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0 and 2010 llu raised household broadband adoption by 15 perhaps surprisingly the majority of studies also find no evidence that llu crowds out future investment by the network owner and in one case may even lead to upgrading this seems partly explained by relatively high access charges in most countries we d urge some caution here though for the uk the positive effects of llu have decreased over time as broadband rollout covers more and more of the population that might change if future technology gets a lot better but this seems unlikely any time soon setting lower access charges would also bump up the adoption effect but also risks discouraging future investment the third toolkit looks across other tools that governments have used to nudge providers and users incentives loans subsidies tax breaks information campaigns and demand side measures such as buying clubs and bulk purchasing sometimes policy works directly with providers isps at other times the nudges are applied to users firms and households does it matter which not from the point of view of take up we find evidence that both kinds of measure can be effective specifically we find that loans to isps and demand aggregation measures like buying clubs have the effect of raising downstream takeup for direct to user policies subsidies training and providing computers are all effective for providers a cross oecd study finds that a bundle of producer incentives have the effect of raising fibre uptake by 10 from slower copper networks on the user side a us study shows that a partial loans scheme for farms raised broadband takeup by 13 14 points again it s not easy to figure out cost effectiveness but we estimate that typical household programmes cost 1 1 1 3k per extra connection with the farms scheme above costing around 3 4k per farm connected the uk has strongly pushed programmes like this notably the last government s sme broadband voucher scheme sadly this has had no proper evaluation done something we d like to see change for future schemes although a user survey was published which perhaps not surprisingly found that voucher recipients were very happy with 3k off the cost of a fast broadband line originally posted here on 23 june 2017 share this print opens in new window print email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in cities economics infrastructure politics leave a comment tags broadband cities economic development economics internet technology whatworks yougov called the election right how june 30 2017 this general election has been full of surprises so i ve been digging into the yougov mrp voting model pretty much the only one that got the 2017 election result correct given all the current humble pie and book eating by pundits who didn t spot the result coming this seems worth doing i also think there are also some useful takeaways for cities especially as devolution rolls on yougov s mrp multilevel regression and post stratification method not only got the national result right but correctly predicted results in 93 of seats compare this to most other polls and chart below the model somehow also predicted the canterbury result where labour won for the first time since 1918 it turns out that earlier versions of an mrp model also spotted the leave vote in 2016 and did pretty well in the us 2016 presidential election though this version seems to have worked better for reasons i ll come back to remember this is a predictive method how might people vote in the future that did about as well as the main exit poll which asked people how they just voted john curtice has more on how uk exit polling is done here so how does the mrp model work here s an overview this gives us the main features but not surprisingly doesn t reveal all the datasets or the functional form s yougov describe this as a big data approach it seems to involve bespoke data and data science methods but also lots of public datasets aka administrative big data the key steps seem to be 1 yougov have weekly individual level data on voting intention and detailed characteristics including past voting they run around 50k online interviews per week and anyone can sign up 2 they use this to build a typology of voter types 3 for each voter type they then fit a model that predicts voting intention 4 for each constituency they then estimate how these types are spread using public resources like the british election study and other ons resources perhaps these 5 they work out how the vote should go in each constituency by contrast traditional polls tend sample about 1 000 people then project direct from respondents to the whole uk using weights to compensate for demographics voting intention and so on this helps us see why an mrp approach might work better than conventional methods first mrp has a much bigger starting sample more observations sharper results second mrp is micro to macro it models each constituency individually so stands a better chance of picking up local issues such as the hospital closure crisis which helped drive the canterbury result third mrp is both fine grained and high frequency the only pundits to pick up on the reality of ge2017 got out there on the ground given the complexity of uk politics right now we also need methods to get at this complexity in a structured way fourth mrp methods should get better over time you end up with loads of high frequency training data and this progressively makes the model better this doesn t mean that conventional polling has had its day e g survation were also on the money but it s notable that most conventional polls fell over this time just as they did in the 2015 general election i suspect that these four factors helped yougov pick up higher turnout for younger voters faster than most pollsters and many mainstream journalists as well as shifts in other age groups this post by ben lauderdale one of their chief modellers seems to supports that note that we won t know turnout by age for sure until the next bes in a few months if modelling can get us to a decent understanding faster that s very useful as sam freedman points out it also helps show precisely and in close to real time the huge damage the conservative manifesto did to the party s chances micro to macro techniques like mrp could be useful for mayoral elections and city politics with a 50k in sample could you train the model on a city region like the west midlands using public data if so this feels much more useful and adaptable than one off traditional polling yougov say their model works at local authority level so some version of this could probably be done now however i suspect that even a big national sample might be too sparse for very local analysis say at neighbourhood level in this latter case you could also imagine building a richer locally specific model for a whole conurbation like the west midlands or greater manchester using a big base of local respondents this would be expensive but for a local university or a group of them it would be a super interesting and public spirited long term investment birmingham university s city regional lab city redi will be exploring this further in the coming months share this print opens in new window print email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in