How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables

What would it be like to live in a city administered using the business model of Amazon (or Apple, IKEA, Uber,…)?  A new book playfully combines speculative fiction and analysis of 38 different business models when applied to running cities of the future.  How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables, edited by Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern and Joe Shaw, is available in paperback and PDF from Meatspace Press.

My contribution to the book, Cities Need Mass Transit, shows how a highly personalized transportation system envisioned by Tesla and Elon Musk cannot possibly scale to be an effective urban mobility solution.

 

Network analysis of intra‐hospital transfers and hospital onset Clostridium difficile infection

New publication: McHaney-Lindstrom, M., Hebert, C., Miller, H.J., Moffatt-Bruce, S. and Root, E. “Network analysis of intra-hospital transfers and hospital-onset Clostridium Difficile infection,” Health Information and Libraries Journal, https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12274

Abstract

Objectives. To explore how SNA can be used to analyse intra‐hospital patient networks of individuals with a HAI for further analysis in a GIS environment.

Methods.  A case and control study design was used to select 2008 patients. We retrieved locational data for the patients, which was then translated into a network with the SNA software and then GIS software. Overall metrics were calculated for the SNA based on three datasets and further analysed with a GIS.

Results.  The SNA analysis compared cases to control indicating significant differences in the overall structure of the networks. A GIS visual representation of these metrics was developed, showing spatial variation across the example hospital floor.

Discussion.  This study confirmed the importance that intra‐hospital patient networks play in the transmission of HAIs, highlighting opportunities for interventions utilising these data. Due to spatial variation differences, further research is necessary to confirm this is not a localised phenomenon, but instead a common situation occurring within many hospitals.

Conclusion.  Utilising SNA and GIS analysis in conjunction with one another provided a data‐rich environment in which the risk inherent in intra‐hospital transfer networks was quantified, visualised and interpreted for potential interventions.

Green accessibility: Estimating the environmental costs of network-time prisms

Network-time prisms are powerful measures of space-time accessibility within transportation networks.  However, they fail to capture the environmental costs of potential mobility.  In this paper, we present a method for estimating the expected energy consumption and emissions associated with network time prisms.  We also verify our method using data from instrumented vehicles moving within an experimental network-time prism in the Phoenix AZ road network.

Song, Y., Miller, H.J., Stempihar, J. and Zhou, X. (2017), “Green accessibility: Estimating the environmental costs of network-time prisms for sustainable transportation planning,” Journal of Transport Geography, 64, 109-119.

Abstract.  Accessibility, or the ease to participate in activities and obtain resources in a given environment, is crucial for evaluating transportation systems. Greater accessibility is often achieved by increasing individuals’ potential mobility. However, potential mobility, if realized by motorized modes, can also generate negative environmental impacts such as fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While the negative environmental impacts of greater mobility are acknowledged, there has been a lack of research to validate those impacts using empirical data, especially considering variations in individuals’ mobility levels. This paper presents a method for estimating the expected environmental costs of accessibility represented by a network-time prism (NTP). A NTP delimits all accessible locations within a network and the available time for an individual to present at each location given a scheduled trip origin and destination, a time budget and the maximum achievable speeds along network edges. Estimating the expected environmental costs of a NTP involves three steps: (1) semi-Markov techniques to simulate the probabilities to move along network edges at given times; (2) the speed profiles for reachable edges, and (3) a cost function that translates speeds into environmental impacts. We focus on air quality and employ the motor vehicle emission simulator MOVESLite to estimate the CO2 emissions at both the edge and prism levels. We calibrate and validate the methods for experimental NTPs defined within the Phoenix, AZ, USA road and highway network using vehicles instrumented with GPS-enabled onboard diagnostic devices (OBD). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through two scenarios and investigate the impact of changes in mobility levels on the expected CO2 emissions associated with the experimental NTPs.

Keywords: Space-time accessibility; Network-time prism; Emissions