Mobility Matters Daily #263 – Grocery apps, saving rights of way, and localisation

Good day my good friend.

It’s the end of the week, and it seems that much of the UK transport network is shutting down ahead of a major storm hitting on Friday. Let us hope that fellow transport colleagues out in the weather are kept safe.

As always, if you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include, email me.

James

Thank you for reading Mobility Matters. This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Grocery App War in the Netherlands is hotting up

Somebody has managed to annoy the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. So much so that both cities are now looking to ban 15 minute delivery services. The simple logic is this. In order to satisfy the insanely short delivery times, these apps need to take up floor space in communities. Not only does this result in more local deliveries, but ‘dark stores’ can take up valuable retail real estate.

Notwithstanding the fact that the economics of deliveries, despite the big talk, really sucks, this matter speaks to how we want to develop cities. On the one hand, many people really like fast food delivery, and unused retail floorspace in cities is a waste. But on the other, could that floorspace be put to more people-friendly use? This is another case of reactionary regulation, sadly. A new idea comes along, and people ban it before trying to understand it, and then regulate effectively.

Could this one decision save rural rights of way in England?

A wonderful thing about living in the UK is that we have an extensive public rights of way network. It is written in law that on these mapped ancient rights of way every person has a legal right of access. This was expanded in 2000 with the Countryside and Rights of Way Act to give a general right to roam in many areas (this has also been expanded further in some other regions of the UK), with a catch. The deadline for registering new paths to grant this right of access was fixed to 2026.

Tom Scott did an excellent video on just this issue, but this has now changed. The Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs is set to scrap the deadline. These rights of way are an important part of the rural transport network, and so this is very much welcome news. If we are looking to develop walking and cycling infrastructure, lets start by preserving what we have already.

A finger sign saying public footpath in a rural area

How do you measure the degree of localisation in an economy?

If we assume that some transport is a demand derived of economic activity, like most of freight transport, or transport for work purposes, it makes sense that for local trips (the most numerous) we would want to measure local economic activity. But disaggregated data on economic performance and activity is quite hard to come by, even in the UK. Unless you are looking at jobs and the number of benefit claimants.

A working paper by the Asian Development Bank proposes an interesting proxy: an agglomeration index. The idea being that the degree to which local economies get agglomoration benefits is a useful indicator of local economic outcomes. An interesting finding from this research indicates that strong domestic linkages enables local economies to more effectively participate in global economies, or value chains. Could this mean stronger domestic connections can help to drive stronger international connections too?

This may indicate that economy sectors with high backward or forward agglomeration are able to channel gains from GVC (Global Value Chain) participation due to its strong domestic linkages, which in turn create incentives for GVC participation.

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 The Pandemic Is Changing Our Bodies (Buzzfeed News)
City trees and soil are sucking more carbon out of the atmosphere than previously thought (Phys.org)
Saudi Arabia: 28,000 apply for 30 female train drivers’ posts (Al Jazeera)
Climate NGO says EU policy is driving shipowners’ use of polluting fuels (The Load Star)
Cycling charity launches ambitious plan to boost UK-wide path network (The Guardian)

Something interesting

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Check out this visual posted by James Carter on LinkedIn about the carbon intensity of electricity consumption across different regions in the last 10 days.