David Boyce suggested I should submit my review of Vaclav Smil’s book for publication after I shared it with him. Smil’s perspective on climate change initiatives might be of interest to regional scientists and transportation planners, he told me. At his suggestion, I submitted the review to Papers in Regional Science. To my pleasant surprise, the editor recommended acceptance with minor revision within a day, and the review was published a week after the first submission, definitely a record for me. If you don’t have subscription, read it here. The published version is only slightly different from the blog.
Category Archives: housekeeping
Integrated bus-bike system
After much delay, the last paper Sida and I wrote together came out last week in Transportation Research Part C. Growing out of the last chapter of Sida’s PhD dissertation, the first draft of the paper was completed before he went back to China in the summer of 2020, at the height of COVID19 pandemic. In part, the long delay was due to Sida’s transition to his new job at Beijing Jiaotong University. I am glad he pressed on despite the early setbacks and eventually published the paper in a descent journal. Here is the abstract for those who wonder what is an integrated bus-bike system.
Abstract: This paper examines the design of a transit system that integrates a fixed-route bus service and a bike-sharing service. Bike availability – the average probability that a traveller can find a bike at a dock – is modelled as an analytical function of bike utilization rate, which depends on travel demand, bike usage and bike fleet size. The proposed system also recognizes the greater flexibility provided by biking. Specifically, a traveller can choose between the closest bus stop and a more distant stop for access, egress or both. Whether the closest stop is a better choice depends on the relative position of the traveller’s origin and destination, as well as system design parameters. This interdependence complicates the estimation of average system cost, which is conditional on route choice. Using a stylized analysis approach, we construct the optimal design problem as a mixed integer program with a small number of decision variables. Results from our numerical experiments show the integrated bus-bike system promises a modest but consistent improvement over several benchmark systems, especially in poorer cities with lower demand density. We find a large share of travellers, more than 20% in nearly all cases tested, opt not to use the nearest bus stop in an optimally designed system. The system also tends to maintain a high level of bike availability: the probability of finding a bike rarely drops below 90% except in very poor cities.
Bob Camilone Memorial Scholarship
Hongyu Zheng, a fourth year PhD student in my group, had won 2023 Transportation and Development Institute Bob Camilone Memorial Scholarship. The other recipient of the award is Adrian Hernandez, another PhD student in our transportation program.
Congratulations to both gentlemen! We take pride in their accomplishment and are confident that they will continue to excel in his academic and professional pursuits.heir
Transportation equity
Last month my group received a one-year seed grant from Northwestern University’s McCormick Catalyst Fund to study transportation equity. The main idea is to incorporate various ethical theories into public transportation system design and analyze the implications. The project initially originated from my interest in the theory of justice (see my review of John Rawls’ book). More details about the project can be found here. Stay tuned for a forthcoming paper that summarizes some initial results.
New NSF grant
Last week, my group formally received a new NSF grant sponsored by Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Program. A joint effort with Professor Zhaoran Wang from Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Science, this three-year project aims to formulate and experiment with an integrative
approach to applying machine learning (ML) for traffic management.
Mehrnaz Ghamami
Last week I learned my former student, Dr. Mehrnaz Ghamami, was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Michigan State University. She is the second of my former students to have earned tenure. Mehrnaz and her husband, Dr. Ali Zockaie, both graduated from our program in 2015, were hired by the same department at the same time, and are now promoted together. I am so proud of their accomplishments and feel immensely happy for their good fortune (to be able to always stay together in academia is no easy feat for a couple) and well deserved promotions!
Redesign transit to cope with COVID
Our paper on transit design for COVID was finally published in Transportation Research Part A. You may also read a previous post about this paper.
The idea was initially conceived at the peak of the first wave (April 2020) and the first submission to TR-A was made later that year (November). In this particular case, the review process was excruciatingly long. The second round alone took more than six months, and yielded no actionable comments. Anyway, I am glad it ended with a positive note for Hongyuan – this was his first publication in my group.
My first post
I finally decided that I need a research+blog type place to share my work and writing. My student told me Northwestern provides a web-hosting service based on WordPress. I have a few hours to spare since it is a MLK day. The tool seems quite reasonable and hence I took the plunge. Let’s see how it goes…