What happens when the idea of integrating transport and land use is taken a bit too far

Transport Oriented Development (TOD) in Chongqing, China. I saw this via Paola Castaneda

Urban Picture

Hisashimichi interchange in the city of Hachioji, in Tokyo Metropolitan Area.  You can see this interchange on OpenStreetMap, here. Thanks Pedro Geaquinto for sharing the OSM link!

photo credit: ?

A survey of the literature on mobile phone datasets analysis

A good paper giving a nice overview of the research using mobile phone datasets (mostly CDR data). A lot of interesting research looking at human mobility patterns, spatial and temporal networks, urban and regional development. This paper is already 3 years old, though, and things move fairly quickly in this type of research.

Some of the authors covered in this review are on Twitter. I've tagged them here and here in case you'd like to follow them.

Blondel, V. D., Decuyper, A., & Krings, G. (2015). A survey of results on mobile phone datasets analysis. EPJ Data Science, 4(1), 10.

Abstract:

In this paper, we review some advances made recently in the study of mobile phone datasets. This area of research has emerged a decade ago, with the increasing availability of large-scale anonymized datasets, and has grown into a stand-alone topic. We survey the contributions made so far on the social networks that can be constructed with such data, the study of personal mobility, geographical partitioning, urban planning, and help towards development as well as security and privacy issues.

image credit: Wang et al. 2009

Waiting for my supervisors' feedback

#truestory

UPDATE: 

More work needs to be done ... of course

Carnival is taken very seriously in Brazil

And now, back to writing.

Thoughtful thread on the future of shared, autonomous and electric mobility

For those not familiar with Twitter, click on this link to read the full thread.

On a related note, Tim Schwanen pointed out to this interesting piece about the State led emerging role of China in electric mobility industry.

A lighthearted title about a very real dispute over urban geometry — & a larger dispute between technologists & urbanists, generally, about the future of shared, autonomous, electric mobility. (Alt. title: Why e-bikes, & not AVs, are the real transportation disruption.) 1/ pic.twitter.com/MdSJbKcI1L

— Autonomous Law (@SafeSelfDrive) 6 February 2018

Assorted Links

1. The world’s largest subway system goes cashless as Shanghai Metro adopts QR code
   
   
   
   
2. Fitness tracking app Strava data gives away location of secret US army bases
   
   
   
   
3. Marriages have on average long lasting positive effects on well-being and life satisfaction HT Cesar Hidalgo I cannot confirm nor deny
   
   
   
   
4. Most Americans didn't approve of Martin Luther King Jr. before his death
   
   
   
   
5. Sprawling Mayan 'cities' uncovered under Guatemala jungle using LIDAR data - "The study estimates that roughly 10 million people may have lived within the Maya Lowlands"
   
   
   
   
6. What factors are associated with population projection accuracy? by Guangqing Chi and Donghui Wang
   
   
   
   
7. The World's 15 Most Complex Subway Maps and our cognitive limits: "Multimodal transportation systems in large cities have thus already exceeded human cognitive limits and, consequently, the traditional view of navigation in cities has to be revised substantially"
   
   
   
   
8. The total seasonal snowfall in the continental US for 2017–Jan 2018, shown as a relief map. Beautiful dataviz by Garrett Dash Nelson
   
   

New tool to get population estimates for any user-defined area

Last year, I wrote a post indicating where you can find open source data on the spatial distribution of population at reasonably high spatial resolutions. One of those sources is Sedac / Nasa hosted by CIESIN at Columbia University. Since my post (almost a year ago), these guys have done some important improvements to their methods and data, which now bring for the first time a global data set on population estimates by age and sex available at 30-arcsecond resolution.

They have also developed a new interactive tool that lets you estimate the total population within a polygon you draw on the map. I saw this tool on Twitter thanks to David McClendon.

Happy procrastinating, everyone!

Related posts:

• Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion to 2030
• An open dataset with 6,000 years of global urbanization 
• High-resolution data sets on global man-made impervious surfaces and urban extents