The City Modelling Reading List: Episode #2
Recent reads in transport, city modelling, decarbonisation, and data science
Published in
3 min readMar 3, 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
- A compelling piece from Simon Tan on the power of dedicated transit-only lanes:
https://simtanx.medium.com/roll-out-the-red-carpet-for-transit-7d497d319ecf - We always enjoy a good transport-related visualisation, and recently Twitter threw up a couple of beauties:
1) high-speed rail construction over the past 50 years
2) the buses of New York City - There’s something about transport that seems to attract tech-minded hobbyists. This gorgeously detailed account of reverse engineering UK mobile rail tickets is a case in point, leaving us racking our brains in the Lab to figure out how we might use this kind of journey data to create or validate our own transport simulations:
https://eta.st/2023/01/31/rail-tickets.html
Decarbonisation
- The oceans soak up 30–40% of the carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels, so recent research from MIT into removing greenhouse gases from seawater offers a promising route towards decarbonisation:
https://news.mit.edu/2023/carbon-dioxide-out-seawater-ocean-decorbonization-0216 - 117 new zero-emission buses are set to be rolled out across the UK in Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Hampshire: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/25-million-to-boost-rollout-of-british-made-green-buses-around-the-country
- British renewables generated enough electricity this winter to power every home in the country, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2023/03/british-based-renewables-produced-more-electricity-than-gas-this-winter/
Modelling Cities
- A captivating paper from a couple of years ago on using deep learning to help beautify urban landscapes: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190987
- In the 12 months immediately before the pandemic, only 12% of UK working adults reported working from home at some point. That figure has risen to around 40% in the most recent analysis published by the Office for National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/characteristicsofhomeworkersgreatbritain/september2022tojanuary2023
- The alarming conspiracy theories that have arisen around 15-minute cities are amongst the most surprising recent developments in urban planning:
https://www.politico.eu/article/dont-lock-me-neighborhood-15-minute-city-hysteria-uk-oxford/
Data Science & Software Engineering
- Hani Lim explains HTTP response codes via a series of Valentine’s Day cartoons — a must whenever February the 14th rolls around each year: https://medium.com/@hanilim/http-codes-as-valentines-day-comics-8c03c805faa0
- We make heavy use of OpenStreetMap data and open-source software here in the Lab, so we were all ears when we heard about The Washington Post switching to an open-source stack for generating interactive maps:
https://www.kschaul.com/post/2023/02/16/how-the-post-is-replacing-mapbox-with-open-source-solutions/ - Advances in answering the question “Will I need a jacket?” — researchers used neural networks to outperform existing physics-based weather simulations at short-term precipitation forecasting: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32483-x