You should read the article I link to in the opening paragraphs.
Good day my good friend.
This week, the post that I usually write for paid subscribers I have made available for you all, for free. The reason being that I think it touches on something important in the context of COP26 – how low carbon transport and those of us who advocate for it is rubbish at the political game it must play.
Of course, you as a paid subscriber have already seen this article yesterday. But that was then. Now, feast upon the articles carefully curated just for you.
James
Thank you for being a paid subscriber. Remember to check out this week’s in-depth article on how low carbon transport is bad at the politics game.
The UK’s rail problem isn’t privatisation. It’s how far we took seperating track from train.
Now this is the sort of thing where I can get my nerd on! Some recent work by John Allen and Gregory Newmark has developed different types of classification for access protocols for roadroad infrastructure. The second sentence of which puts the debates about rail privatisation in their place:
This paper views the conversation about access to rail infrastructure as an institutional matter substantially independent from economic debates regarding rail organization.
Translation: the economic rationale for rail organisation matters less than how that organisation works. In Europe, whilst it has been somewhat amended, 91/440/EEC set the standard for seperating track from train across the continent. It was intended to create on-rail competition by opening up infrastructure use to anyone who met minimum service standards (hence why the British government of John Major supported it). The reality is that everyone interpreted it differently, from privatising it (the British) to a token effort (the French). The thing is, in the UK, we didn’t so much privatise as smash the whole organisation to bits, taking 20+ years to recover. The natural conclusion of which is Great British Railways.
The morality of who driverless cars should kill is as complex as our morality, because our morality is complex
The Moral Machine is one of the more interesting crowd sourcing activities undertaken in transport in the last 10 years. It poses a simple question: kill the granny or the kid? Kill the dogs or kill the driver? Hard ethical choices boiled down to a binary choice. But, as a new paper by Sebastian Krügel and Matthias Uhl states, ethics are more complex than a choice between who dies or not. In their experiments, they pose an additional question: should we balance collision probability and collision severity in making such a choice?
It turns out, people consider the outcome as a product of the two. Accordingly, autonomous cars should make judgements based upon both the likelihood and a severity of an incident occurring. That is an extremely complex and subjective judgement to make, but it is one that the authors argue that needs consideration. Good luck trying to code that sort of judgement, Google.
Financing the future is not just about the public sector
Us transport professionals know public sector financing. Its where a lot of the money for what we do comes from, after all. But the private sector has a massive roll, and could be the major enabler of low carbon travel adoption. Recently, a brilliant report by the Green Finance Institute identified a series of private sector initiatives to trial in order to stimulate electric vehicle uptake. This includes 0% vehicle loans for EVs, a guaranteed end of life value for batteries, and a salary sacrifice scheme.
That’s not all. Recent analysis by PwC has shown that investment in climate tech solutions (including transport) is growing 5 times faster than other investment. COP26 itself proposed the role that private finance should take in achieving Net Zero be a simple one: every financial investment decision must take Net Zero into account. Finance is distinctly unsexy, but remember the old journalists phrase: follow the money. For the money leads to the future.
Random things
The usual random things for your interest:
Without Coal, What Happens to Cement, Steel, Iron — and Asia’s Path to Development? (The Diplomat)
Meet London’s New 300-Mile Range Electric Double Decker Bus (CarBuzz)
Japan’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy (BBN Times)
Green housing schemes have nowhere to park your car (The Sunday Times)
Trial to use cleaner aviation fuel in Singapore to begin in 2022 (The Straits Times)
Interesting things
Disappointed about COP26? So am I, but reading this series of tweets by Roger Pielke Jr puts the achievements of Glasgow into context. For me, it also really highlights where power to do things lies.
If you do nothing else today, do this…
Take part in Steve Melia’s rapid review of transport futures.
Mobility Matters 