In short: we have a lack of evidence of the equity impacts, and transport policy is shifting in the Netherlands

Good day my good friend.

The to-do list is less than 100. Christmas is in sight. Here are your links for today, just for you.

James

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Delays on public transport are an equity issue

This great article by Michelle Levine touches on a matter that I have considered for a while, but have yet to see the data to back it up. Delays to public transport are a significant equity issue. If the data we have indicates that those on low incomes, from ethnic minority groups, and women are more likely to use public transport, and that a significant proportion of both buses and trains are late, that surely has an equity consequence?

Klumpenhouwer et al recently touched upon this issue in creating an equity and transit dashboard, while there has also been some work to analyse the impacts of subway shutdowns on buses in more deprived areas of Toronto, there has not been much of an exploration of this matter. Perhaps if one of you is looking for a PhD topic, this is it?

Changing planning paradigms so that they are less transport-orientated is a challenge everywhere. Turns out, changing cities is hard.

There has been a significant interest recently in developing, and delivering, place-based solutions to reduce carbon emissions, and ultimately reduce the amount of car trips on local highway networks. This is currently an area demonstrating promise and flickers of evidence that such an approach could make a significant difference. Fortunately, the Dutch are ahead of many countries, and their experience provides a useful case study into how this could work.

Akse et al present research on how different Dutch municipalities have delivered mobility planning and access planning. With evidence being presented that, slowly, Dutch municipalities are shifting to the access planning approach, but this approach has been faster in the cities compared to regional municipalities.

Random things

The usual stuff from across the Internet.

• The Romance of Shipping Containers (Naked Capitalism)

• Where is Standard of Living the Highest? Local Prices and the Geography of Consumption (NBER)

• How the Pandemic Changed the Terms of Investment (Bloomberg)

• From the Field: ‘climate-smart’ development in an uncertain world (UN)

• How Successive Bengal Governments Killed Kolkata’s Trams (The Wire)

Interesting things

After a couple months of sweating the assets, it appears the ship have cleared the port in LA.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read this article by Eurostat, where they have estimated quarterly carbon dioxide emissions in the EU by source, including transport.