Turns out, if you encourage modal shift and like other people more, the results are good!

Good day my good friend.

Short and sweet today’s newsletter. So I hope that you enjoy it.

James

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E-bikes have potential to significantly reduce carbon emissions. Nobody shocked.

Ian Phillips, Jillian Anable, and Tim Chatterton have written a paper1 that assesses the potential of e-bikes to reduce transport emissions. The potential changes are significant, with the analysis finding that the greatest potential for savings can be found in more rural areas, whilst noting that:

Though capable of a very significant contribution to transport carbon reduction, other changes in technology and reduction in demand would also be necessary to reach zero emissions.

This is an excellent peice of work, and I look forward to digging through the code at some point. But in the abstract, those above words struck with me. E-bikes hold a lot of promise, and they are outselling electric cars. But they can’t save the world by themselves. Maybe (and whisper it) we should put in more bike lanes?

In even more not shocking news, people who don’t like other people drive like idiots

Yan Ge et al ran an interesting experiment. Using an Implicit Association Test (in short: it is meant to reveal your own biases and attitudes), they sought to understand whether people who they classified as pro-social (they generally tend to be ulturistic) drive differently under a high-pressure and time-sensitive situation compared to those who are less pro-social. You can probably guess the results, really.

The results showed that high prosocial attitudes lead to friendly interactions with pedestrians and careful driving in specific situations, even under time pressure.

This is the first research of its kind that I have seen, and it makes for an interesting policy conundrum. If some people are just implicitly less pro-social and are more likely to drive dangerously as a result, how do you reach them? This study does have its flaws, notably its limited size, but notably more work is needed to make this insight practically applicable.

Random things

The usual random things from the Internet.

• Your Brain Is an Energy-Efficient ‘Prediction Machine’ (Wired)

• Union Connectivity Review – Current proposals to deal with M4 congestion (New Civil Engineer)

• Being in a building (Aeon)

• Decarbonisation of transport in Malta (Times Malta)

• Electric vehicles won’t save us — we need to get rid of cars completely (Newsnation)

Interesting things

This graph gives a very good summary of why it is a challenge to encourage more people to use public transport.

If you do nothing else today, do this

Have a look at the outcomes of the Union Connectivity Review. Very much an Eddington Report feel about this.