Good day my good friend.

No fluff today. Let’s get right to it.

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

James

Automated vehicles and the Highway Code – what’s behind it is more interesting than the headline

You may have seen the headlines already about how you will be allowed to watch movies whilst sat at the wheel under changes to the Highway Code. This often generates much debate, but as always, there is a lot of interesting work behind these changes that supports this.

The first is some work by Britainthinks on different tests applied to the wording to be used in the Highway Code. Simply, because the concept of autonomous vehicles is new, plenty more clarity on terms is needed – not a shocking finding. The consultation report into the changes is also worth looking at. Again, people liked the idea of including autonomous vehicles, but more clarity is needed on wording.

Can traffic data be used as a proxy for sustainability?

I like it when people test out new approaches to things. And this new research paper that uses traffic counts and the Google Directions API data to help estimate the sustainability of different neighbourhoods in Ljubljana is a good example of this. Their conclusion?

Analyses of rhythmicity give straightforward insights into travel time trends, appropriate for comparative analysis and thus well-suited for use in NSA and monitoring practices.

Simply, its a good dataset for comparison purposes, but that does not make it a good indicator in itself. For example, if you were measuring neighbourhood CO2 emissions, you could compare it against traffic flows and be reasonably confident that your analysis is good. Which is useful in its own right.

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.

• “Algorithmic Destruction” Policy Defangs Dodgy AI (IEEE Spectrum)

• Satirical cartography: a century of American humor in twisted maps (Big Think)

• Success Depends On Access, Not Location (Washington Post)

• Crypto Is Poised to Reshape Taxes—and Cities (Wired)

• Can the 1.5°C climate target survive? (The Economist)

Something interesting

That’s a lot of boats.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read this excellent article by Martina Juvara on challenging the growth mindset in transport planning.