cities demographics politics leave a comment tags bigdata polling cities demographics local government politics citizen jane may 8 2017 like a boss we went to see the new jane jacobs documentary citizen jane battle for the city it s pretty good with plenty both for jacobs fans and those who don t know her work it pulls in some big name contributors including saskia sassen michael sorkin mindy fullilove mike davis and geoffrey west but it also perhaps unintentionally shows up some of the limits of jacobs thinking as it applies to today s cities here s a review of sorts the film has two particular strong points the first is the precis of jacobs most famous work the death and life of great american cities director matt tyrnauer nicely summarise the key ideas cities as organised complexity street life as a dance of uses and users the rebellion against modernist city planning cities for the car and high rise living the importance of eyes on the street mixed uses old and new buildings and short blocks concepts now hard coded into masterplans and design standards in cities across the world crucially these ideas developed over many years close observation of new york streets and neighbourhoods and through test runs in jacobs journalism her first book arrived in the world fully formed and ready for use the film s other big plus is its retelling of the epic struggle between jacobs and city planner robert moses in 1950s and 60s new york with minimal resources jacobs somehow turned around moses big money plans to bulldoze and run roads through washington square park the west village and ultimately lower manhattan itself these are perhaps the most gripping parts of the picture moses is a monstrous figure see also robert caro s 900 page biography summarised here by jackson lears while jacobs is revealed to be a total badass machine politics corruption and the abuse of power run up against agile and well networked social activism we see jacobs wearing a mailer for mayor badge organising a series of brilliant publicity stunts and photo opportunities and roping in susan sontag margaret mead and eleanor roosevelt to help out the gender dynamics are striking moses summons an army of besuited male planners and notoriously dismisses jacobs female led network as just a bunch of mothers fatally underestimating his opponents but also as a talking head points out you d only say that if you thought people didn t matter at all jacobs publisher sends moses a copy of death and life he returns it in a terse note sell this junk to someone else lewis mumford dismisses the book as mother jacobs home recipes the filmmakers link jacobs tactics and successes to other 1960s social struggles feminism the environmental movement civil rights there s an important point here about shared repertoires of protest tactics it s also true that jacobs was both a feminist and an environmentalist but i needed a bit more convincing that the bigger links really held together the racism in us post war urban planning is still shocking to see james baldwin appears in the film to point out that urban renewal means negro removal with housing projects and highways used as tools of segregation the minority urban poor were pushed into badly designed blocks at the city s edge just as in france the following decade with similarly grim results for the victims the film starts to connect these practices to moses development model which raised land values in redeveloped zones and leveraged huge federal budgets i was left wanting to know more about the political economy was this racial redlining patronage politics or some toxic mixture of the two the cross bronx expressway 1948 72 is perhaps one of the most notorious moses schemes literally cutting the neighbourhood in half and blighting lifechances for years afterwards as mike davis points out it s perhaps the single most damaging urban development in us history jacobs was active in new york at the time and the film is curiously silent about this was she involved in opposing this if not why not did she try and fail was her model of protest anchored in the neighbourhoods she knew did construction help spur her into action elsewhere in the city if the film is sometimes in danger of reifying jacobs older ideas it also misses out some of her newer thinking that s a shame the economy of cities 1969 is a foundational text in urban economics with important ideas about how cities help innovation to happen long term growth and urban resilience cities and the wealth of nations 1985 which posits cities over nation states as the key unit of development feels ahead of its time and her environmental work which i know less well also looks increasingly prescient the film also skips some chances to reassess that legacy jacobs was a progressive and a futurist but not a fan of big government her anti planning stance has made her popular with the libertarian right it s the antithesis not just of the government cynicism that produced pruitt igoe and ronan point but also the state funded optimism that gave us the lcc and park hill sure the lower manhattan expressway would have been a concrete stake through the city s heart but i dare you not to look at the renderings and at least wonder what a brutalist icon it would have made some of the limitations in jacobs vision become clearer in the second half of the film which lays up jacobs neighbourhood prescriptions against urbanisation outside the west as saskia sassen puts it the pace and style of urbanisation in the urban cores of china and india are moses on steroids how can we apply jane jacobs thinking to these cities asks another contributor good question the film drops some hints successful urbanisation can t shut out the public realm cheaply built towers are a terrible false economy existing urban settlements however visually shabby or informal embody their own dances and should be valued by planners not bulldozed away see stewart brand for more on this nevertheless the film can t escape the conclusion that death and lif e has plenty of say about preserving old neighbourhoods in old cities but rather less about building new ones jacobs new york was losing population as their heavy industry began to be globalised away the cities of the brics are growing at speed equally today s new york is struggling with an affordable housing crisis other us cities are still feeling the aftershocks of de industrialisation as jacobs put it in 1958 the best way to plan a downtown is to see how people use it today to look for its strengths and to exploit and reinforce them today s urban crises need urgent solutions and significantly by her death in 2006 jacobs didn t seem so interested in these issues as her last interviews show she had moved on to other things the film is a great appreciation of jane jacobs finest hour her elegant and radical thinking was inevitably a product of its time but bettering our contemporary cities may require both a re tooling of jacobs ideas and new thinking from other voices share this print opens in new window print email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in architecture cities housing infrastructure politics leave a comment tags architecture cities design diversity 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