Down with this sort of thing

Good day my good friend.

I’ve been writing a lot less words recently. Partly because of time, but partly because there is not much to say. So we’ll get straight to the news.

James

Politics, protest, and transport policy

A news article from the Oxford Mail about an Extinction Rebellion protest against the UK government’s road building plans got me thinking about an age-old problem. What is the relationship between politics and transport? There has been a lot of study of this relationship, with a common conclusion being that ‘its important, but complicated.’ I recommend Steve Melia’s book on just this as a good start for you to explore this issue.

It is important to make a distinction between protest (a political act) and the act of politics itself. From my limited career, I have learned of a few truisms about it. The most important is this: you get no prizes for coming second. That is something that every one of us interested in how this dynamic works must wrestle with. How can we change the one thing that changes transport so much if we must do what it takes to win first, above all else?

Coming to a city near you soon – the one minute city

It seems our transport horizons are getting ever smaller, but this idea called Street Moves from Sweden is actually quite clever. Rather than a pure city planning tool like the 15 minute city, the ‘One Minute City’ is more a process of community engagement and co-design. The idea is simple – get people to co-design their own streets.

This has already been applied experimentally to 4 sites in Stockholm, with the view to roll out across the country over the coming years. How this will interface with more strategic connectivity will be interesting, but lets see the outcomes of the first trials before we judge how much of an impact this could have.

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.

• Photos Of London In The 1980s Show A Very Different City (Londonist)

• What climate change means for the future of coffee and other popular foods (National Geographic)

• Bipartisan Bill seeks to stop warrantless car spying by police (The Intercept)

• Deep physical neural networks trained with backpropagation (Nature)

• The moral calculations of a billionaire (The Washington Post)

Something interesting

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Review the data on Resource Watch, which – in its own words – monitors the planets pulse.