ITS Monday: Edition 8, 2025

Taking a deep dive into our Federal Election Ask #1: Comprehensive regional city networks

Yes, there’s a Federal election fast approaching, and here Better Streets Australia advocate for what it would like to see addressed in terms of funding for walking and cycling in towns and cities across Australia.

Related iMOVE projects:

• Safer cycling and street design: A guide for policymakers
• Road use activity data: Cyclists, pedestrians and micromobility
• Modelling cycling investments in regional areas

Related iMOVE articles:

• Active Transport: Info, Projects & Resources
• Vulnerable Road Users: Info, Projects & Resources
• Road Safety: Info, Projects & Resources

Ride to school on a Bike Bus!

Ostensibly this is a story about Melbourne’s Merri-bek council Ride & Stride program, but it also contains links to guides on how to get a similar program up and running in your area.

Putting our best foot forward A checklist for walkable density

This pdf has been produced by the Committee for Sydney. “This paper has been completed in partnership with WalkSydney. WalkSydney is the peak body advocating for walking in the Greater Sydney Region. WalkSydney has three key asks:

• 30 km/hr urban default speed
• streets that are safe and easy to cross
• pedestrian priority over cars”

Walkable and bikeable streets are good for business

Staying in Sydney, and with walkability and bikeability, is this second paper from the Committee for Sydney.

“High streets are at once places and movement corridors. They need to be easy for people to access and move around, but also attractive places for them to hang-out and spend time.

There is a common misconception that most people drive their car to access Sydney’s high streets. But our research with the University of Sydney, which surveyed more than 1700 Sydneysiders across 21 different high streets, shows most people access high streets by foot, bike, or public transport.

Walkable and bikeable street upgrades make streets nicer places, while also making streets easier to get around. This is why, as so much research shows, walkable and bikeable streets are good for business.”

How Tokyo developed a culture of transit in a world of cars

“Despite a population of 37 million, there’s relatively little congestion and pollution here since the majority of its residents rely on public transit rather than cars. But while Tokyo’s mass transportation system may serve as a global success story, it may not be replicable, because its organic growth over the decades has fostered a unique culture of transit.”

Private motorists should subsidize public transit

From Andy Boenau’s Urbanism Speakeasy newsletter. “I’m constantly being told that people who drive pay for the roads and bridges they use, while people who ride bikes and buses don’t. Their claim is that gas taxes and other car-related fees pay for the infrastructure. Sure, those fees pay. Just like chipping in a couple quarters towards something that costs a dollar is paying. You’re paying towards something but you’re not covering the costs.”

A review of scenario cases for autonomous transportation system: Insights from CAV safety testing and scenario generation

A new academic paper, co-authored by Yuhan Zhang, Xiaomeng Shi, Yichang Shao, Nirajan Shiwakoti, Jian Zhang, Ziyuan Pu, and Zhirui Ye. The abstract:

“Ensuring the reliability and trustworthiness of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies is crucial before their widespread implementation. Instead of focusing solely on the automation levels of individual vehicles, it is essential to consider the autonomous operations of the entire autonomous transportation system (ATS) to achieve automated traffic.

However, designing and generating scenarios that unify the diverse properties of CAV testing and establish mutual trust among stakeholders pose significant challenges. Previous studies have predominantly focused on the automation levels of CAVs when characterizing scenarios, neglecting the autonomous level of the entire scenario from an ATS perspective. Moreover, there remains research potential in evaluating whether the testing scenario libraries can be effectively integrated into the CAV testing process. In this paper, we propose a grading framework for traffic scenarios based on autonomous levels in the ATS.

We also classify and summarize the traffic scenarios used in CAV safety testing. Through a comprehensive literature review, we identify prevailing issues and patterns in scenario design and provide insights and directions for future research in this field.”

Related iMOVE articles:

• Autonomous Driving Info, Projects & Resources
  
• Autonomous Driving Technology
• Connected Vehicles: Info, Projects & Resources

Related iMOVE projects:

• C-ITS national harmonisation and pre-deployment research
• Environmental impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles
• Safely deploying automated vehicles on Australian roads

This Google Maps ‘safety’ feature could actually make roads more dangerous

“Google Maps now prompts drivers to confirm traffic incidents, but experts warn the urgent requests could lead to dangerous distractions on the road.”

A spatial-temporal dynamic attention-based Mamba model for multi-type passenger demand prediction in multimodal public transit systems

An academic paper co-authored by Zhiqi Shao, Haoning Xi, David Hensher, Ze Wang, Xiaolin Gong, and Junbin Gao. The abstract:

“Predicting multi-type passenger demand, such as for adults, seniors, pensioners, and students, is essential for improving the operational efficiency, equity, and sustainability of multimodal public transit (PT) systems. However, traditional demand prediction models often struggle to capture the complex spatial-temporal variability inherent in diverse socio-demographic groups.

To address this gap, we propose a novel spatial-temporal dynamic attention-based state-space model, i.e., STDAtt-Mamba, tailored for multi-type passenger demand prediction in multimodal PT systems. The STDAtt-Mamba model comprises three key components: an adaptive embedding layer that integrates station-level, passenger-type-specific, and temporal embeddings into a unified representation for efficient data processing; a spatial-temporal dynamic attention (STDAtt) module that employs sparse attention mechanisms to selectively capture crucial global spatial-temporal dynamics; and a spatial-temporal dynamic Mamba (STDMamba) module that extends state-space modeling to fuse spatial and temporal dependencies dynamically.

We reformulate STDAtt-Mamba as a spatial-temporal dual-path attention mechanism and theoretically prove the complementarity of STDMamba and STDAtt in capturing local and global dependencies, thereby improving the interpretability of the STDAtt-Mamba. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale multimodal dataset of over 1.58 million smart card users of 9 passenger types from Queensland, Australia, from 01/2021 to 01/2023.

Experimental results demonstrate that STDAtt-Mamba outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models regarding the prediction accuracy across all passenger types and travel modes. By addressing the challenges of heterogeneity in spatial-temporal travel patterns and socio-demographic groups, this study offers an adaptive, robust, scalable, and data-driven tool for managing the heterogeneous passenger demand in multimodal PT systems.”

Intertraffic Q&A: Sampo Hietanen talks smart mobility and, of course, MaaS

As the title says, an interview with MaaS expert, Sampo Hietanen. “Smart mobility is a multifaceted beast that despite evolving exponentially over the last decade and a half, has stayed resolutely true to its underlying principles. Intertraffic interrupted Mobility as a Service pioneer Sampo Hietanen’s family skiing holiday to find out what’s driving the industry… and him.”

Related iMOVE articles:

• MaaS (Mobility as a Service) in Australia: Info, Projects & Resources
• MaaS: What have we learned, and where to next?
  

Related iMOVE projects:

• Sydney MaaS trial: Design, implementation, lessons, the future
• Behavioural change for sustainable transport
• Mobility landscapes: Mobility as a Service customer impact trial
• Gippsland community e-Bus pilot