Good day my good friend.

A great deal many of you have been brilliant in sending through some recommended articles and reports. Thank you for doing so. I will get to them, I promise. I just need to find a spare few minutes to check them out.

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

James

An index that is actually useful for once

When Sustrans announced with fanfare that it had published a Walking and Cycling Index of 18 major urban areas in the UK, I did dread it. Usually these sorts of things are just analyses of open data on transport, based on an obscure index methodology that you can’t quite trust. But in this case, Sustrans appears to have actually done its research in all 18 areas.

Its based upon detailed surveys of people’s activities and views on walking and cycling, and contains useful insights. For example, apparently the whole of Inverness walk and cycle the equivalent of the length of the UK 64 times a day. And each report contains detailed and locally-relevant policy recommendations. Its a very, very good bit of work.

In innovation, networks and access points matter

If doing newer and innovative things is part of the solution to our host of problems on climate change and social justice, we have to consider how best to make such innovation spread. And spread quickly. Research on past technological innovations can provide us with some insight on this, and this really-quite-good paper on diffusion in global shipping networks highlights this.

Looking at steam and container shipping, they…

…share a large quantity of similarities. They both fostered port concentration, were boosted by city size and port connectivity, bypassed upstream port sites, and diverged gradually from older technologies.

Simply, not only did these innovations use the existing networks and the nodes contained within them to propogate, but they established new ones. Which in turn were exploited by new technologies to propogate further changes.

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.

• The World Has No Choice but to Care About India’s Heat Wave (The Atlantic)

• Driven – In an age when driving is the next frontier, a 22-year-old mother tries to become the first woman to drive cross-country (Truly Adventurous)

• Southern Spain’s Ancient Water Network Sustains Life but Faces an Uncertain Future (Atlas Obscura)

• The Global Fertilizer Crisis (The American Conservative)

• More roadkill along the blockchain highway: Miami Mayor’s ‘MiamiCoin’ a disaster (Boing Boing)

Something interesting

Live in Europe and thinking about flying off on holiday? Alex’s Twitter thread about her trip by train from London the Barcelona should make you think again.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read about this plan to rewild London. Let’s be clear on this. As foxes have shown us, nature will come back to our cities regardless of how much we fight it. So lets make nature a part of our cities.