Reinventing Transport

Despite its age (I finished it in 1999), I still get requests now and then for my PhD thesis. The old link to download it broke some time ago but last week the Murdoch University Research Repository came to the rescue and put it back up. So you can again  download it as a pdf via this page . Please forgive the shameless self promotion here! I never turned my thesis into a book, as many academics do. Instead I simply made it available on the web. A bad move? I did have some doubts when I saw bits of it plagiarized once or twice. But it also has 61 citations according to Google Scholar. I guess that's not too bad for an unpublished thesis. Last year, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) picked up some of its ideas for their document,  Changing Course: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Urban Transport  [ PDF ]. The full title of my PhD dissertation is:   An international comparative perspective on urban transport and urban form in Pacific Asia: the challenge of rapid motorisation in de

The newly resurrected Transport Blog has an interesting riff on taxis  around the world. The post is an entertaining read, full of pithy observations (and quite a lot of speculation I suspect). Yet it cleverly sneaks in some important points on the dry dry topic of taxi regulation. Which is great because improving taxi industry arrangements is an important but sadly neglected element of urban transport policy. Hanoi's taxis feature prominently - hence the intriguing title " How to spook a Vietnamese taxi driver ". You have to read to the end to understand the reference. There are brief comments on taxi service and its regulation all over the world. If author Michael Jennings is to be believed, taxis in Bulgaria and Buenos Aires are to be avoided if humanly possible. Hanoi taxis in their natural habitat (a sea of motorcycles!) Singapore's get a little nod too. Which reminds me that a few years ago I wrote something about Singapore's taxi arrangements . Si