A bit of a mixed bag, this one.

Good day my good friend.

Short and sweet today. Let’s get to the articles…

James

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Manage port rivers in the same way that you manage, well, rivers.

Some of the engineers among you are probably aware of the concepts of managing river catchments. But I bet few of you had ever thought about how, on the major rivers, we best manage the inland port infrastructure for a wider social benefit. And this is important. In Europe in 2020, 132bn tonne kilometres of freight was moved by inland waterway, with the Rhine and Danube rivers being particularly important.

Recent work by Li et al1 challenges the traditional approach of inland port management (rival ports competing). By looking at factors such as waterway depth, port congestion, and port competition, they propose a framework that is a more co-ordinated approach to managing shipping traffic across the system. They particularly note a common issue that many of you are all too aware of: ports tend to build far too much in way of capacity.

COVID-19 has fundamentally challenged how risk is managed in logistics systems

It’s fair to say that COVID-19 has done a number on global supply chains. The efficiencies gained through decades of work were blindsided by a virus that shut down everything, leaving a system with minimal slack by design horribly exposed. Nassim Taleb would call this a lesson in being antifragile. But it seems the logistics sector has had its understanding of risk fundamentally challenged.

In a wide-ranging editorial, Tsan-Ming Choi highlighted the various ways at which analysis of risk in supply chains is being challenged. This includes the application of systems thinking to risk analysis, incorporation of new economic theories, and social welfare factors. This is an extremely geeky debate (which I love), but the important part is how risk management is moving from operational risk management to system risk management. That change in thinking will happen after your system is rocked to its core.

A core idea on behaviour change is being rocked to its foundations. This could be important for how we encourage people to change travel behaviours.

For disciples of the nudge theory of behaviour change, the idea of loss aversion is an important consideration when developing policy tools and ideas. This is the idea that, when people are assessing gains and losses from a decision, the losses loom larger and so people look to minimise them first. For example, when comparing a train fare of £100 rising 10% (to £110) or falling 10% (to £90), even though the difference is the same (£10), the £10 increase will have a bigger impact on demand than a £10 decrease. Because people want to minimise their losses.

This is now being challenged, and quite fundamentally. Undark has an article that goes into this debate in more detail. The challenge is quite simple: the empirical evidence points to other factors that could explain why people take risk-averse decisions. A big problem behind this is that loss aversion is very difficult to prove as an idea in a study. Which then leads me to ask whether our behaviour change programmes in transport, partly influenced by nudge, could in fact be based on little more than a gut instinct.

Random things

My daily scour of the internet for your reading pleasure.

• Is the Four-Day Workweek Finally Within Our Grasp? (New York Times)

• Do you use predictive text? Chances are it’s not saving you time – and could even be slowing you down (The Conversation).

• West Midlands agrees transport innovation deal with Malaysia (Insider Media)

• The Pigeon Puzzle: How Do They Figure Out Their Impossibly Long Routes Home? (The Walrus2)

• UN Policy Brief: H2 Technologies to Contribute to Carbon Neutrality (Energy Industry Review)

Interesting things

You will have seen this before: the Mercator projection of the world. What you may not know is that it has fundamentally messed up how you view the size of countries across the world. As this article in Visual Capitalist explains.

If you do nothing else today, do this…

I’m writing a book! Well, with the help of the always-excellent Beate Kubitz. The Institution of Engineering and Technology have commissioned us to write a book on the history and current practice of Mobility as a Service. We’re looking for case studies for our book – from the many stages of Mobility as a Service. We need YOUR help. If you have an example, please complete our case study template.