Good day my good friend.

After several months of being baked, then comes the deluge. The result being that Pudding Mill Lane station in London temporarily had an interchange between the Docklands Light Railway, the Elizabeth Line, and the river. Even when it rains we can’t win, but expect more of this in the future.

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. Sponsorship slots are also available.

James

Distracted walking – how much of a problem is it?

That question is one that this new research article has tried to measure. As far as I am concerned, all it has measured is how often people walk with a smartphone, and observational data may be more useful, but that is me nit-picking the results. But is having your face in your phone that big of an issue, outside of being a complete menace when walking down Oxford Street?

Sorry to say this, but it is far more prevalent than we accept. A study in New York estimated that 1 in 4 pedestrians is walking while distracted by a phone. However, something that is obvious is that this is not a severe risk to public health. Unless you are the distracted walker of course, then it could get very bad for you. Apparently a big driver of this is the fear of missing out (gotta keep up with the Twitters, haven’t we?). But we as transport practitioners don’t agree as to whether it is a big problem or not. I’m firmly in the camp of ‘its not a big problem.’

Is Silicon Valley wrong about the future of transport? They wouldn’t be the first

There has been a few articles doing the rounds recently decrying big technology companies and their view on the future of transport. As notably shown by this interview with Paris Marx in Vox. Or maybe Jarrett Walker’s legendary screed against Elon Musk. Some of which I agree with. Big Tech doesn’t necessarily have all the answers as to what the future of transport holds. But it has some of them. Technology can help us in achieving our goals, even if we disagree with the vision of some of its louder voices. Not to mention the fact that there are a lot of tech companies who are actually doing good things to make transport better.

As transport planners, we have learned the hard way that we can have a well-intentioned future of transport but end up being so wrong about it. I hate to say it, but for every evil person who wanted to build roads in the 1950s that we like to demonise now, there were thousands more well-meaning professionals that also thought it was a good idea. Not because they are bad, but because our success is judged over decades, and some impacts we could not foresee. Even now, we may be making the same mistakes in visions of the future that we consider acceptable.

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.

• When Cities Treated Cars as Dangerous Intruders (MIT Press Reader)

• Young Workers Are Bridging the Climate and Labor Movements (Teen Vogue)

• The anti-work movement (Axios)

• Closing Down the Billionaire Factory (BIG by Matt Stoller)

• America Is Going to Have a ‘Heat Belt’ (The Atlantic)

Something interesting

Ok, this isn’t transport related. But I thought this map by u/VictimOfMaths is rather fun. Its quite sunny on my side of the island…

If you do nothing else today, then do this

The North American Bikeshare and Scooter Share Association has released a report on the state of the industry in the US. Its full of useful data and facts, and is well worth a read.