Good day my good friend.

This last weekend I managed to achieve something I never thought would be achieved on UK public transport. Or at least achieved anytime soon. I managed to travel to York by train, ride around on local public transport, including buses near my home in Bedfordshire, all on one device.

And no, I haven’t checked the price yet.

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

James

We need to operationalise equity in transport. For that, we need data

This article by Anne Brown is a brilliant bit of work. It sets out perfectly the nature of the challenge when it comes to equity and transport. We have articulated the problem well, and Anne does a brilliant job in this article. But now comes the hard bit: doing it. This paragraph should be burned into people’s brains:

Implementing policy in many ways is just the first step in a never-ending cycle of equitable transportation planning that rotates between goal setting, implementation, evaluation, and iteration. Once a policy aimed to deliver equity is implemented, the next step must be to understand how well (or not well) the programme is meeting its objectives. Understanding the relative successes can help to both identify best practices moving forward, as well as how programme iteration may address its identified shortcomings.

This is hard. As it requires us to collect data on problems that we have little idea of the scale of. We have to be creative, and willing to try new things to get hold of this data and to analyse it. Let’s stop talking and start doing this.

Want to get people to be more environmentally-conscious? Get them doing environmentally-conscious things

Yeah, this has been proven already. But sometimes repeating previous experiments to validate findings is equally as valid science as doing the big, shiny new thing. A case in point being a study of environmental behaviours and walkability in Accra, which found that people acted better towards the environment when their neighbourhood was more walkable. The summary summarised it well:

PEB [Pro-environmental Behaviours) and SRC [Socially Responsible Consumption] had a positive association with neighbourhood walkability, with the latter having a stronger association with neighbourhood walkability. The relationship between these behaviours and neighbourhood walkability was significantly strengthened by sustainability knowingness.

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.

• Climate Change Is Bad – But It Doesn’t Deserve All the Blame (The Wire)

• Are microbes the future of recycling? It’s complicated (Ars Technica)

• Realization of Paris Agreement pledges may limit warming just below 2°C (Nature)

• Welcome to “Robot Hell”! Meet the Deranged Genius Who Created an AI Version of @Dril (Futurism)

• What policymaking lessons can we learn from the government’s Covid-19 response? (Centre for Cities)

Something interesting

Brand identity matters, even if you don’t like the brand.

Things for a better world

This is a weekly collection of transport strategies, experiments, and cool projects looking to create a better world that you should find out more about. Not only that, you should think about adapting and doing yourself.

With it being the Easter holidays, there was not much to go around, but I managed to pick up a few interesting things. Enjoy.

Strategies

• City of North Vancouver Mobility Strategy (City of North Vancouver)

• Midlands Connect Strategic Transport Plan (Midlands Connect)

Experiments

• Dr Lal Pathlabs Medical Drones (Dr Lal Pathlabs)

• S-Bahn Munich tests all-day bicycle transport (The Munich Eye)

Cool Projects

• CurieuzenAir, Brussels (CurieuzenAir)

• Antwerp’s Marketplace for Mobility (Eltis)

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Pick up your half price rail ticket (if you are in the UK, and the website hasn’t crashed).