Plus one of my favourite transport visualisations
Good day my good friend.
It’s the time of the year when the UK Government starts spilling the beans on its spending plans. Already it has been good news for public transport and cycling in the cities, even if £5bn of what has been announced had already been committed. In the absence of further news, here are some news items carefully curated just for you.
James
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Paris wants to become a 100% cycling city
Now that is an ambitious strategy. The new Plan Velo for 2021 to 2026 is simple in its delivery and aim: build it and they will come. Including 130000 cycle parking spaces, 180km of new cycle tracks, and prioritising the circulation of bicycles and public transport. Needless to say it has gone down well with cycling advocates. This builds upon the rapid progress made over the last 5 years.
The plan is impressive by its scale (although it should be stressed that the actual city of Paris itself is very small in area). The city has been extremely successful in attracting new people to cycling, and cycle trips make up an estimated 15% of trips in the city. Paris has shown that it can grow cycling, but can it keep the momentum going?
Community engagement is not all about the feels
I am a massive advocate of community engagement, as you may well know. But there are many, many ways by which even well-intentioned community engagement can go wrong, even when it is done well. Reading this research by Hamann et al reminded me of a simple fact. Community engagement is about impact and change.
This study is very interesting as it explores the dynamics concerned with keeping people engaged, and giving them a feeling of accomplishment. Which is critical to continued engagement. But what was the impact on the ultimate aim – to reduce road casualties in this instance? Good community engagement enables change in what you do, and should impact on results.
Modal shift from cars to bikes and walking will increase emissions by those modes
Weird and slightly speculative research is always fun. Many advocates of sustainable transport modes always make the point that increasing electric vehicle uptake may increase emissions from the power grid, so seeing research that says more walking and cycling will lead to a ‘non-negligible’ increase in carbon emissions from food amused me greatly.
We estimate that walking and cycling an additional kilometre may result in [Greenhouse Gas] emissions up to 0.26 (95% UI 0.12 to 0.53) and 0.14 kgCO2e/km (95% UI 0.06 to 0.28)), respectively, when additional energy expenditure is fully compensated with increased food intake in the most economically developed countries.
Even the researchers admit their results are highly uncertain, and preliminary. There is also an obvious issue with a direct energy substitute assumption1, notably that most people in developed countries already consume more calories than we burn. And there is nothing here to say that more people walking and cycling is worse than more people driving. But it goes to show that actions can have an equivalent reaction.
Random things
These are some random things that I found while looking around the internet, that you may enjoy:
Google’s Biggest Moonshot Is Its Search for a Carbon-Free Future (Bloomberg)
Decision-Making under Uncertainty (Verfassungsblog)
The horse bit and bridle kicked off ancient empires – a new giant dataset tracks the societal factors that drove military technology (The Conversation)
Downtown Brooklyn’s Greener, Car-Free Future Is Taking Root (CityLab)
A two-step hormone-signalling mechanism that drives physical activity (Nature)
Interesting things
One of my all-time favourite visualisations goes to show that all roads really do lead to Rome. Sadly, the website which hosted this is no more, but what amazes me is how, in our little corner in the UK, many of these roads are still in use today.
If you do nothing else today, do this
Read this excellent article by Centre for Cities on what German reunification can teach the UK about levelling up.
And finally.
Paid subscribers found out this week about how autonomous vehicle policy and legislation across the world is highly variable. Furthermore, they were advised that policy needs to start shifting from improving things for companies, to actually enabling demand to grow.
Put simply, if people are exercising more due to more walking and cycling, the extra calories burned as a result are assumed to be directly replaced by eating more food.
Mobility Matters 