In short: The Highway Code is changing, transport planning needs to change to take advantage of free data, and public transport can save the NHS a lot of money

Good day my good friend.

A big thank you to you all. As some of you know, for the last couple of weeks we have run adverts to help the Chrisp Street Community Cycles in their fundraiser. Thanks to your help, they raised £12,000, beating their fundraising goal. Well done all you great people! Now, to today’s articles especially curated for you.

James

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The important document that all British road users are meant to know but nobody has read since they passed their driving test is being changed

Today (as I write this), the UK Government has published a summary of responses to its planned changes to The Highway Code. In short, all of the proposed changes, including a hierarchy of road users, it plans to take forward and adopt in a new version of The Highway Code. In particular, 79% of respondents approved of putting pedestrians and cyclists ahead of motorised vehicle users, effectively saying that those with the greatest power, have the greatest responsibility.

Cycling UK have welcomed the move. Whilst it won’t tackle all of cycling’s and walking’s ills in the UK, partially because very few people actually read the thing from my experience, it sets a strong legal principle in place. Now, lets await the first challenge in court to see if it has teeth.

You can do a lot of transport planning with free data and a bit of know-how

Ransford Acheampong and Stephen Asabere undertook what seems like a bog-standard study of the accessibility of urban expansion areas in Ghana. In short, the city centre of the Greater Kusami City-Region is within 30 minutes public transport journey time of just 1% of the built up area, and between 14% and 33% of the built up area is within 5-10 minutes walking time of a stop. That clearly poses some significant policy challenges for land use and transport planning across the city.

All this analysis was done using image data from Landsat, the Openrouteservice, and the Google Maps API. All free to use (within reason), and with just a bit of knowhow you can get some great policy recommendations. There are many tools to do open source transport planning. You just need the skills. Transport Planning Society – might I suggest that data science be a core competency of transport planners in the future?

Better public transport reduces costs for the health service as people don’t miss appointments.

In a case of someone confirming what many of us already knew (but its great to have the data), Smith et al did a study on whether the expansion of public transport in Minneapolis and St Paul resulted in fewer people missing appointments. Their findings were that doing this resulted in fewer people missing their appointments, especially for those on low incomes and in receipt of Medicaid.

I tried to do the maths on this. In the UK, each NHS appointment costs £30. For a public transport scheme costing £50 million, you could recoup over half of the cost of the scheme over its lifetime by enabling people to get to 800,000 appointments. Great news for the public purse, but not captured when we think about how schemes are financed. For shame.

Random things

The lucky dip of articles on the Internet, this is.

• Notes on an Apple car (Ben Evans) – old, but still relevant.

• Fixed transport link between Great Britain and Northern Ireland: technical feasibility (Department for Transport)

• TftN brands Integrated Rail Plan ‘inadequate’ (Construction News)

• Toyota EV Strategy Explained: Affordability Vs. Range (CleanTechnica)

• To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions (Quanta Magazine)

Interesting things

No shock where most of the world’s carbon emissions come from.

If you do nothing else today, do this

Read the MaaS Alliance’s white paper on Interoperability for Mobility, Data Models, and APIs.