The City Modelling Reading List: Episode #3
Recent reads in transport, cities & modelling, decarbonisation, and software engineering
Published in
3 min readApr 19, 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
- Good public transit services address many problems (congestion, decarbonisation, transport equity), but unexpected barriers sometimes block the associated transit-oriented suburban development required to boost their usage:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-24/in-a-baltimore-suburb-nimbyism-is-starving-a-transit-system - Nicholas Dagen Bloom makes a case for the city bus, augmented by innovations from as far afield as Curitiba and London, as a means to expand public transit ridership in the US: https://theconversation.com/why-the-humble-city-bus-is-the-key-to-improving-us-public-transit-199052
- A fully electric taxi fleet of some 600 vehicles has launched in the city of Hanoi, Vietnam, with plans to expand to at least five more cities: https://citymonitor.ai/transport/e-mobility/electric-taxi-firm-hanoi
Decarbonisation
- While the emerging role of EVs in decarbonisation attracts ever more focus, electrified rail is a proven, mature green technology that provides “low-hanging fruit” opportunities for reaching net zero transport:
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2023/03/60-miles-of-electrification-is-no-regrets-way-to-get-diesel-trains-off-key-freight-routes/ - Peter Knapp describes the fascinating journey of Michael Hedges, a London taxi driver-turned-green activist and researcher: https://medium.com/the-new-climate/from-driving-a-taxi-to-doing-a-phd-21196e84a869
- Generating electricity is the single biggest contributor to global warming, but Ember’s Global Electricity Review predicts that 2023 will be the first year that greenhouse gas emissions from electricity will fall, a trend expected to continue year-on-year: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65240094
Modelling & Cities
- “What is the problem we’re trying to solve?” is a question that regularly arises in the City Modelling Lab. The problem most models are expected to solve is predicting the future, but this brilliant talk by Joshua Epstein describes an array of less obvious problems that modelling can also solve:
https://www.jasss.org/11/4/12.html - John Burn-Murdoch on how a cultural preference for lower urban density has made it more difficult to tackle the housing crisis and protect the environment in English-speaking cities: https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f0b5 (login required, archived at https://archive.is/2ue9q)
- Arup’s Richard de Cani on what other cities can learn from twenty years of London’s congestion charge:
https://www.arup.com/perspectives/two-decades-in-what-can-other-cities-learn-from-the-london-congestion-charge
Data Science & Software Engineering
- Clemens Jarnach explores the hidden history of women in computing and the need for a path to greater inclusivity: https://betterprogramming.pub/the-lack-of-women-in-computer-science-a-hidden-history-and-the-need-for-a-path-to-inclusivity-26fd5fa610cf
- Famously, there are only two hard things in Computer Science — naming things, cache invalidation, and out-by-one errors. Denilson Nastacio’s deep philosophical dive explores the very nature of naming and why it’s so tricky:
https://dnastacio.medium.com/real-to-virtual-b2bacd2423c9 - cURL, the hugely popular data tool and our go-to command line HTTP client in the Lab, recently celebrated its 25th birthday: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/curl-the-omnipresent-data-tool-is-getting-a-25th-birthday-party-this-month/
