Mobility Matters Daily #136 - Tall buildings, dockless bikes, and packed trains
Street trees too
Good day friend.
Trains are like buses. You don’t use one for ages and then you use loads at once. The now-fornightly trip to Southend yesterday was a big change from previous trips. In that the train to London was standing room early for the first time in about 18 months.
That said, this only reflects what has been common on Northern and Transpenning Express services for about 3-4 months now. My train from Sheffield to Manchester on Friday being a good example. So much so that yours truly had to sit by the door.
To the news.
James
Tall buildings are good for density, but at what cost?
A key driver of transport economics is density. To put simply, a higher population density means more people using public transport and accessing local services as there are more people (shockingly). In an established best practice, although there is evidence from Canadian cities that shows there are points at which increasing density results in diminishing returns in terms of public transport patronage.
So this article in Grist is useful, in that it points out that simply putting in taller buildings has other significant environmental impacts. By reducing air circulation and reflecting sunlight, they make the heat island effect much worse. This comes to an important point often lost in planning discussions. Making buildings taller is not the only way to densify. Other measures include underground parking, people-friendly streets, and the use of well-designed city blocks. All of which do not need tower blocks to do.
How do you incentivise users to help you rebalance your vehicle sharing system?
Bike, car share, and now e-scooter systems have a common problem. How do you rebalance the provision of vehicles to best serve demand? Demand for travel is a function of time (when people want to travel) and space (where to and from), and often the provision of vehicles is misaligned to this. As a vehicle sitting unutilised is a wasted and costly asset, companies spend a lot of staff time and money to rebalance vehicle provision to meet demand. But work has also been done to balance demand with supply.
There has been some interesting research into just this. Chenyi Fu, Ning Zhu, Shoufeng Ma, and Ronghui Liu attempted to reframe the problem as one where vehicles are assigned an operational area with incentives for users to rebalance the system within that area. Drop-off incentives were also studied by Junwei Wang and Yan Wang that indicate promising results based on stated preferences. While others have looked at constraining demand in a manner that best balances provision. The experience of free-floating systems has had a positive impact in this regard.
Visualisation of the Day
In a previous post I stressed the importance of trees as a way of cooling streets. In New York, you can actually check what the tree cover is on streets across the different Boroughs of New York. Not only that, you can check out what type of trees are where. There appears to be a lot of Maple Trees in Queens. All of this from open data.
Source: CloudRed
If you do nothing else today, do this
Play Sim City 2000 online. The original Sim City was great, but this game got me into planning and transport in a big way.