With some nice trails for a few beers on the train

Good day my good friend.

Mainly because I haven’t had the chance to digest the plan yet, I won’t be commenting on the Integrated Rail Plan yet. But I will say this. Yesterday I took this Thameslink train. A nice, new train plying the line between Bedford and Brighton. To get this train, the Department for Transport battled to get financing for 3 solid years. negotiating with banks and the Treasury to get the new trains over the line.

It also had a worse business case than the now-cancelled Northern Powerhouse Rail. Here are today’s stories, just for you.

James

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The research behind the headline is always more interesting – mobile phone use edition

The UK Government has announced that it has tightened laws on the use of mobile phones whilst at the wheel. Then you dig into the actual changes, and its just about clarifying for the police that they can prosecute people taking photos and playing games at the wheel. Important, but not quite as exciting. But what is interesting is the research behind this change.

The results of surveys were a mixture of depressing, interesting, and enlightening. A sizable minority admitted to breaking the law, with the most popular reasons being:

• making or receiving calls (27%), reading messages (26%), or searching for music (24%), while in motion, and

• reading a message (34%), making or receiving calls (29%), searching for music (25%), or typing a message (23%) while stationary.

But at least people recognise that it is bad:

Despite this, handheld mobile phone use while driving or riding is generally seen as unacceptable in any situation, even among those admitting to these types of behaviour and for most younger drivers too. A majority of at least seven in ten said they were either unlikely or certain not to use their phone handheld in a range of different scenarios presented to them while driving alone, rising to at least eight in ten in scenarios where passengers are present.

Flooding isn’t about whether or not you close roads

The recent flooding around Vancouver has had a lot of people thinking about climate change and it’s impacts on our society, and how we should accelerate work to decarbonise transport. Thinking more pragmatically, a lot of warming is already locked in, which means that infrastructure will be more affected by flooding in the future. And dealing with it is more complex than we think.

I refer to a journal article from a few years ago about how flooding is more complex in terms of its impacts than we thing. Whereas our current choices are seen as binary (close the road or not), this research adds the question of “what is the impact of puddles and how deep they are?” They found a relationship between the depth of the standing water and vehicle speed. That complexity affects how we manage roads during disruption.

If you want to know about power dynamics, follow the money

This is slowly starting to become a bug bear of mine. Investing in transport is not about how many billions you put in from the public sector. It’s about how that investment levarages private sector investment. This excellent article in City Monitor poses this exact question regarding President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill. $1 trillion is great, but it needs to leverage private sector investment to be truly successful.

If you wanted a quick primer on this from an infrastructure perspective, this review by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority is as good as start as any. So think about how your plans can leverage the funding of others.

Random things

Today’s links. The usual.

• Public debt and debt servicing costs: The nightmare than never was (New Economics Foundation)

• Delay to liveable neighbourhoods strategy triggers ‘massive alarm bells’ (Bristol Post)

• Airline industry union leaders call for no-fly list for unruly passengers (The Hill)

• Transport in Leeds: A history of HS2 and city’s doomed mass transit plans such as Supertram (Yorkshire Evening Post)

• Number of Maritime Passenger Transport Almost Halved in 2020 Compared to 2019, Eurostat Report Shows (Schengenvisainfo)

Interesting things

This infographic shows the impact of hospital closures on rural areas in the USA. Clue: its not good.

If you do nothing else today, do this…

Inspired by chats in the pub at the Local Transport Summit, plan yourself a trip on a rail ale trail in Devon and Cornwall.