Good day my good friend.

And you are very good friends indeed. Since the announcement on Monday that the sponsorship and paid subscriptions for this newsletter will go to the Trussell Trust over the coming winter, so many of you have signed up and come forward to help. I have been truly touched by your generosity. Already, £200 of the £400 goal has been raised. Amazing. Just amazing. I’m lost for words. Thank you.

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

When even your strategy isn’t good, you have a problem

A big strategy problem is that your strategy can state grand things, but the delivery isn’t up to scratch. When it comes to Net Zero, we are being so overtaken by events that even our strategies are not up to scratch any more. As a German Climate Change Panel has so eloquently stated that Deutsche Verkehrsklimapläne sind Quatsch. And even here in the UK, we produce a lot of action plans.

So even if our thinking is not up to the challenges being faced, what do we do? Its simple in some respects. You just…do. We know what is needed to reduce carbon emissions from transport. But now is not the time to let perfect be the enemy of the good. The clock is ticking on climate change, and even imperfect action is better than no action at all. And so long as your strategy is adaptable to change, then it will be a good one.

If people like a place, they are more likely to like walking through it

I am sure that more than one of you lived in an absolute dump which you hated walking through, right? Well, new research from China may just back up your feelings on this. It turns out, if we don’t like a place and we feel less attached to it, then we don’t like walking through it as much. If you have had a bad experience walking through a place, it also means that you enjoy walking through it much less.

This research is the flip side to the common trope that walking in a neighbourhood gives a sense of well being towards it. Amazingly, though, there is little academic evidence to support this claim. And often evidence presented uses proxies to make a conclusion that walking increases a sense of community. Very simply, matters such as sociability and a sense of belonging to a community extend way beyond the urban form.

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.

• Is net zero really to blame for soaring energy bills in Great Britain? (The Guardian)

• The impact of information provision on women’s migration outcomes: Evidence from Indonesia (VoxDev)

• The short-term impacts of development-induced displacement on wealth and subjective well-being in the Brazilian Amazon (World Development)

• Migration and the multiverse (World Bank Blogs)

• Heatwave in China is the most severe ever recorded in the world (New Scientist)

Something interesting

A survey by YouGov has shown that most Americans think that most issues are a national issue. The one exception? Lack of public transportation, which respondents thought was equally a local issue and a national issue.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

This research article tries to answer a key question: what if everyone cycled as much as the Dutch do? Quick answer: it would save a lot of carbon emissions. There may be something to this cycling thing, you know.