In summary: Transport for the North did good, lets make congestion costs more personal, and public transport gentrifies – so what do we do about it?

Good day my good friend.

Oh, Milton Keynes. I not quite sure that you get this green thing. It’s more than just biodiversity. I did have to chuckle a little bit, I’m sorry. Anyway, here are today’s links just for you.

James

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After years of climate change plans and targets, the North gets a climate change plan. But it may actually do something.

Here’s an unwritten rule of transport strategies: If you want to know what an organisation hopes to achieve, read a strategy from the front, but if you want to know whether the organisation will let it achieve it, read it from the back. Transport for the North just produced a regional decarbonisation plan for transport. It can’t do much nowadays, but reading from the back, I am confident it will do some good work on this.

What their plan does brilliantly is enable others to focus on actually doing work. Setting assurance frameworks, providing capacity to go for funding and lobby government, doing research, building tools. Unsexy stuff that matters and is a pain to anyone trying to do projects, but when done well adds value to most projects. Great strategies think about how the organisation will deliver them, and this one does that in spades.

We should start discussing the costs of not instigating road user charging

A recent Centre for Cities article about the Workplace Parking Levy not being delivered in Bristol prompted me to think about how we frame the debate on road user charging. The Centre for Cities states that Bristol City Council has effectively forgone £96 million in revenue by not instigating it, as well as all of the other benefits that have been experienced by Nottingham.

We understand the economic cost of congestion. We even understand the economic benefits and costs of measures to reduce congestion like road user charging. But we cannot (or maybe will not) estimate the costs and benefits to individuals of road user charging, and state this to them. Saying that it will save the economy £10bn a year is abstract. Saying to someone that they could save hundreds every year by there being less traffic is not.

Public transport investment gentrifies areas, so we have to ask a difficult question: is that a good thing?

New evidence from Hong Kong has revealed that where the development of new public transport links, in this case rail, gentrification of areas often occurs in terms of higher educated people moving in, and people on low incomes move out. This is not the first time that this issue has been observed either. So we face a tricky choice; how can we invest in low carbon solutions (public transport) whilst not enabling socially unjust outcomes (gentrification)?

I don’t have the answer, and no amount of listening and understanding communities can stop richer people buying new homes and relocating because of a new rail line intended to serve disadvantaged communities. Transport investment needs to be seen in a context of wider social policy and a range of measures to help disadvantaged communities without displacing them. The authors of the article recommend placing a requirement on the MTR (the public transport company) to build low-income housing when expanding rail lines. This has merit. What may have more merit is a place-based approach to development.

Random things

The usual sleuthing across the internet has turned up the following goodies.

• Why US Infrastructure Costs So Much (Bloomberg) – remove US and insert the name of any other country. Rinse and repeat.

• Why Electric Vehicles are not a Climate Change Silver Bullet (Institute for Transportation and Development)

• How Can Local Leaders Use Data to Promote Equity? (Urban Wire)

• Environmental group asks court to overturn NZTA’s $24 billion transport plan (Stuff)

• Smarter Cambridge Transport is retiring (Smarter Transport Cambridge) – It’s sad to see you go, Edward 😦

Interesting things

I’ve been playing around with the latest dataset on driving tests in the UK, just for fun more than anything. There is an overall trend of reducing the number of people taking driving tests. Though I think this is more a case of the start and end points playing games with the trend line.

If you don’t do anything else today, do this

Read this article on why taking penalties under pressure is so tough. Not because you may or may not be interested in football, but because it shows the psychology in working under pressure. As we all are.