Good day my good friends.
Again, no fuss and bother. Hey, we are all busy, are we not?
Speaking of which, for the coming couple of months I will be reducing the daily stories in the newsletters to two a day slightly more permanently. This is due to suddenly getting a lot of work, and so I need every spare minute I can get in order to balance it all and still have a social life. I very much hope that you understand.
If you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include in this newsletter, you can email me.
James
With public transport the rules are simple: keep it simple
For any of you who have followed the work of Jarrett Walker, you will know how much of a proponent he is of making public transport simple. Essentially, focus on direct, high frequency routes with lots of interchanges as opposed to more, lower frequency routes that are less direct. And it works, and some new evidence from Norway shows it works at a variety of scales.
Across 8 Norwegian cities, routes were rationalised onto fewer, higher frequency and more direct routes. Despite walking distances to stops increasing, patronage levels also increased. While the reasons for this are less convincing (and are shared below), it goes to show that gettings the basics right is often as good as something new and shiny.
Stronger focus on increasing public transport competitiveness versus cars, enhanced knowledge among planners and organisational changes leaving more power to the professionals stood out as important factors explaining why these interventions had been implemented.
Our Elon is getting into public transport. Kind of.
No matter what you try, you just can’t get away from the guy. Look, I’m not his greatest fan, but his recent ramblings about The Boring Company shifting towards Hyperloop are interesting to note. Not because Hyperloop will work (there are a lot of reasons why it will be extremely difficult to pull off), but because its a shift in focus. More towards public transport – that is far more efficient to do in cities – than on car tunnels.
One thing I will give Musk credit for is his ability to build teams of truly great engineers – take SpaceX as a very good example – and get them working together to build incredible things. He is incredible at that, and if we can get him working on bikes lanes it would be wonderful. But sadly, I don’t think that will happen any time soon.
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.
Activism, Uncensored: On Winning and Losing Strategies of Climate Change Protest (TK News)
World’s most remote post office is hiring. Penguin counting required. (Washington Post)
Narita airport deploys net traps to stop turtles infiltrating runway (Bangkok Post)
These hackers showed just how easy it is to target critical infrastructure (MIT Technology Review)
Tennessee May Soon Require Drunken Drivers to Pay Support to Victims’ Children (The Wall Street Journal)
Something interesting
Thats a lot of migration
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.
Strategies
Experiments
St. John’s Temporary School Street Opening (Southampton, UK) (Eltis)
Participative budgeting in Tartu, Estonia (Cities Multimodal)
Cool Projects
Providing open-source multi-modal travel information in Milan (Eltis)
Housing England, to explore data on housing, including vacancy rates, across England (Open Innovations)
A new model for urban food transportation in Athens: the U-TURN project (TRT)
If you do nothing else today, then do this
Listen to this The War on Cars Podcast about Ray Bradbury’s legendary short story The Pedestrian.
Mobility Matters 