Good day my good friend.

All hail the Bus Services Act 2017. Read the judgement first, obviously. But as someone who has had first-hand experience of how broken the UK bus network is, this is very good news.

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

James

We rarely consider migration as movement. Perhaps it is time we did.We rarely consider migration as movement. Perhaps it is time we did.

I have never seen on a travel survey, even at an airport, ‘migration’ being a journey purpose. Or people simply moving from one place to another to take up residence. Maybe its exceedingly rare. Yet migration significantly affects the demographic profile of areas, and the transport networks that we look to establish in these areas.

Some insights into movement between cities in Columbia does, however, show the extent of the movement.

Results show that the majority of people do not move in general, and nearly three out of four times that a person moves at least twice, they return to a previous city. A small group exhibits frequent migration, particularly the young and male. In contrast, women and mature people are less likely to move and more likely to return if they move.

Data has also been released for internal migration in the UK. Maybe we should start measuring this movement pattern more?

The usefulness of old, robust technology in the transport industry

In the Ukraine, in amongst all the horror and devastation, the vulnerability of modern communication systems is being significantly exposed. Not only is it being alleged that secure communications are being exposed after mobile masts have been blown up, but also shortwave radio is being used to communicate messages more reliably than modern mobile networks. Whilst a war is a unique theatre, it shows that with new technologies comes new vulnerabilities.

These vulnerabilities can also be costly in a more practical way. A huge ongoing case in the US is John Deere over the Right to Repair. Farmers, used to repairing tractors with parts and a bit of elbow grease, are having to lose days in productivity and thousands of dollars because John Deere is not allowing them to override software or replace parts in modern tractors. When thinking of new technologies, think about how this can be exploited, and not just the benefits.

Hitting animals can be costly

Some years ago I worked on a road safety project unlike any other. At a large estate owned by a Duke and with a public road running through the middle, the Council I worked with developed plans to reduce the number of deer being killed on one stretch of road each year. To give you an idea, in California during the year of COVID restrictions, between 8.7 and 6.6 animals were still being killed every day. In the UK, between June 2019 and September 2020, 279 animals were killed on just the M5.

This is clear animal carnage, but similarly it can have an economic cost. In the aviation industry, bird strikes are common forms of delay. This research has shown that the cost of delays propogates through tightly-balanced airline systems. With a single bird strike resulting in at least 570 minutes (just over 9 hours) of delay within the airline. Protecting our animal friends also benefits us hugely as well.

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.

• Cars make cities less compact (Vox EU) – thank you to Francis Ostermeijer for both pointing this article out and authoring it!

• Satellite outage knocks out thousands of Enercon’s wind turbines (Reuters)

• Amazon to shut its bookstores and other shops as its grocery chain expands (Reuters)

• Online Sales Tax: Policy Consultation (HM Treasury)

• ‘Tech wreck’ looks more like another dotcom bubble bursting (Financial Times)

Something interesting

Tom Scott, and an innovative transport solution in the Scottish Highlands. What more can you ask for?

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Our World in Data has produced an excellent data explorer on international migration. Remember, migration and refugees is mainly a humanitarian issue, but it has serious transport planning consequences.