Blog Profile / The Transportationist
| URL : | http://blog.lib.umn.edu/levin031/transportationist/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Industries / Transportation | |
| Posts on Regator: | 1770 | |
| Posts / Week: | 6.5 | |
| Archived Since: | March 4, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Traffic Congestion and Job Accessibility
I was interviewed a few weeks ago by Dale Connelly for KFAI Community Radio. The edited interview (aired April 22, 2013) is below as an MP3 (5:51) Every so often we get a discouraging report on traffic congestion in metropolitan...
Street Improvement Fees
The League of Minnesota Cities writes: Briefing paper---2013 Minnesota cities and street improvement districts League position The League supports HF 745 (Erhardt, DFL-Edina) and SF 607 (Carlson, DFL-Eagan), legislation that would allow cities to create street improvement districts. This authority...
Evaluation of the Minnesota Road Fee Test
MnDOT has posted the evaluation of the recent Mileage Based User Fee test: Connected Vehicles for Safety, Mobility, and User Fees: Evaluation of the Minnesota Road Fee Test: "In 2007 Minnesota legislature approved a $5,000,000 project in order to demonstrate...
Property Tax on Privatized Roads
Recently published: Junge, Jason and David Levinson (2013) Property Tax on Privatized Roads. Research in Transportation Business and Management. [doi] Roads cover a significant fraction of the land area in many municipalities. The public provision of roads means this...
The case for (and against) public subsidy for public transport
David King and I argue The case for (and against) public subsidy for public transport at Streets.MN: "In most of the United States and much of the world, public transport is publicly subsidized. Everyone in an area pays for transit...
A Portfolio Theory of Route Choice
Recently published: Zhu, Shanjiang and David Levinson (2013), A Portfolio Theory of Route Choice Transportation Research part C [doi] Although many individual route choice models have been proposed to incorporate travel time variability as a decision factor, they are...
Moving beyond mobility: measuring accessibility in U.S. cities
CTS Catalyst summarizes our Access Across America report: Moving beyond mobility: measuring accessibility in U.S. cities Every year, Americans face a steady stream of discouraging news. We’re spending more time stuck in traffic. Congestion in our metro areas is on...
Adventures in Forecasting Intercity Rail: NLX edition
Projections around the proposed intercity railway "Northern Lights Express (NLX)" line from Duluth to Twin Cities are presented below. The first two columns of data are from the Statewide Rail plan, funded by MnDOT, prepared by Cambridge Systematics (lead). The...
Who will pay if NLX fails?
I was asked to write an opinion piece for The Pine City Pioneer: Who will pay if NLX fails? in response to one put forward by project consultant Alexander Metcalf of TEMS: "TEMS, the consultant hired to advocate for...
Inform pedestrians, not drivers
Inform pedestrians, not drivers:From Sacha Kapoor and Arvind Magesan (pdf): Most empirical studies on the role of information in markets analyze policies that reduce asymmetries in the information that market participants possess, often suggesting that the policies improve welfare. We...
When Thinking About Infrastructure, Focus on Accessibility
Reihan Salam talks about infrastructure, and cites our Access Across America work. When Thinking About Infrastructure, Focus on Accessibility : "… David Levinson, a transportation economist at the University of Minnesota, has emphasized that one of the key issues in...
Understanding the Contribution of Highway Investment to National Economic Growth
I posted a while back Transportation Benefits Too Little. Matt Logan sends me to another paper of interest: Understanding the Contribution of Highway Investment to National Economic Growth: Comments on Mamuneas’s Study by Randall Eberts Introduction: : Since the early...
Does NLX rail make sense for Pine County?
I get quoted in the Pine City Pioneer about the proposed Twin Cities to Duluth train: Does NLX rail make sense for Pine County? I assume you can derive the answer from first principles....
Mis-structuring employee parking charges: An example from a local university
I talk about the efficiency and equity of parking charges now at streets.mn: Mis-structuring employee parking charges: An example from a local university...
Access Across America
Today we released a new report describing the level and change of accessibility across the 51 metropolitan areas in the United States: Access Across America. The website includes an interactive map, the report can be downloaded directly here. Executive Summary...
Zeppelins and server farms
Two new posts at Streets.MN today... New Zeppelin Port Announced Streets.MN moving to LA unless new server provided by Minnesota Taxpayers...
Annals of excess cost: Volume 2
From an anonymous source: The Ramsey Star bus service had 115 park-and-ride users in fall 2012, two months before the Ramsey Station opened. 2012 ANNUAL REGIONAL PARK-AND-RIDE SYSTEM REPORT Meaning of course that most commuter rail riders are not new,...
Black Holes: A brief treatise on the nature of journal publications and the conditions necessary for formation of black holes in networks of scholarly communication.
Academia should be faster than it is. This especially applies to the transportation and planning journals with which I am familiar. It often takes more than a year to do less than 8 hours of work (reviews and editorial...
Annals of excess cost
Drew Kerr at Working on the railroad reports: "A new $13.2 million station in Ramsey also opened in early November, and is seeing an average of 130 weekday boardings." So we have the capital cost of a commuter rail station...
Automated Vehicles are Probably Legal in the United States
Bryant Walker Smith writes 99 pages saying Automated Vehicles are Probably Legal in the United States: "This paper provides the most comprehensive discussion to date of whether so-called automated, autonomous, self-driving, or driverless vehicles can be lawfully sold and used...