The City Modelling Reading List: Episode #1
Recent reads in transport, city modelling, decarbonisation, and data science
Published in
2 min readFeb 13, 2023
Inside the City Modelling Lab, we read and share a lot of content about city and transportation planning, decarbonisation, modelling, data science, software engineering, and more.
Here, we present a lightly curated list of things we’ve read recently that tickled our fancy.
Transport
- An eccentric story from UK transit history - 1950s trains fitted out to look like mock Tudor pubs, complete with brickwork exteriors and oak beams:
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/british-rails-short-experiment-with-travelling-pubs-36068/ - A thoughtful and engaging piece by Keaton Brandt, a Google software engineer, on how public transit might thrive when combined with autonomous vehicle ride-sharing services:
https://medium.com/source-and-buggy/transit-arteries-and-autonomous-veins-2732ac13f63a - The transport community has long been sceptical, if not outright scathing, about Elon Musk’s attempts to revolutionise urban transport. Barry Gander asks if the failure of The Boring Company predicts the likely fate of Twitter under Musk’s ownership:
https://barry-gander.medium.com/was-the-boring-company-an-omen-of-twitter-s-future-5b0493adebba
Decarbonisation
- In California, used EV batteries are being used to store solar energy and return it to the grid: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/08/ev_batteries_solar_storage/
- “Invisible” solar panels that blend into the historic surroundings are powering an archaeological site at ancient Pompeii: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/02/06/ancient-pompeii-site-installs-invisible-solar-panels-that-look-like-roman-terracotta-tiles
Modelling Cities
- Paul Waddell of UrbanSim outlines an interesting methodology for assessing the performance of urban models: https://www.urbansim.com/blog/benchmarking-model-accuracy-t6f9g
- Much has been said and written in recent years about the 15-minute city, but how do you measure the “15-minuteness” of a city? Nat Henry analyses the walkability of various types of amenities in Seattle: https://nathenry.com/writing/2023-02-07-seattle-walkability.html
- We put a lot of effort into validating and calibrating our models, plus we love a good academic paper, so we were intrigued to read about a novel approach to activity-based model calibration that uses Bayesian Optimisation:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03480.pdf
Data Science & Software Engineering
- Is the era of “Big Data” over? A former engineer on Google’s Big Query makes a strong case for the prosecution: https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/
- Which programming language is the most environmentally friendly? Here in the CML, we program in Python, Java, and occasionally Rust, three languages which produced vastly different results in this assessment:
https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sleFinal.pdf
