Good day my good friend.

Whooo are you? (Who? Who? Who? Who? I really wanna know) as Roger Daltrey once asked.

To help figure out where to take this newsletter next, I’ve done a bit of analysis you, my dear audience. Turns out, you good people are a varied type. And whilst most of you hail from Old Blighty, turns out you also come from New Zealand (where it seems half of Waka Kotahi is signed up!!), the USA, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Romania, Singapore, and even the Falkland Islands.

So, I guess I must say thank you, Ngā mihi, Kiitos, Bedankt, Vielen Dank, Vă mulțumesc, Terima kasih and any other language I may have missed!

James

EV charging is energy infrastructure, not transport infrastructure

Thank you to Tom Van Vuren for sending this article on new types of charging infrastructure that allow electric vehicles to act as batteries to be rolled out across Australia. And it makes news like this in the US all the more frustrating. Whilst we are trying to roll out more charging points, we are not seeing what electric vehicles could and should be doing.

Achieving a decentralised energy grid is something that we should be striving to achieve through our transport investments. Therefore, when making investments in charging points, we need to be more careful. Consider making choices that don’t just charge electric vehicles, but also have the potential to feed that energy back into the grid when needed. We also need more projects like this one from National Grid and Octopus Energy to trial this approach.

More people riding bikes means more people who walk getting injured and killed

This research article doesn’t so much kick the hornets nest as kick it, rip it open, call it ugly and insult its mother. And it all boils down to measuring collisions between cyclists and pedestrians, specifically those that resulted in people being killed or seriously injured (KSI). Using data from England, researchers have shown that the rate of KSIs (rate per billion vehicle kilometres and per million hours use) has been increasing for collisions between cyclists and pedestrians, and decreasing between cars and pedestrians.

The study re-iterates that that number of pedestrians KSI’d by cyclists is vanishingly low, barely over 1% of all pedestrian KSIs. But the trend is there, and the study calls for segregated cycle infrastructure. I would caveat the study against low annual numbers of pedestrian KSIs from collisions against cyclists making it tricky to state a rate in some years. But the trend has a logic to it.

Bike share reduces the amount of vehicle miles driven by it users. Or does it?

CoMo UK’s latest report into Bike Share in the UK makes a bold claim: that bike share reduces car mileage by an average of 3.7 miles per user per week. Lets get the obvious thing out of the way. The report itself describes this figure as a ‘rough calculation,’ so take the reported figure with a pinch of salt. Other evidence shows the impact on vehicle miles of bike share scheme is highly variable by the context, though bike share does play a role in overcoming barriers to cycling.

This doesn’t mean that bike share is bad, or a poor policy idea. There is also a lot of useful insight in the CoMo report, such as the impact of e-bikes and insight into who uses bike share schemes. But as with all policy ideas, we need to focus on what works. And the evidence of the case for bike share is not quite as compelling as many proponents make it out to be. Though on this, I am willing to be proven wrong.

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.

• Architects call for mass insulation of England’s interwar suburbs (The Guardian)

• The Cities That Battle Winter With Beets (Bloomberg CityLab)

• What Old Mental Maps Reveal About Competition Today (War on the Rocks1)

• EV ads dominated the Super Bowl, but don’t expect to buy one anytime soon (The Verge)

• Why Trucking Can’t Deliver the Goods (The American Prospect)

Something interesting

Anyone else wondering why you try and change your behaviour?

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Explore this map showing air quality outside schools in Madrid and Barcelona (the article is in Spanish).