Good day my good friend.

When you see a headline about raising monster rounds, I can’t help but imagine Hades raising the titans to take on Zeus. Turns out, it just means self-driving car start-ups trying to raise a load of money. While interesting, it’s not quite as good as the sarcastic tones of James Woods.

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

James

Buses and telling a story with data

This very good article on buses and levelling up in the Financial Times by Jennifer Williams caused a little bit of a stir. Not because of the subject matter, but because of an increasingly important skill that many transport planners need to learn: how to tell stories with data.

The story uses three graphs, the most important of which is shown below. Combined, they tell the story completely: buses are in trouble, and deregulation has largely been a policy failure. All of this is available through data produced by the Department for Transport. But together, the impact is huge.

Traffic is the bane of the emergency services

Some interesting new research by Possible quantifies something that has been long understood by professionals: that traffic congestion really does significantly affect the emergency services. This finding in particular strikes home:

Each percentage point increase in congestion on the roads results in a one second delay to response times.

Interestingly, the effect of traffic calming measures across London appears to have had minimal effect on journey times, or at least not in a statistically significant way. So even if a bike lane looks like it is causing traffic chaos and holding up every ambulance and fire engine going down a street, that doesn’t appear in the data. Remember: traffic is the problem.

Safe cycling in London is all on a map

I can’t believe I have not seen this until now. But there is a map of most safe cycling infrastructure in London, including what proportion of an area is covered in LTNs. Thanks to Jon Stone for pointing it out in this tweet.

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.

• Our World at Risk: Transforming Governance for a Resilient Future (United Nations)

• Nature does not care (Aeon)

• Union Square Subway Entrance a Smelly Mess Despite Ritzy Private Ownership (The City)

• The gig workers fighting back against the algorithms (MIT Technology Review)

• Confessions of a DMV Vision Test Failure (Oldster Magazine)

Something interesting

Just a reminder that sometimes a simple visual can be the most impactful.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

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