• Book Name: Informed Urban Transport Systems Classic and Emerging Mobility Methods toward Smart Cities by Joseph Chow
• Author: Joseph Chow
• Pages: 473
• Size: 26 MB

Informed Urban Transport Systems Pdf Free Download

I love “aha” moments—sudden, sharp moments that bring clarity to otherwise obscured subjects. I have been fortunate enough to have had a few such moments spread over a, perhaps, too-long career; many other would-be aha moments fizzled and died on the vine. This book is filled with aha moments—moments that bring unexpected clarity to the underlying issues that define so-called smart cities and the complex networks that will make them possible. Oft said that “everything is connected to everything”—in the sense of the butterfly effect—but we now enter into a data-rich, information-dominated era where “everything can be connected to everything” in the sense of real-time system management.

Joe has captured the imagination of the possibilities portended by these newfound capabilities and given a box of tools to build and choreograph the dance of an interconnected urban society characterized by physical, economic, and social mobility. Okay, so by now we have all heard about Big Data and how it is going to revolutionize our approaches to understanding how urban systems work, in general, and how transport networks behave, in particular. But, other than recognizing the possibility of drowning in the vast amounts of disparate data that might offer clues to understanding, or even obscure them, there has been only scant progress in identifying approaches to harness the wealth of information provided by new technologies into meaningful analysis tools.

Although the era of Big Data and such new concepts as autonomous/ connected vehicles and shared use/ownership are bound to give rise to unimagined mobility systems and their attendant modeling capabilities that heretofore simply were impossible to achieve, it does not mean that the fundamental properties of urban systems derived from basic economic principles need to be abandoned. So, it is pretty fitting that Joe starts this journey by first couching its destination within the context of the classical Manheim-Florian-Gaudry (MFG) framework that characterizes urban systems as an interaction between activity and transport systems. The prominent role of activities as the driving force of the need for transport, and the networks that support it, in this paradigm serves its extension to the design of informed urban transport systems nicely throughout the remaining chapters.

Informed Urban Transport Systems Pdf Free Download

In Chapter 2, Joe systematically identifies the components and characteristics that position smart cities as a time-geographic subset of the internet of things. But, then comes an aha moment—what if we treated these real-time “big mobility data” as comprising travel momentum vector fields. Transport analysis has a long history of borrowing ideas from other fields—gravity model of trip distribution, fluid dynamics of traffic flow, assay analysis as the roots of travel choice behavior—as analogies to transport concepts that stem from no physical laws. But, for the most part, these analogies have been addressed to explaining certain observable outcomes of mobility decisions, for example, traffic flows on networks, travel speeds, transit patronage, and not as vehicles to expose and define as yet unobserved phenomena.

With the introduction of the vector field interpretation of activity data, Joe has opened the door to a completely new foundation for analyzing mobility patterns that form the heartbeat of urban existence—one that promises to lead to models that uncover new concepts built on Big Data, rather than simply using Big Data to address conventional aspects of mobility. Maybe it is just my old training in applied mechanics showing through, but I find this train of thought pretty exciting stuff. Chapter 3 begins the “heavy lifting” in developing smart city design and operation capabilities, and is not for the faint hearted, as the mathematical formulations underpinning classical network problems require some due diligence (as does most of the content of the remaining chapters).

But, there is a reward at the end of this necessary positioning in the form of the exposition of a wealth of approaches to the general MaaS (Mobility as a Service) systems that will characterize smart cities of the future—a future in which public agencies are the platform linking mobility providers and travelers, connecting everything to everything. During a period when I was fortunate to have Joe as a post doc, he became a bit intrigued by an activity scheduling model (HAPP) that I had developed some years previously, and we played around with some extensions to the model that left me pretty satisfied that some incremental research had been accomplished, but which left Joe with a vision (which I, admittedly, lacked) of the potential of the model as a framework for general application in urban systems analysis. I remember jokingly sending Joe off with a charge to take the model and apply it in ways that would make me famous as its originator. Well, with his mHAPP, which is largely the focal point of Chapter 4, just maybe he will. 

Informed urban transport systems pdf free download.