Good day my good friend.

I have come to the realisation that turning 300 in terms of newsletters is much like turning 30 years old. Most of the major mistakes you have got out of your system, you are maturing in your outlook (even if you still want to be a rebel at heart), and you are coming to like routine. That, and you have an overwhelming urge to start listening to BBC Radio 2.

Thank you, friend, for sticking with me. Even if it hasn’t been since number 1, your support is always appreciated.

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

James

P.S. Apologies if you have received multiple versions of my emails in recent days. Substack have been having a lot of issues on this across their publications, and so I do apologise if you were affected.

The tricks of the mind that get you to buy more

Us transport planners need to learn more from Tesco. Not in terms of how they impact on retail centres (its quite nuanced, actually). Nor about the rising demand for localised convenience stores. Nor about how supermarkets are increasingly using the railways to shift things to their stores. But in how they deploy psychology to get us to do what they want.

My first job was in a supermarket, and I was told that the items that sold the best were on the shelves that were at eye level. And those same tricks still work. Maybe we can do things like bundling deals (complimentary products sold together – wonder where I have seen that before??), or encourage more online sales to help people feel good about their transport purchases? So much to learn, and so much we can do to get more people feeling good about sustainable transport.

Decide and provide is becoming the dominant transport paradigm

Jarrett Walker effectively says so, so then it must be true, mustn’t it? There has been a lot of academic research put into the concept of decide and provide, and how it is to be applied in transport planning. But something that is often under-appreciated is how much of a paradigm shift it is. Not because we do our work differently, but we think about our outcomes differently.

Decide and provide is focussed on the question of what sort of transport system do we want to provide for an area, as opposed to what sort of transport system is needed and predicted. This makes our debates about transport policy much more philosophical in nature. After all, we could decide that we want a net zero transport system, and provide for that. Or we could decide that we want expanded roads everywhere, and provide for that. Anyone up for creating a new syllabus on transport philosophy?

Does Uber benefit everyone by discriminating?

I mean price discrimination of course. Come on, Uber may be bad but I don’t think its that bad (mostly). For those of you who don’t know about price discrimination as an economic term, essentially it is about selling the same product at different prices to different markets, with the aim of maximising revenue. In theory, this means that those with a low willingness or ability to pay could have their purchases subsidised by those with a higher willingness to pay.

A new paper explores the possibility that Uber benefits many people by discriminating by price. Specifically in relation to trips between airports and hotels (a very niche trip type, but bear with me). What it found was that the more expensive the hotel room, the more Uber charged as a fare. This builds upon previous economic work done by Uber informed by its surge pricing system. The basics of economics, applied to transport. The geek in me loves this.

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 that you enjoy them.

A huge thank you to the always-excellent Naked Capitalism for some excellent links after my RSS feed reader decided to break.

• As Oil Giants Turn to Bitcoin Mining, Some Spin Burning Fossil Fuels for Cryptocurrency as a Climate Solution (DeSmog Blog)

• Watch what happens when police pull over a driverless car in San Francisco (MarketWatch)

• Dreams and reality collide in Praxis’s vision of a utopian crypto city (Financial Times)

• Container shipping at the crossroads: The big unwind or party on? (Hellenic Shipping News)

Something interesting

Bollards and sea birds. You cannot ask for any more than that.

If you do nothing else, then do this

The excellent Foresight team at Arup have produced a report on the Future of Urban Logistics. It’s a cracking good read, though not enough cargo bikes for my liking (then again, I love cargo bikes).