT&T, Verizon and others who also have Cable TV operations and their own content. It costs them nothing to offer a data 1-800 service to themselves while at the same time being able to charge rivals for it. And then think about what happens if we don’t stop at mobile and move on to broadband.

There is a lot to unpack here, but Digitopoly's complaint raises lots of the concerns lobbed at congestion pricing, namely equity, fairness, competition, privatization and privacy. Overall, this seems like a second best solution. It would be better to keep the costs of production low and have consumers pay their full marginal costs of usage, whether road or data. And we should price mobile data and then move on to pricing broadbrand!