Good day my good friend.
So it’s World Earth Day today. I’m not going to bore you with how much transport contributes to climate change, or the challenges faced with reducing emissions from transport. Instead, I encourage you to watch this video of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Because it perfectly captures why being good to our tiny world is so important.
If you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include in this newsletter, you can email me.
James
Just telling people to do things for sustainable transport isn’t enough. You have to make doing the right thing the easy thing
There is a climate, social justice, and increasingly a security imperative to decarbonise our transport networks. But its not enough to simply tell people to do a thing. You have to make doing that thing easy. This great CityFix article covers matters such as financing and prioritising walking and cycling in budgets. But there is even more to it than just providing money (which does help).
This is where things like the establishment of Active Travel England, and the changes to the Highway Code come in. They are not big on the surface, but they make things easier. For instance, in designing roads, engineers assume that those using them will keep to the Highway Code. You change the Highway Code, you change how they design.
So one thing you must ask yourself is this: what have you done to make someone’s life easier?
It turns out simply shutting down projects that are largely done causes a lot of delays
Ok, this is a slightly geeky thing. A new research paper explores the implications of delays to the project closeout phase of highway projects. Essentially, this is the phase where all documents are finished off and approved, the project is evaluated, and then it is passed over to the client. I call it ‘the fiddly bit’ and appears now to be for good reason.
Doing this stage wrong can lead to problems down the line. While the main project has been constructed and thus is ‘complete,’ this handover phase is where a lot of information and experience is lost. In the words of the researchers:
When a highway construction project is not closed out in a timely manner, the DOT can be subject to additional costs, obsolete funding sources, loss of project documentation, loss of staff with project knowledge (through retirement/attrition), and potential adverse impacts on internal and external relationships.
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.
Why People Vote Against Redistributive Policies That Would Benefit Them (MIT Press Reader)
This Is, As Far As I’m Concerned, The Greatest Airport Story Ever Told (Defector)
The Boneyard Principle: Why the Next Big Thing will Emerge from a Failed Idea (Every)
The benefits of co-benefits: why policy on air quality and greenhouse gas emissions needs to be joined-up (Policy@Manchester)
Something interesting
The relationship between population density and transport emissions seems pretty clear to me.
If you do nothing else today, then do this
Read this paper by the European Central Bank on the effects of COVID-19 on consumption, including a section on public transport.
Mobility Matters 