Plus a map on India’s light pollution

Good day friend.

After an evening of feeling a bit poorly, I must admit I’m phoning this one in a bit. Not that it’s not interesting and the stories aren’t important, but it may lack the oomph of normal newsletters. I’m nothing if not honest. To the news.

James

The UK’s Disability Strategy should be seen as more than just tactile paving and apps

Yesterday, the UK’s Department for Transport announced to great fanfare about how good the new Accessibility Strategy is. There are some very promising policy announcements around reviewing every railway station for its accessibility, making charge points accessible, and providing visual and audio announcements on buses.

But the more interesting things are in the wider Disability Strategy around designing for more accessible public services. This incorporates a whole service design approach and a new approach to understanding disability and the data supporting it. This is the approach that should be taken to improving the lived experience for those with disabilities.

The challenges with motorway electrification

A consortium of organisations including Siemens, Scania, the University of Cambridge and Herriot-Watt University were awarded funding to investigate the feasibility of electrifying the UK’s motorway network. The possibility of overhead wires across the network was raised in the Transport Decarbonisation Plan. But could it possibly work?

This has been studied as a concept in Germany and Sweden, and there are advantages to the idea. Overhead wires are not intrinsically linked to the road surface, and are therefore not affected by its condition, nor impact upon it. The challenge is that it is a largely theoretical exercise at present, and the impacts on capital and revenue costs are unknown. Worthwhile studying – particularly as battery technology is struggling to gain a foothold in the freight vehicle market – but perhaps not committing to yet.

Visualisation of the Day

Street lighting has, quite literally, one of the most visible impacts of humankind on our world. I came across this great article on Our World in Data that goes through the impact of lighting and how it reflects living standards and infrastructure development across the world. This image of India shows this perfectly. Look how much brighter the country is in 2010.

Source: Our World in Data

If you do nothing else today, do this

Just check out the Our World in Data website. You can get lost in it for hours, and the transport pages are worth it on their own.