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Good day my good friend.
Apparently there is some sort of get-together in Glasgow this week. I think there may be something on the news about it. Anyway, here are some articles curated especially for you.
James
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Measuring groceries took on a whole new meaning
The most important service that the average person will use every week is the grocery store. In the UK, food stores are the most accessible service of all those measured by the Department for Transport in terms of journey times, with the average Brit barely 10 minutes from their nearest store. But how we measure accessibility can have a significant impact on how we see the accessibility of services.
That is why Michał Niedzielski decided to see how different metrics affected the measured accessibility of grocery stores in Warsaw, Poland. The conclusion?
The space-time metric indicates better transit accessibility than the closest facility metric which in turn shows better transit accessibility than cumulative opportunities.
Translation: when you account for a maximum time allowed to shop and get back home (space-time metric), access to food stores by public transport appears better than if you measured it by the closest food store. In turn, this gives a better result for accessibility than if you measured all the food stores within a set travel time. Remember, you are what you measure.
Could flying electric ‘air taxis’ help fix urban transportation?
The short answer is no. The long answer is nooooooooooooooooo, or at least not yet. But that doesn’t stop The Guardian from having a think about it. Electric Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) is still early in its technical and deployment phases, and has numerous practical issues to overcome before it takes on the private car. Although they could directly compete with helicopters through immediate substitution.
There is also another compelling reason why they won’t. They are likely to result in even greater urban sprawl. The Centre for American Progress in a report that largely critiques eVTOLs in 2020 states that…
History demonstrates that the introduction of affordable transportation technologies and supportive infrastructure fuels outward expansion. For instance, the modern era of highway construction began when Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. The resulting highway system not only provided for efficient travel between urban areas but also facilitated an explosion of low-density suburban development.
In the UK we have had similar with Metroland as the London Underground expanded. So if history is anything to go by, if eVTOLs become a thing, more and more sprawl may be on the cards.
Do low traffic neighbourhoods win votes? As always, its complicated.
As explored in more detail in this week’s Mobility Matters Extra, I have been doing a lot of thinking around transport, culture wars, and simply whether voters actually care about changes in their streets. Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow touch upon this in a Guardian blog (ably pointed to me by friend and TPS chair Mark Frost) saying how popular pedestrianisation and cycle lanes after they are installed, and how politicians are getting re-elected as a result.
Any politician and political scientist will tell you the link between action and votes is rarely a straight one. One factor that consistently comes up is trust in the political figure and a wider social trust. People can be inspired by a particular campaign or social setting. Not to mention neighbours. But there is no evidence that indicates that delivering walking and cycling improvements results in re-election. In my (non-expert) view, this is less about livable places making people like politicians more, but more about projects delivered well inspiring confidence in the public at large, increasing the chances of re-election.
Random things
The usual random nonsense picked up from around the Internet, served up for your pleasure.
‘Immediate clarity’ needed on Oxford to Cambridge railway (New Civil Engineer)
The Transport Hierarchy: a new Clean Transport themed report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers published ahead of COP26 (Institution of Mechanical Engineers)
Train or plane? The climate crisis is forcing us to rethink all long-distance travel (The Guardian)
The Great Resignation is Accelerating (The Atlantic)
Will the Supply Chain Crisis Lead to More Onshoring? (Naked Capitalism)
Interesting things
As COP26 is taking place over the coming weeks, lets make things a bit more climate-themed. This map by Climate Central shows areas of South East England that are at risk of being flooded at high tide in a scenario of 2C warming. The one that we are heading for right now. As well as greater damage to London, most of the Isle of Sheppey is lost, as well as Sheerness, Lydd (between Folkestone and Hastings), and everything between The Wash and Peterborough.
If you don’t do anything else today, do this
My good friend Aimee Whitcroft has been busy at work at Waka Kotahi (the New Zealand Transport Agency) drafting up an open data framework for the transport sector. She is requesting feedback, and lots of it, particularly from those of you who are in that neck of the woods. So…get to it!
And finally…
In this week’s Mobility Matters Extra, I touched on the fact that transport is likely to be the next frontier in a wider culture war, and what we as transport professionals need to do about it.
Mobility Matters 