Good day my good friend.

In the last couple of days, the UK Government has bailed out public transport operators to the tune of £350 million for the next 6 months. Which is essential spend, as public transport services need to keep on running in order to achieve a number of social and environmental goals. But is this just kicking the can even further down the road? One can only imagine that HM Treasury’s patience will only last so long. So again, we must ask – where is the exit strategy here?

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

James

Traffic is good for electric vehicles

I really wish that this article was open access, as it is rare that I see a research article where its findings could really be a game-changer in how we think about policy initiatives, let alone change how we deliver. Researchers looked at the energy consumption impacts of electric vehicles and fossil fuel cars under different traffic scenarios. Simply put, EVs perform far better in congested conditions, while the internal combustion engine performs better at higher speeds. But this line sticks out for me:

Traffic speed restriction in urban networks can further improve BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles) consumption, while speed increase would improve ICEVs (Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles).

Simply, but reducing traffic speeds in urban areas. we improve the energy consumption advantage of electric vehicles. I don’t know if this is down to the engine performance, or the use of manual versus automatic gearboxes (translate, less revving at lower speeds with automatic gearboxes, that are almost universal in electric vehicles). But this made my jaw drop. Lowering traffic speeds potentially tackles climate change in more ways than just increasing walking and cycling.

Methods of collecting data that understand how we use time are getting better and more nuanced

How we use our time, and how we value it, is pretty important for anyone who has worked on a business case in transport. But aside from activity diaries and interviews, collecting data on how time is used is hard, and fraught with issues. But a new NBER working paper has explored new methods for collecting this data in the context of rural areas in the developing world, that us transport professionals could apply for our own means.

As this summary blog by the World Bank sets out, the approach is simple. Rather than using pre-determined definitions of what is ‘income generating’ time, interviewers discussed with participants (in this case women) their activities, and used stylized time use categories to allocate their use of time in a non-technical way. The result was results that are very close to the current gold standard method of doing this work. Maybe we could adapt this method to household travel surveys?

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.

• ‘Major Step Forward’: AIG to Stop Insuring Coal, Tar Sands, and Arctic Drilling (Common Dreams)

• Exercise Can Build Up Your Brain. Air Pollution May Negate Those Benefits (New York Times)

• Talking Headways Podcast: Planning for Underground Cities (Streetsblog)

• Killer Truck, Dude (Slate)

• Elon Musk’s Starlink arrives in Ukraine but what next? (BBC)

Something interesting

If you are a policy maker wondering what you should be doing to tackle climate change, this one figure tells you it all.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Explore SUMC’s Micromobility Policy Atlas.