There are several websites available with such information.
Belfast in Ireland is the best example for bike parking location, what kind it is, how many spaces, etc. Check out this wonderful website: https://lnkd.in/dNaHcmus
Additional websites:
1. dublinbikeparking.com
2. openstreetmap.org
3. bikedata.cyclestreets.net
4. opencyclemap.org
5. https://lnkd.in/dqi-sxJa
Read through this figure, very interesting findings:
1. A typical European car is parked 92% of the time
2. It only drives 5% of the time
3. 5 seat car carries only 1.5 persons per trip
4. 86% of the fuel never reaches wheels
5. 50% of the city land dedicated to transportation network
Source: Ellen Macarthur Foundation
Have you ever thought about the limitations of big data usage for travel demand modelling? Here are a few:
1. Certain age group prefer a particular mobile network / smartphone app
2. Big data can’t capture socio-economic attributes so big data alone is not sufficient for building the travel demand model
3. Need to pick the outliers from the big data. Ex: The interaction between shared e-scooter and IoT send / receive the data over mobile network
4. The big data is not always comparable due to changes in technology and other causes
5. Private mobile network companies can change priorities and may stop sharing the data
Source: ITF 2021
In five simple steps:
1. Know the data: what data you have and what data to be gathered
2. Identify your partners, stakeholders, opponents and obstacles
3. What are your community’s biggest needs (transportation, WiFi, crime, education, employment, etc)
4. Identify and prioritize the projects on the basis of step 3 (short, medium and long range)
5. Identify potential hurdles to success (funding, stakeholders buy-in, etc) and ensure you have adequate resources to complete the task
Source: ITE
This morning I was reading through an interesting article on connected vehicles with the actual implementation and performance.
What are the benefits of connected vehicles deployment:
1. Can eliminate the severity of up to 80% of non-impaired crashes (NHTSA)
2. Dedicated Short Range Communications-based transit signal priority reduced 72% of travel time, on time performance improved 2.5%, improvement of schedule reliability 6% (Utah DOT)
3. Spot Weather Impact Warning (SWIW) application can identify adverse road-weather conditions— like ice and packed snow on the pavement—and report those conditions to the connected vehicle system (Utah DOT)
4. SWIW system installed along 159 miles of weather-crash-prone would yield a 20-year savings of $97.7 million and projected to prevent 1,654 crashes (Utah DOT)
Small-scale deployments can yield immediate results, and these benefits can be expanded with further deployments.
Source: ITE
How many of us will visit the grocery store which is less than a km without involving the car? Excuses could be waiting time at the signal, temperature, no sidewalks, and many others.
Frankly, the temperature excuse is really only applicable for a short period of the year. Walking in the neighborhood certainly affords the ability to see things I wouldn’t normally notice from the windshield. I know the benefits to my physical and mental well-being but the knowledge isn’t enough to prompt a change.
Despite the infrastructure challenges, the occasional complainers, and the heat, active transportation is a joyful activity. Time to ditch the excuses!
Few years ago, when I was working in Qatar, one of my friends was taking a driving test. The instructor was asking my friend to take the car and drive along the city network. They approached a roundabout and the instructor asked my friend to make u-turn. Instead of navigating through the roundabout, my friend took an immediate u-turn as if we do at the signals. Now you know what happened to his driving test result! Haha.
The most compelling aspect of the Safe System Approach is the acceptance of the fact that the humans are fallible and mistakes are inevitable. As planners and designers of the transportation system, this should be core of our work. We cannot assume that the pedestrians will talk through the nearest controlled crossing when the two attracting land uses are located just across the street.
Vision zero is possible if we plan the roadways for all road users!
How Dubai infrastructure evolved so dramatically in such a short span of time compared to many other countries? In my view, one of the key reasons is the innovators in every aspect of the transportation arena sit together with the plans and finalise the scheme to be built.
However, COVID impacted all of us directly or indirectly. Virtual meetings are providing many possibilities. Necessity prompted a lot of change, not only to adopt technology, but to revamp processes.
As the world emerges from the pandemic, organizations will not be returning to pre-COVID status quo, and it is possible to harness the crisis-mandated energy and flexibility. In addition to mixing virtual and in-person meetings, novel variety can be derived through choice of times, days of the week, location, topic, and format. We shouldn’t assume that because an event wasn’t successful in the past, that it may not be possible in the future.
Post pandemic, the agencies and consultants think of developing creative and innovative ways to recruit and retain employees, particularly after such a massive attack by COVID. That’s how, I retained as a freelancer, will you? 🙂
As a member of ITE (USA), I kept hearing this term “EQUITY” quite a lot in the webinars and journals but I never understood the practical definition of it. However, I always felt that there is a serious importance to this term. This is because, we don’t use this term in Middle East at all.
Equity (noun): freedom from bias or favoritism, the quality of being fair and impartial.
Equity is a complex, challenging topic and it doesn’t come with the checklists or standards. It routinely involves judgement and differences in thought. Because of this people often prefer to avoid the sensitivity of equity discussions altogether.
Some of the transportation equity topics:
1. Rural/urban funding priorities
2. Selection of professionals to design and plan transportation systems
3. Leaders trying to control to implement community solutions to fit their ego and interests
Exploring equity on many fronts has the potential to make future transportation systems better for all. Find the courage to listen,
understand, and seek meaningful change.
When I was a child, the streets of the town where I born and brought up were empty most of the time in a day – couple of buses and few cars. The same streets today are occupied with full of vehicles – thousands of vehicles in a day. The industry is dreaming about implementing Shared, Electrical, Autonomous and Connected Vehicles (SEACV). Now the question is, how our streets will look like in 40 years from now (2060)?
My answers could be:
1. Most rural areas will likely still have drivers “driving” vehicles
2. Most of cities will have fully autonomous vehicles operated
3. If a driver is distracted, autonomous controls become active and connect to surrounding vehicles to avoid collisions (Vision Zero achieved)
4. The toll will be reduced on the highway system with advanced transportation technology
5. With the implementation of SEACV, key corridors (like Sheikh Zayed Rd in Dubai) capacity will be reduced to 2-3 lanes (from 6-8 lanes) and rest of the right of way will repurposed
