I also have an ask of you…

Good day my good friend.

It’s not often I do this, but today I start off with something different. Some years ago, I created the Future Mobility Scenario Game to encourage people to ‘experience’ the future of mobility as they make plans for it. Well, I’ve been busy creating a new version that you can play online with your team through a facilitated session. Think of it as part strategy, part role-playing.

What I do need, though, is teams to help me test it. So if you are creating a new transport strategy for your city, and you want to experience the scenarios you are creating to get some insight into how they will play out, then drop me a line.

Anyway, to today’s articles.

James

Active Travel England launches, and the jury is watching

The big news announced on Saturday was that Active Travel England, the UK Government’s walking and cycling body for England, was launched. Olympic Gold Medallist Chris Boardman is at the helm of it after all of his excellent work in delivering the Bee Network in Manchester. The idea behind the body is to raise the standard of walking and cycling infrastructure across England so that its in line with Gear Change.

The previous version, Cycling England, was abolished in the ‘bonfire of the quangos.’ I worked with them frequently when working on the Leighton-Linslade Cycle Demonstration Town. The only word of advice I have is this: the body needs to have teeth to be effective. Being nice and sharing practice gets you some of the way, but occasionally you need to whack things with a stick to get stuff done. I wish them the best of luck.

Efficiency in privatisation is not always certain. Just ask the Japanese.

I often observe the ongoing debates in the UK about private ownership of the railways with a wry smile. For one very good reason. The best railway in the world, by almost any metric, is privately owned – the Japanese railway. They are not so much railway companies as property development firms that run trains. But as recently as 1987 they were publicly run, and they were privatised in the name of achieving efficiencies.

A new research article that majors in something that I find incredibly interesting (institutional factors that influence successful delivery of transport operations and services), and shows that finding efficiencies in transport is extremely complex. I will leave the abstract to summarise it best:

The results reveal improvement in cost efficiency remains a vital issue for all six [railway] companies, and increasing trend of efficiency measures on operations is observed after the privatization. Mainland companies with an advantageous business environment do not necessarily have higher efficiency, holding more room for improvement. Further, we found that higher cost efficiency for some companies may be derived from a shrinking equilibrium in management based on a potential decline in demand, but such a passive operation could hinder managerial efforts to escape dependence on subsidy.

The effects of the pandemic on metro ridership in US cities varies by ethnic mix and employment area

If you don’t follow his work already, you should follow Yonah Freemark. The guy has been hitting transport data analysis out of the park for years, and this article on variations in transit ridership by neighbourhood characteristics really hits the mark. What does his data analysis say? Some things that seem logical, some things that are obvious, and all of it engaging.

In summary, if your transit station was in an employment area, COVID hit ridership bad. It was the same if the stop was in a high income area. But, in neighbourhoods with lower income jobs and fewer white residents, ridership held up better. What this shows I am not 100% without a well-researched causal link, although Yonah states in the article that the reliance of these communities on transit may play a role in this. Regardless, judge the data for yourself.

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.

• Can a Neural Network Ace an MIT Math Exam? (Cantor’s Paradise)

• Street’s ahead? What I’ve learned from my year with an electric car (The Observer)

• A New Model for Ethical Leadership (Harvard Business Review)

• The System that Drives our World (The Tyee)

• Web daddy Tim Berners-Lee on privacy, data sharing, and the web’s future (The Register)

Something interesting

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read this article on how communications infrastructure has helped to reduce volatility in food prices.