Good day my good friend.

Due to a couple of scheduling conflicts, I have actually written this Mobility Matters Daily during last weekend. So while this is pretty up to date, the news may not exactly be hot off the press! It will be the same with tomorrow’s newsletter, but normal service will be resumed on Wednesday.

For my UK subscribers, good luck today. Take care of yourselves, and stay out of the sun.

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

You should also join a lot of like-minded people at Mobility Camp in Bristol in September. Get your tickets now. Seriously, they are starting to really sell now.

James

What can us transport planners do to keep cities cool?

Yeah, I’m going to talk about the weather. Come on, I am British you know. With the temperatures of 40C forecast for the first time ever in the UK, keeping our towns and cities cool is one of the ways that us transport planners can, and indeed must, help to tackle climate change.

Lets start with the obvious one: more trees. They can reduce road temperatures by as much as 27.5C. We should also make our built form more tense and closely packed, as has been done in the Mediterranean for centuries. Finally, for something slightly more eccentric, why not try what the Japanese do and water the pavement? Hey, a 9C reduction in temperature is not to be sniffed at.

Oh, and air conditioning? Probably not advised, but it is very useful when the body is heat stressed and needs to cool quickly.

The development of green belt housing embeds automobility because it changes lifestyles

The Journal of Land Use and Transport has been pushing out some absolutely stonking articles recently. And this study of green belt development and car dependency in Sydney is one of those. By combining a study of 300 residents of a new development with a social practice approach to research challenges the pure infrastructure and service approach that we often take to transport planning, and states something simple. The way to challenge this is to look at transport choices in the context of social choices, like choices on visiting family and friends. Derived demand, anyone?

The likes of Transport for New Homes have done some excellent research over the years of the scale of car dependency in new developments. This is not an unknown phenomenon. But perhaps we need to realise that while we transport planners can play a big role, we are not all dominating. Sometimes, it can be a conscious lifestyle choice to be car-oriented. Or the fact that other modes are available may just not be important to some people.

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.

• Experiments with a Four-Day Workweek (Naked Capitalism)

• Closing Time – The life and death of the American mall (The Baffler)

• Creative Economy 2030: Imagining and Delivering a Robust, Creative, Inclusive, and Sustainable Recovery (Asian Development Bank)

• Keeping bills and carbon low – where next for policy? (New Economics Foundation)

• Lime has built its own camera-based sidewalk detection technology (TechCrunch)

Something interesting

Personal view here. The end of fossil fuels is an economic inevitability. The industry may be going down fighting, but the pure economics of net zero means that oil, gas, and coal is a dead industry walking. This excellent video by Vox explains it all.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

One for my UK followers this. Follow the UK Government’s advice for keeping cool, and for keeping your home cool. Honestly, this hot weather may seem like a bit of fun, but I am sure that all my readers are clever enough to know that what will happen in the next couple of days is something else entirely. Stay safe, please.