{gtfs2emis} - Estimate public transport emissions from GTFS data: ipeagit.github.io/gtfs2emis/ #RStats bookmark from the old twitter

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

It's that time of the year again and I am chuffed to be included in Elsevier list of the top 2% of most-cited authors for the year 2024 (at rank 51 within the field "Logistics and Transportation") as well for the whole career (rank 326) lnkd.in/e6QprVQh

The Incerto books are written in a provocative style that may not appeal to everyone. Beneath the prose, each book explores a profound concept in probability theory. I tried to strip each to its bare bones. (1/6)

Computing travel time matrices in r⁵py from #geopandas #DataFrame is two lines of code: (1) create an r5py.TransportNetwork from @openstreetmap.bsky.social and #GTFS data (2) turn it into an r5py.TravelTimeMatrix() Try it out in #binder: r5py.readthedocs.io/stable/user-...

"The probability of first birth within marriage has become increasingly similar across social classes, while cohabiting and single parenthood have become more strongly stratified," finds @aledinal.bsky.social in new DR article

LINK ROT: 38% webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer available 10 years later. Even among pages that existed in 2021, 22% no longer accessible just two years later. This is often because individual page was deleted or removed on otherwise functional website. Many implications for knowledge 🧪

NEW: The first evidence of a solar take-off in Africa☀️✈️ x33 rise in Algeria solar panel imports in the 12 mths to June 2025, compared to previous 12 mths. x8 in Zambia x7 in Botswana x6 in Sudan x3 in each of Liberia, DRC, Benin, Angola, Ethiopia 🧵

ICYMI: Safety as Access https://transportist.org/2025/09/12/safety-as-access/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to more than 27 years in a Brazil prison for attempting a coup after losing the 2022 election.

Safety as Access

#rstats #econsky fixest v0.13.0 is finally out! It's still about making OLS and GLM estimations easy. Some major changes: - *default* VCOV becomes iid always! - singletons are removed by default! See all the changes here: github.com/lrberge/fixe...

A quick reminder that the #SDSS2025 deadline for Thematic Session proposals is coming up quickly. We'd love to see a proposal from you on a topic of your choice. The symposium is free, online, and typically has large numbers of engaged attendees. sdss2025.spatial-data-science.net

New paper alert! In a massive collaborative effort, we surveyed 1300 transport & planning practitioners from 22 countries to ask their understanding and normative views of proximity-centred accessibility. doi.org/10.1016/j.ci... To me, the most amazing results that emerged from this paper are that:

A generation of researchers will vanish, as intended, due to the US Administration’s illegal politicized attacks on our universities. Our national capacity for innovation and competitiveness, hobbled.

We usually rely on GDP, trade, or wages to study the past. This amazing paper flips the script. It analyzes 630,000 paintings (1400-2000) to extract emotions and shows how art tracks living standards, wars, inequality, and even climate shocks. (How is this economics? Everything is economics!)

#Accessibility modelers using #r5r #rstats, check this GUI for playing around with R5 network. If many people find it useful, I would get signal if I should invest any more free time into it. github.com/e-kotov/r5rgui (uses #mapgl by @kylewalker.bsky.social and #r5r by @urbandemog.bsky.social et al)

WE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you. Apply by: 10 Oct www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

New study using 📱geolocation data to examine the impact of major transit fare subsidies in Germany (Deutschlandticket - DT). Using a time-shifted DiD model, we assessed how DT affected travel behavior in terms of visitation volumes and trips distances across the country doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...

In 2008 I met a climate scientist from Mali who was advocating for this so long that he looked exhausted. Absolutely amazing man. He was working so hard on this. And then I see numbers like this and my heart just soars. Youba Sokona, you (and your peers) really did it. www.ipcc.ch/people/youba...

📣help: can anyone point to a tutorial or example on how to do spatial operations in #Rstats using #duckdb ? Cc @ekotov.pro @paleolimbot.bsky.social @robinlovelace.bsky.social

Kansas City was one of the first US transit systems to go fare-free. Now the fares are coming back. The city & transit agency had a choice: Eliminate bus service or charge for trips. They chose the latter. (Low-income riders can still ride free.) Good move. Service quality > Free fares

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

*David Attenborough voice* Here, amid his first grand international gathering, the fledgling researcher observes a strange spectacle, an early glimpse into the unforgiving ecology of academia...

