Saturday reading:

  1. The effect of a yellow bicycle jacket on cyclist accidents – a randomised controlled trial with 6,793 cyclists shows a reduced accident risk due to a yellow bicycle jacket
  2. The effects of rent control on tenants, landlords and inequality – rent control in San Francisco led to a city-wide increase of 7% in rents and caused $5 Billion in welfare losses for all renters
  3. Why the time is right to abolish stamp duty – the Productivity Commission lays out a compelling argument for replacing stamp duty with land tax
  4. Do you have to be smart to be rich? – the impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress
  5. Freeing up the huge areas set aside for parking can transform our cities – cities around the world are starting to rethink how much land should be devoted to car parking
  6. Where does ‘London’ end? – where 183 people think the boundary of London is
  7. 5 reasons why Amsterdam works so well for bikes – short-change any one of them and your city of bikes won’t work as well
  8. The economics of the office: why do Americans still commute? – The personal computer was supposed to kill the office and liberate us from hellish commutes to the city. But the average American commute has only increased since then

Sunday reading:

  1. The state of the art in self-driving cars – those who think fully self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous on city streets within a few years are not well connected to the state of the art. Also, the Andrews Government has asked Infrastructure Victoria for advice on automated and zero emission vehicle infrastructure
  2. Denver radically expanded its transit. So why are more people driving cars? – the “most advanced transit city in the west” is having growing pains
  3. The changing face(s) of US cities and suburbs – 12 of the top 20 metro areas have core cities where the white population is increasing while the black population is decreasing
  4. Why ‘statistical significance’ is often insignificant – researchers are sometimes driven to publish suspect findings
  5. Melbourne’s largest suburban mixed-use development becomes reality – construction works have begun on the site of M-City, Saraceno Group and Schiavello Group’s $1 billion mixed-use development in Clayton
  6. Remembering Ben Sandilands – The late aviation journalist’s career spanned more than half a century
  7. Why you hate contemporary architecture – and if you don’t, why you should… And a WA-based practice trounced all others to take out top award for Public Architecture for its East Pilbara Arts Centre in the 2017 National Architecture Awards
  8. Public transport has been let down by our reluctance to pay for it – to fix and expand our rail systems we need to get fares right and we need to diversify the funding mix