I’m very glad to (finally be able to) share our new paper on measuring transportation equity. In this paper we present a critical and theoretically grounded reflection on different methods to measure transportation inequality and transportation poverty. There are several important takeaways in the paper please stop using the Gini coefficient!!!. All the methods discussed in this paper have also been implemented in the {accessibility} package in R. On this link you can get the ungated PDF, the code and data used in the study. Karner, A., Pereira, R. H. M., & Farber, S. (2024). Advances a ..read more

I’m super glad to share we have a new paper out of the oven! In this study we: propose a new route-based accessibility measure propose a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to map the causal paths of key variables that influence transit ridership, and compare the performance of our proposed indicator against similar metrics by examining their association the ridership of transit routes. Among all of the papers I’ve been involved in the past year or so, this is certainly one of the papers I’m most proud of. For different reasons. First, the paper was led by João Albuquerque-Oliveira as part of his ..read more

We have a new paper published where we look at the intersection between racial and income inequalities in access to healthcare in Brazilian cities. I’m very glad to see one more output from the Access to Opportunities Project. Tomasiello, D. B., Vieira, J. P. B., Parga, J. P. F., Servo, L. M., & Pereira, R. H. (2024). Racial and income inequalities in access to healthcare in Brazilian cities. Journal of Transport & Health, 34, 101722. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2023.101722 ? Ungated PDF and code here ..read more

Super glad to share the news that our paper on accessibility by ride-hailing has been published in the journal Cities. Pereira, R. H., Herszenhut, D., Saraiva, M., & Farber, S. (2024). Ride-hailing and transit accessibility considering the trade-off between time and money. Cities, 144, 104663. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2023.104663 The study covers many interesting results comparing accessibility by ride-hailing Vs transit Vs ride-hailing integrated with transit. However, in a world where most studies estimate accessibility based solely on travel times, one of the key contribution ..read more

Really glad to see our Special issue on “Advances in Spatial and Transport Network Analysis” is now online, publised in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. You can check all papers in the special issue here, and our editorial here. Thanks to many authors contributing with high quality papers and thanks Henrikki Tenkanen, Elsa Arcaute, and Marta C. Gonzalez for a wonderful colaboration ..read more

Exciting upcoming workshop on “Getting to Services: Transport and Accessibility”, organized by OECD and European Commission. The event will feature presentations by the European Commission, OECD, and researchers in Brazil, Canada and the Netherlands, sharing their experiences on some of the recent advances and persistent challenges in accessibility research and planning. The workshop will be entirely online on Thursday, the 26th of Oct/2023 from 15:00-17:00 CET. Click here for more info on the agenda and how to register ..read more

Glad to share the news that our paper on the impact of free public transit on voter turnout and mobility levels has now been publised! On this link you can get the ungated PDF, the code and data used in the study. Pereira, R. H. M., Vieira, R. S., Bizzarro, F., Barbosa, R. J., Dahis, R., & Ferreira, D. T. (2023). Free public transit and voter turnout. Electoral Studies, 86, 102690. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102690 Abstract: Transportation costs are an under-studied barrier to political participation. In many elections worldwide, subsidies to voter transportation are alre ..read more

I’ve always been a heavy user of Brazilian census data. This is of one the key data sets I use in most of my reseach projects on cities, urban and regional development, urban transport and accessibility. Like in many other countries, the population census in Brazil is the most comprehensive data collection process, covering various different topics and using a consistent high-quality method for the entire country at fine spatial resolution. Nonetheless, getting access to census data has never been easy or convenient. Although Brazil’s official statistics and geography institute (IBGE) makes ..read more

The “Anscombe’s quartet” is a famous way to illustrate how datasets can have nearly identical descriptive statistic but very different distributions. It serves as a warning, calling researchers to carefully visualize their data in any data analysis process. More recently, Lucy D’Agostino McGowan has proposed the “Causal quartets”: a group of four datasets all with the same statistical summaries & visualizations but different true causal effects. See her blog post and paper preprint. Takeaway: theory-informed data analysis is key. A good theoretical understanding of the causal mechanisms ..read more

Our paper on accessibility within planetary boundaries has now been published (open access): Willberg, E., Tenkanen, H., Miller, H. J., Pereira, R. H. M., & Toivonen, T. (2023). Measuring just accessibility within planetary boundaries. Transport Reviews, (0), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2023.2240958 I’m obviously biased, but Elias Willberg has done a great job leading the paper and I think the study makes a great contribution to research at the big area of intersection between transportation and sustainable development. I hope the paper will spark new discussion around sustai ..read more