Climate Change & Online Discussion

In the web world, the public conversation about climate change on mainstream discussion and media websites is quite distorted. The comments sections are filled with poorly informed opinions (on all sides of the debate), personal attacks and disinformation.  (It’s widely documented that the fossil fuel industries and other motivated groups are pouring significant amounts of [...]

Advances in Population Synthesis, the journal article

I’ve finally published my M.A.Sc. thesis as a journal article, under the title Advances in Population Synthesis: fitting many attributes per agent and fitting to household and person margins simultaneously. This article is the preferred citation going forward; I think it tells the story best: A brief summary of the key contributions described in detail in [...]

Greater Toronto Area transit map

Many years ago, when Google first released Google Maps and revolutionized online mapping from the stagnant MapQuest era, I put together a few quick demos showing the Vancouver and Toronto transit maps. I’ve made a few updates over the years since then, but not much more.  The Vancouver one is still quite popular – more [...]

Canadian Government Scraps Long-Form Census

An appalling decision from the Canadian federal government today, reported by the Globe & Mail here: “Tories scrap mandatory long-form census” The census is a vital data source for all sorts of transportation and land use planning.  A voluntary census is nearly useless, since the sample will suffer from voluntary response bias.  This will do [...]

Bryant and Road Rage

The judicial verdict is in on the sensational case of Michael Bryant. It sounds like a tragic case of a driver whose car’s stop/stall/roll action accidentally provoked an unstable bicycle courier, with tragic and ultimately fatal consequences. The driver appears to have behaved completely reasonably under the circumstances. The cyclist had a long history of aggressive [...]

Winter cycling, Dutch style

Growing up in Toronto, I was a six-month cyclist and six-month pedestrian/transit rider. Since moving back a few years ago, I’ve been shifting to closer to ten months of cycling. I realized that I feel much better when I get that daily exercise and sunshine, and it’s considerably faster for getting around, chaining trips and [...]

Subcultures & cycling

The Copenhagenize blog has some interesting thoughts on cycling and subcultures: do the various cycling subcultures (racers, couriers, mountain bikers) in North America get in the way of making cycling appealing to normal citizens? The subcultures define themselves by gear or attitude – and I think this is quite offputting for normal people. It’s like a [...]

Joe Romm discusses a plausible worst case scenario for climate change. The UK’s Hadley Centre model was used to look at the effects of continued growth in fossil fuel use, including carbon feedbacks – and the results aren’t pretty. In 10% of the model runs, very high temperatures are seen as soon as 2060, and [...]

Google Map updates

Several years ago, I put together some Google Maps for the Vancouver and Toronto transit systems. In light of the expected opening of the Canada Line in Vancouver on August 17th, I took a shot at updating the maps. In the interim, though, Google has made some big advances in its handling of transit. They [...]

Transportation Research Board template for LaTeX

Last summer, I submitted my first paper to the Transportation Research Board (TRB) conference (ultimately accepted, and presented in January 2009). They have recently started accepting papers in PDF form instead of requiring a Word file—and this meant that I could write my paper in LaTeX, my preferred document processing system. However, TRB doesn’t provide [...]