[Insert witty subtitle here]

Good day my good friend.

Few words to say today. It’s not you, it’s me, don’t worry. News…

James

Value for money as a framework for delivery is under-developed, and must be seen outside of purely money

When someone complains about frameworks for assessing value for money, their points can usually be distilled into a single sentence: “Its not doing what I want.” Value for money is not a process for making an investment decision, but a process of learning as well. This is actually something that transport has some best practice in, but the actual practice is usually poor.

A new framework proposes to shift this by integrating experience across the lifecycle of projects into procurement exercises and their assessment of value for money. It sounds a boring as anything, but this sort of framework needs to be rolled out if we are to learn anything and procure better transport projects from experience.

How to empower communities when power is centralised

The UK has a highly decentralised transport decision making system. Just last week, the Planning Committee I sat on had to consider a stopping up order for a small parcel of highway on a verge, an order that can only be made by the Department for Transport. So when power is so centralised, what are the mechanisms (outside of legal and pure good will) to truly empower local people?

New research into this dynamic between city and national government’s moves outside the legal elements and discussing best practice, and into the culture that a centralised system creates. I like this research because its fundamental conclusion is that some authorities push it and be a pain to see what they can get away with, while others do what they are told. It’s like children really, which is a very apt metaphor.

Stop the theory about the commercial viability of Mobility-as-a-Service. Start proving it

Yet more research into the flaming obvious. A research article was recently published saying how developing Mobility-as-a-Service using a purely commercial model may be a bit tricky, and may require legislation. Several years on from the peak of MaaS hype, and the commercial viability of the offering is still uncertain. There are lots of people doing amazing work to make this so. But the academic work is still stuck in theory.

This is not a bad place for MaaS to be, to be fair. Any new offering will take years to prove itself and to demonstrate viability as either a service or a technology. But when research is published that says the same thing as a lot of other people, it does get boring after a while. Sorry.

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.

• Schedule Reliability Dropped to Record Low at the End of 2021 (Maritime Executive)

• Please make a dumb car (TechCrunch)

• Lakshmi Mittal transformed steelmaking. Can his son do it again? (The Economist)

• An Anatomy of Bitcoin Price Manipulation (Single Lunch)

• The hidden $1 trillion: Halting waste in public procurement (Voices)

Something interesting

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Check out the Eltis Urban Mobility Observatory. This should be on every transport policy makers list of essential websites.