"Automatic Generation of School Bus Routes in Los Angeles"

Our report for the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies from our collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is now publicly available. Here are some details.

Title: Automatic Generation of School Bus Routes in Los Angeles

Authors: Mason A. Porter, David J. Spender, and Cu Hauw ("Willy") Hung

Abstract: The goal of our project is to automatically generate school bus routes for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). We examined four algorithms, including two from the existing literature and two new ones that we developed. A major focus of our work was the construction of “mixed-load routes,” which transport students from multiple schools. Based on our measurements (whose imperfections we discuss), three of the four algorithms perform at least as well as the existing route plan, and one of those three performs better than the existing route plan. We also delivered a user-friendly routing program to LAUSD that uses one of these algorithms, and we have made our software publicly available. Our insights and results are also applicable to other school districts that permit mixed-load routing.

Travel Time from London in 1881

This is really cool!

My favorite part of this visualization is for a trip to Africa, as the rapid change in colors once you arrive on the content very nicely and tersely tells you something about the change in transportation mode (and topography, etc.).

I'm sure there are plenty of other similarly interesting things if one looks closely.

This map shows travel time from London in 1881 pic.twitter.com/CbMNxcDEpu

— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) December 23, 2017

(Tip of the cap to Sydney Padua.)

Subway Maps Compared to their Actual Geographies

Here are some cool visualizations of subway maps morphing to their actual geographies.

And if you want to learn about the amount of information to navigate such things, you may be interested in this paper.

(Tip of the cap to Marta González.)

Map of Literature's Epic American Road Trips

This visualization of epic American road trips from literature is very cool!

You have walks on networks, you have different ones that you can compare to each other, and you also have descriptions from the authors of these different places.

(Tip of the cap to Bonnie Harland.)

Nomenclature for a Few London Tube Stations

This very interesting article has some really cool stuff about the origin of the names of a few stations in the London Underground ("The Tube") transportation system.

Tales from the ArXiv: "Other Naive Models"

This paper's abstract has the following final sentence: "Furthermore our transition probability model is up to 20% more accurate than other naive models."

Notice the phrasing "other naive models", which contrasts rather sharply with the phrasing "other, naive models".

"Lost in Transportation: Information Measures and Cognitive Limits in Multilayer Navigation"

A new article of mine just came out in final form today in Science Advances. Here are the details.

Title: Lost in Transportation: Information Measures and Cognitive Limits in Multilayer Navigation

Authors: Riccardo Gallotti, Mason A. Porter, and Marc Barthelemy

Abstract: Cities and their transportation systems become increasingly complex and multimodal as they grow, and it is natural to wonder whether it is possible to quantitatively characterize our difficulty navigating in them and whether such navigation exceeds our cognitive limits. A transition between different search strategies for navigating in metropolitan maps has been observed for large, complex metropolitan networks. This evidence suggests the existence of a limit associated with cognitive overload and caused by a large amount of information that needs to be processed. In this light, we analyzed the world’s 15 largest metropolitan networks and estimated the information limit for determining a trip in a transportation system to be on the order of 8 bits. Similar to the "Dunbar number," which represents a limit to the size of an individual’s friendship circle, our cognitive limit suggests that maps should not consist of more than 250 connection points to be easily readable. We also show that including connections with other transportation modes dramatically increases the information needed to navigate in multilayer transportation networks. In large cities such as New York, Paris, and Tokyo, more than 80% of the trips are above the 8-bit limit. Multimodal transportation systems in large cities have thus already exceeded human cognitive limits and, consequently, the traditional view of navigation in cities has to be revised substantially.

A Spectral Navigation Algorithm

Clearly, some users of London's transportation system are using a spectral algorithm for navigation.

(Tip of the cap to Sang Hoon Lee.)

Anagram Tube Map

Here is a map of the London Underground (aka, the Tube) with an interesting twist: all of the stations are presented using anagrams of their actual names.

(Tip of the cap to Alan Champneys.)