Posts

Often, there are discounts when transferring between transit vehicles. But in some cases, using a discounted transfer could cost you more.

Accessibility metrics are increasingly being used for planning, with planning agencies measuring what opportunities the transportation network connects residents to. A common accessibility metric is the “cumulative opportunities” metric, which measures how many opportunities can be reached within a given travel time budget—these opportunities could be jobs, grocery stores, or even abstract space.

In my previous post, I analyzed the effects of a proposed bill in California that would dramatically upzone areas around transit stations, allowing for increased housing production, albeit potentially creating opposition to transit projects.

A proposal under consideration in the California State Senate would prevent cities from limiting residential density near public transit. SB 827, proposed by state Senator Scott Wiener, prevents cities from enforcing zoning ordinances with housing density maximums, sets minimum standards for height limits, and abolishes parking minimums, in the areas around “high connectivity” transit stations and along corridors with transit service more frequent than every 15 minutes.

Here we are early in 2016, and I decided it was time to revisit how I publish my writing. I’ve had a blog for a while, but I’ve recently been realizing that the future is social, and my ideas would be easier to share if they were hosted on a social platform.

Urban planning is the process by which society decides how our cities and regions will develop in the future. As anyone who’s been involved in a planning process can tell you, it is a very difficult field.

A Citylab article from a few weeks back observes that the rate of household formation among millenials remains low. A large proportion of millenials are still living with their parents, certainly a sign of economic hardship.

My adopted city of Washington, DC, is shoveling out from under some of the last snow of the season. At the same time, we’ve just enacted a law that levies fines on residents who don’t clear their sidewalks, after years of debate.

Dijkstra’s algorithm is a method for finding the shortest path through a graph with non-negative edge weights. It is a relatively efficient algorithm, and is guaranteed to find the shortest path (unlike some heuristic algorithms).

Walking time to the nearest grocery store for all Census blocks in Chicago. OpenTripPlanner is a great bit of software for both customer-facing tools and analysis. Until recently, it had the capability to perform batch queries, calculating an origin-destination matrix or an aggregate measure of accessibility.