With a nice video of nice verges

Good day my good friend.

Yesterday, I was assisting on a planning application to move an existing English football club from their historic ground to an out-of-town new stadium. Then I read this story about York City doing the same thing. There is a wonderful communality about going to watch football, that I sadly feel out-of-town stadiums don’t quite replicate.

Anyway, here are today’s stories especially curated for you.

James

Stopping subways from flooding means stopping streets from flooding

Over the last month we have seen footage of the New York subway being flooded by the remnants of Hurricane Ida and Tropical Storm Henri. With rising sea levels and increases chances of heavy rains, combined with many subway systems being located close to rivers and coasts, flooding will only get worse.

Klaus Hans Jacob reminds us the the solution is simple – stop the flood water getting into the system. And a lot can simply be achieved by building barriers and flood gates over subway entrances and ventilation shafts. But the remaining issue of street run-off requires a more sustainable approach to managing streets. As shown by the SUDS approach, increasing vegitation cover, installing permeable paving, and creating retention ponds reduces run off. Nature knows how to lessen the impact of flooding, so lets follow it.

Don’t look at autonomous cars, look at autonomous vehicles. They are already here

This article about Rio Tinto teaming up with Caterpillar, and the recent episode of the Streets Ahead podcast, reminded me that autonomous technology is not something for the future. It is here. We just focus too much on the cars, when autonomous trucks, tractors, and delivery vehicles are part of everyday life in many different settings.

As ever, when thinking of these technologies, you should consider not just the use cases but the business case. For moving things around, the business case for autonomous technology is clear. In a controlled environment, it is simply cheaper to operate a fleet of vehicles with a controller acting as oversight, than it is to have these vehicles and drivers for each. The question we transport planners should ask is not just “what could the impact of autonomous vehicles be?” but “autonomy is here, how do we deal with it?”

E-scooters as a last mile solution for people who value their time more. Probably

This really interesting research paper by Baek et al studied, using a stated preference method, the value of time of potential e-scooter riders using them as a last mile solution. The plain English conclusion is that people who walked for the last mile typically valued their time less compared to e-scooter riders and users of other modes of transport (real plain English – people who use e-scooters want to get there quicker and are willing to pay for it). But the detailed results are really interesting. Such as this table:

What the data shows is a significant variation in values of time for e-scooters from very time-sensitive to less time-sensitive. This variance interests me as much as the average. What could be driving this? The study indicates that the survey design is partly the issue, but I wonder if this reflects the wide potential market for e-scooters? Or a lack of knowledge of the technology? Answers on a postcard please!

Something interesting

Speaking of the importance of nice verges, this is a great video of the beautiful verges of Montreal.

If you do nothing else today, do this…

Read this booklet on Mobility as a Service worked on by my good friend David Alderson of SYSTRA. I don’t usually link to company white papers as they often try and sell you stuff, but this is a very good analysis.