New paper where we propose the Transit Heat Exposure Index (THEI) to gauge high-fidelity heat exposure for transit riders🥵🚍 We demonstrante THEI using 1m-by-1m microclimate simulations and door-to-door transport network analysis in a case study of Miami doi.org/10.1016/j.jt...

Preparing slides for a talk on Marxism in the 21st century I asked an AI programme to give Marx a contemporary hairstyle. I’m sure he served me once at a craft beer place in Shoreditch.

Adding this to the top of my waiting list !

There's a *ton* of interesting stuff in this pod with Alon Levy about why US public transit is so f'ing expensive, but I really want to highlight what I take as his Main Point, to wit ...

Want a good starting point for learning good principles of Dataviz? I'd highly recommend @andrew.heiss.phd course--Data Visualization with R. Reading materials, slides, lecture videos, examples, code, etc. are all posted for free on his website.

I ran an #rstats lab for many years before our foray into #pydata, so wouldn’t say my experience is super generalizable. But going back to play with R and seeing improvements to wasm and shinylive, ellmer, ragnar, vitals, and the entire tidy ecosystem reminded me just how batteries-included it is.

An "economist" so dumb I had to explain to him how the import price index works last month will now lead the BLS, kill me

We just published a deep dive on spatial joins in DuckDB by @maxxen.bsky.social. In this blog post, Max explains how spatial joins evolved in DuckDB and how the current operator harnesses R-Trees. Read the full post at duckdb.org/2025/08/08/s...

Time for one of my favorites:

👇🏽

This is pretty much how I feel from an analyst perspective. AI will not make the model run faster, nor will it solve the scientific problems that you and the rest of the team spend days agonising over. Writing the boilerplate slightly faster doesn’t buy you much in the real world

Would you rather have good access to destinations by transit or by car? In a study of real estate prices across Canada, @higgicd.bsky.social and team found that despite the ubiquity of cars, good *transit* access is a bigger driver of housing prices than good car access. 🧵 doi.org/10.1080/2469...

BlueSky is finally becoming as good as Twitter in its golden era

grading final projects and I've never ever seen so much brazen LLM output. **Most stuff is still great!** only ≈20ish% is pure LLM (text like "Lifenpsctarece.years" in completely made up images!) This is the most disheartening time I've had grading, like, ever. What are we even doing anymore.

👋 Welcome to the School of #Geography & the Environment @ox.ac.uk! We’re a world-leading department tackling global challenges through research and teaching. Follow us + @ecioxford.bsky.social @tsuoxford.bsky.social @oxfordsmithschool.bsky.social for updates from our SoGE community. 🌍

Just published in @jpube.bsky.social: "Parenthood and the gender gap in commuting" By Aline Bütikofer, René Karadakic, & Alexander Willén www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #econsky #publiceconomics #gendergap

Gold star for visuals.

Downtown LA × Hollywood - Elevation visualization concept map. Experimental design. #b3d

Pin this on your wall transit advocates:

I rave about @protomaps.com's PMTiles as a transformative technology. Here's an example: 📊 All 8 million+ US Census blocks; 🗺️ Visualized in 3D with MapLibre (via #rstats); 💻 Locally on my laptop - and the fan is running nice and cool. Writing up a blog post, I'll teach you how!

New #rstats blog up! solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2025-07... This is the first in a new series discussing causal inference with experimental data using multilevel models. My basic case is g-computation is the way to go.

Statistic Canada has updated spatial access measures out today. Update report cites @urbandemog.bsky.social www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/27-26...

👇💯 If someone invented an AI that could clean bathrooms, I’d be all over it. I don’t need AI to do my thinking, or writing, for me

Brazilian president to the American people, "If Trump was Brazilian and did what he did at the Capitol, he'd be on trial in Brazil"