Talking Headways Podcast: Unnecessary Literature Reviews, Part II

This week, we’re joined by Professor David Levinson of the University of Sydney for Part II of our TRB discussion. In this episode, Levinson talks about the creation and politics of research journals and his new book, “The 30 Minute City.”

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A Better Way to Grade City Transportation Systems

By Angie Schmitt |
How should we grade America’s transportation systems? The big, headline-grabbing transportation metric right now is the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report, which holds up the lack of congestion as the ultimate sign of a well-functioning transportation system. By that measure, cities like Kansas City, Phoenix, and Detroit — where car commutes can be free-flowing […]

The 10 Best and Worst Cities to Catch a Bus to Work

By Angie Schmitt |
It’s been called “the geography of opportunity.” And David Levinson is trying to make a science of it. In a new analysis, Levinson, a University of Minnesota transportation engineering professor, and his colleague Andrew Owen have ranked the 50 largest U.S. metro areas based on job accessibility by transit [PDF]. Levinson and Owen used transit schedules and walking […]

What If We Paid the Full Cost of Driving?

By Angie Schmitt |
Driving is too cheap in the United States. It’s a complicated thing to unpack, but David Levinson, engineering professor at the University of Minnesota and blogger at the Transportationist, attempted to analyze the cost per-minute. Levinson estimates that the true cost of driving — including vehicle purchase price, insurance, taxes, repairs, and costs like parking and […]

An Alternative to Congestion-Based City Rankings

By Angie Schmitt |
The Texas Transportation Institute’s “Annual Mobility Report,” which rates highway congestion in major urban areas across the United States, probably gets more press attention than any other piece of transportation research. These city rankings assume that urban transportation policy should aspire, first and foremost, to eliminate motorist delay. Many press outlets pick up the report’s […]