The usual randomness to end the week

Good day my good friend.

My evening was both inspiring and depressing. Listening to young people talking about how they are inspired to take action on climate change: inspiring. Listening to local politicians talking at length and saying nothing when asked by said young people what they are doing: depressing. At times like this, I look to the teachings of Master Yoda:

“Do, or do not. There is no try.”

Here are your articles.

James

Park and rides – if you do want to build them, where do you build them?

Park and ride sites are one of those transport issues that seems to get some professionals riled up in an almost unreasonable degree. Let’s make this clear, they don’t reduce traffic levels. They can be popular for certain age groups and driving demographics, as well as even abstracting trips from cycling.

Some interesting research in France took on a slightly different angle. How do you locate sites to minimise the impact of traffic disruption? And they developed a model to calculate this, and identify a series of sites in Lyon for on-demand park and ride. Sites are usually based on distance criteria, but newer research is showing that basing sites on delays on the network and the location of population points also has promise.

New research from the Department for Transport explores an under-appreciated problem in business case development: that yours is fundamentally based on those of others

This is research so obvious, that I wonder why it has not been done before. If you are building a scheme, it will be affected by other things you (and others) are building. So its important you understand the relationships between them. As well as this research showing that this is a thing, and something that is not often thought of when developing schemes, but it recommends an approach to dealing with it:

Step 1 – Assessment of interdependencies;

Step 2 – Modelling the benefits;

Step 3 – Apportionment of net benefit;

Step 4 – Scheme costs and net benefit metrics;

Step 5 – Assessment of likelihood of net interdependency benefits; and

Step 6 – Reporting and value for money conclusion criteria

This is not the first time that this has been thought about, and recommendations on practice have been made. Risk management does this well. So if we are being encouraged to think in systems, we should now start assessing in systems as well. This research could be the first step towards this.

Random things

These links are meant to make you think about the things that affect our world in transport, and not just think about transport itself. I hope they do just that.

• How to succeed at failure (The Atlantic)

• Do smart supermarkets herald the end of shopping as we know it? (The Observer)

• The problem with p-values (Aeon)

• Europe rolled out 5G without hurting aviation. Here’s how (CNN)

• Trains intended for unbuilt Milwaukee-Madison high-speed rail line going to Nigeria (Wisconsin Public Radio)

Something interesting

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read this Urban Transport Group report on decarbonising freight in city regions.