This fall, we have chosen to feature six intriguing papers that discuss diverse transportation options and analyze intra-urban traffic networks.

Towards a general theory of mixed zones: The role of congestion

• AUTHOR(S): Kantor, Yuvale; Rietveld, Piet; van Ommeren, Jos
• PUBLICATION: Journal of Urban Economics
• DATE: Sept. 2014
• Mixed commercial and residential land use is observed in most cities around the world. Despite its ubiquity, urban economic theory is rather silent on the formation of mixed land use.

Modal choice and optimal congestion

• AUTHOR(S): David, Q.; Foucart, R.
• PUBLICATION: Regional Science & Urban Economics
• DATE: Sept. 2014
• We study the choice of transportation modes within a city where commuters have heterogeneous preferences for a car. As in standard models of externalities, the market outcome never maximizes aggregate welfare.

Beautifying the Slum: Cable Car Fetishism in Cazucá, Colombia

• AUTHOR(S): María José Álvarez Rivadulla and Diana Bocarejo
• PUBLICATION: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
• DATE: Oct. 2014
• The installation of cable cars as part of slum beautification projectshas begun to circulate among politicians, planners and residents as a magical solution that offers social and economic integration to historically marginalized urban areas. This paper analyzes the way in which a cable car project became a fetish for the inhabitants, politicians and planners of Cazucá.

Different Ways of Thinking about Street Networks and Spatial Analysis

• AUTHOR(S): Jiang, Bin; Okabe, Atsuyuki
• PUBLICATION: Geographical Analysis
• DATE: Oct. 2014
• Although street networks have been well studied in a variety of engineering and scientific disciplines, including transportation science, geography, urban planning, economics, and even physics, our understanding of street networks in terms of their structure and dynamics remains limited, especially when dealing with such real-world problems as traffic jams, pollution, and human evacuations for disaster management.

Analyzing the Configuration of Multimodal Urban Networks

• AUTHOR: Gil, Jorge
• PUBLICATION: Geographical Analysis
• DATE: Oct. 2014
• This article proposes urban network models as instruments to measure urban form, structure, and function indicators for the assessment of the sustainable mobility of urban areas, thanks to their capacity to describe the detail of a local environment in the context of a wider city-region.

Using principles of justice to assess the modal equity of regional transportation plans

• AUTHOR(S): Golub, Aaron; Martens, Karel
• PUBLICATION: Journal of Transport Geography
• DATE: Dec. 2014
• While equity has been an important consideration for transportation planning agencies in the U.S. following the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI specifically) and the subsequent Department of Transportation directives, there is little guidance on how to assess the distribution of benefits generated by transport investment programs.