Plus how where you are born in the US affects your life chances

Good day my good friend.

Just a shout out to those of you attending the Local Transport Summit later today. Come and say hi! I would love to chat to you. Anyway, enough social stuff, here are today’s curated links for you. Because I am nice.

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.

What happens to traffic if you build new roads?

It generates more traffic! Induced demand! I hear you all shout. Which is true. But everybody forgets the but at the end of that sentence. And that but is this:

It varies according to the local circumstances.

Recent work by Morten Welde and Eivind Tveter highlighted this in particular, when they assessed the wider local impacts of new roads using 10 case studies. Their conclusions?

The results do not provide a clear answer as to whether road projects are a suitable tool for fulfilling political objectives of improving the local economy. Apart from possibly one exception, none of the projects scored positively on all indicators. We identify several examples of significant negative impacts as a result of road investments…

Recent work in the UK concluded that, as a general rule, new roads do generate induced demand, there is much that we do not know about it. It’s impact on the economy, how that demand is generated, and the quality of the data generated is uncertain. It is worthwhile remembering that behind simplicity there is sometimes complexity and unknowns.

Dropped connection? Your train being busy might be the reason.

You’ve been there before. You are chatting to someone on the phone while sat on the train. If you hate everything that is good in the world and you like to punch puppies in the face, you do this in the Quiet Carriage. Then the signal drops. You may even find that on certain trains that happens more often. Why is that? Of course, the Department for Transport have researched it. Here is what they found.

First, the reasons why the call drops varies a lot. But under the worst case scenarios, people’s bodies on overcrowded trains are likely to attenuate the signal more than the train itself. Although the study also showed that older trains generally tended to disrupt the signal less. I’m filing this under ‘first world problems.’

Unsexy stuff makes or breaks your transport projects, people.

I’m going to scare you: procurement. That’s it, I’ve lost half of you. But a recent post by the excellent Pedestrian Observation blog touches how how a badly run procurement process can essentially break projects before they have a chance to get going. The whole post covers the client and contractor relationship really well, but what interested me was the text on flexibility.

Contracts should permit as much flexibility as practical, to allow contractors to take advantage of circumstances for everyone’s benefits and get around problems. This is especially important for underground construction and for construction in a constrained city, where geotechnical surprises are inevitable.

This touches on an issue that I will call the overspecification cycle. To maintain good client relationships and usually in good faith, contractors ask clients to specify what they mean by a change that they wish to see. This means that in future contracts, that client then overspecifies based on this experience, that results in either a low risk but highly specified solution or a high risk that the solution is completely wrong. There is no hard science behind this, apart from the observation that overspecification is an issue in procurement. Procurement is as much an art as it is a science, but it is one that must be practiced carefully.

Random things

These were found after a highly logical and structured search using many search terms. Do you believe me?

• CouriersPlease uses IoT to keep track of transportation cages (IT News)

• It’s Time to Mobilize for the Good Transportation Projects and Stop the Bad Ones (Transit Center)

• Railway restored: regular trains to run on Dartmoor Line for first time in 50 years (Department for Transport) – as a former local(ish – Barnstaple, actually), in a week of bad rail news in the UK this is very good.

• Vancouver is now completely cut off from the rest of Canada by road (Kelowna Now)

• Air freight is Latin American aviation’s only pandemic winner (Flight Global)

Interesting things

This is the Opportunity Atlas. Click on any neighbourhood in the US, and it shows what your chances are of getting out of poverty. One of the indicators is the percentage of adults who stay in the same commuting zone that they grew up in. Its amazing and sobering.

If you do nothing else today, then do this…

Listen to Gareth Dennis’s Railway Natter on why the Eastern leg of HS2 is the most important part of it.