Good day my good friend.

Before Christmas, the UK Department for Transport stated that local authorities will know their Bus Service Improvement Plan allocations by ‘the end of February.’ Yesterday, there was a big announcement. The COVID recovery funding for buses was continuing for another 6 months. Good news for buses, but not the news local authorities need, sadly. Public transport in the UK continues on life support.

If you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include in this newsletter, you can email me.

James

COVID-19 has reduced our mental travel horizons as well as our actual travel horizons

In my own work with bus operators over the last year, one comment has always stuck with me. How elderly concessionary bus pass holders are not coming back to buses. I have yet to see some actual evidence of this, with national evidence showing changes in concessionary travel broadly reflecting the trends for all trips. But what if it were true? And has COVID-19 affected our propensity to travel at all?

Research from China is indicating that it might be. But it goes one stage further. Not only did it show that COVID restrictions had an impact on people’s perceived accessibility of key services, but that in turn had impacts on the mental health of families. The final paragraph is particularly devastating:

Disadvantaged people experienced mental health issues due to accessibility loss for daily necessities and social activities until the lifting of compulsory QR-code-for-buses, whilst better-off populations had better mental health during the early phase of the outbreak and rapidly recovered their mental health after mobility restrictions eased.

Don’t just consider better data. Consider relevant and useful data for early indicators (it is different to better data)

I highly recommend that you read this post on Economics that really matters that asks an important question: can better data lead to better decisions? This is within the idea of developing resilience and capacity to deal with shocks (somewhat topical). But it is useful in that it touches on something we rarely think of: data as early indicators.

We often consider data collection in terms of assessing impact or dealing with an operational matter. Something is happening, we do something, we judge its impact. But a key part of learning from our data is identifying early warning indicators that something could be happening, and learning from it to make better decisions next time. This work utilised high frequency data, and studied for patterns that may indicate change is happening. I wonder if any of you have done this is part of transport strategy work?

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.

• Consumer watchdog fires warning shot to lenders over abusive auto repos as used-car prices soar (Market Watch)

• Introducing Checks: simplifying privacy for app developers (Google) – Privacy as a service?

• Jobfished: the con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency (BBC)

• The Youth Movement trying to revolutionise climate politics (New Yorker)

• Here Comes the Full Amazonification of Whole Foods (New York Times)

Something interesting

How to demonstrate the case for good public transport and cycling networks in a single tweet.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read this report on the future of e-scooters in the UK by the Urban Transport Group.