Good day my good friend.

Times like these remind me why, for all of the incredible and varied transport challenges in the city, you just can’t beat rural life. When a walk to meet friends at the pub is through a quiet woodland, with birds singing and deer rooting around the undergrowth. The peace is quite something!

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

James

The relationship between first and last mile services and public transport ridership is not so certain

One of the hot topics during the last few years in transport planning is that of the first and last mile. Usually spoken of in terms of regular trips, this is about providing sustainable transport services to mobility hubs to enable onward travel by rail, and vice-versa, with the idea of making travel by sustainable transport more attractive. One question: does it?

Research on this on Caltrain and BART is not so certain. It finds that connecting bus and shuttle services and jobs and houses surrounding stations do have a positive relationship with rail ridership. But walking and cycling networks don’t. Simply, this study suggests that the best things we can do for the first and last mile is build around the stations, and make buses to them better.

There is a racial dimension to pedestrian fatalities

It’s not often I reproduce an entire article summary. But I think this is hard hitting enough to do on this occasion to summarise this study.

Black and Native American pedestrians are disproportionately killed in the US, yet relatively little is known about how fatal crash patterns differ between races. Our multinomial logit analysis of six years of US pedestrian fatality data (2012–2017) and built environment and census data reveals notable differences between races compared to the baseline of White pedestrians, including that Black and Native American pedestrians were significantly more likely to have been killed in darkness, Black and Hispanic pedestrians under age 16 were significantly more likely to have been killed, and Asian pedestrians age 65 or older were significantly more likely to have been killed. Importantly, models with crash, built environment, and population data suggest critical connections between roadway design and population patterns that are risk factors for all pedestrians, but disproportionately affect certain races.

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.

• Gaining momentum – Results of the 2021 BIS survey on central bank digital currencies (BIS)

• What We Can Learn From Switzerland’s Sustainability (Discover Magazine)

• COVID-19: the next phase and beyond (The Lancet)

• A YouTuber’s Plane Crash Draws Doubts From Aviation Experts (New York Times)

• Massachusetts should have a state-owned bank (Boston Globe)

Something interesting

This is how the global oil market works. As they say, the oil industry’s old ways are over.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Now this looks like a very interesting event in London on transport justice. Perhaps you should go?