January 30, 2023

Week in Review 2023-01-30

Last week was a short one at work, a three day week. It had some deep dives into code to make the application to work into certain specific cases. It was good to understand more about different areas of the application that I didn't develop firsthand.

Along the week I found interesting resources, both on the software side and the urban side. One special one was the McKinsey report on autonomous vehicles, I wrote about it, and their take on urban sprawl. I still find amazing that TVs and electric cars keep being pitched as the solution to urban mobility, while we have had the solution in our streets since long ago: 🚶‍♀️, 🚲, 🚎.

Here are the collection of links and resources, hope you enjoy:

Mastodon

• If I have to prove I'm not a computer by identifying traffic lights and busses, perhaps we're not quite ready for self-driving cars.
• The next new site I build will be Django Cairn: A (future) place to find #Django knowledge... via Tim Schilling

Software

• osmnx-matplotlib-animation A simple example of how to animate objects moving on OSMnx graph. By Mikhail Sirenko // Good tutorial on using OSMnx and Mtplotlib to animate objects moving in an urban graph. It is very useful to create visualizations of people, bikes, trams, or other objects moving through a city.

Twitter

• How far can you go in 15 minutes in the Netherlands

Web

• The Commuting Principle That Shaped Urban History // On how cities evolved according on how fast it was possible to move around.
• EV Hype Overshadows Public Transit as a Climate Fix // The hype of electric vehicles has, certainly, pushed away from the conversation the importance of public transport as a way to reduce emissions in cities, and to improve the quality of cities. As a pedestrian, cycling, and public transport advocate, it is really frustrating to keep hearing about TVs as the solution, while clearly they are part of it, but by far they are not the most important part of the solution.

Weeklogs

• Jochen's Weeknotes 2023-01-23

YouTube

• New Underwater Bike Parking at Amsterdam Central Station // Check out the video, it is a great parking for 6,300 bikes, linked directly to Amsterdam Central Station and the metro station.