Good day my good friend.
Someone, someday, will achieve something of a minor miracle. No, not fusion energy, nor will it be world peace. It is a prize more elusive than either of those. It is delivering an on-train WiFi service that isn’t either as slow as a melting glacier or as unreliable as an old Robin Reliant. Is such a thing even feasible? Certainly not on Thameslink it isn’t.
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
Don’t ever let the perfect be the enemy of the good
One of the newsletters that I highly recommend that you subscribe to is Jen Gale at Sustainable(ish). A self-described ‘knackered mum,’ she started off by not buying anything for a year and blogging about it, and now recommends ways by which people can take imperfect actions to reduce their carbon footprints. The philosophy really is one to live by: doing something imperfectly is better than doing nothing at all, and we aren’t all perfect anyway.
I often get that feeling with transport and the actions we take. Something that is good, but far from perfect, is something that should be supported. Whether it be temporary bike lanes or traffic filters, a good example of the latter being the online discussion with regards to the plans in Oxford. (For transparency, I helped Oxfordshire County Council get the BSIP funding to deliver these). Whilst there is always room for constructive challenge and disagreement, sometimes changing things means doing the thing that is less than perfect. Because less than perfect is sometimes good enough, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
Having profitable deliveries isn’t just a transport issue, its also one of labour
Before I have touched on how the profitability of deliveries is closely linked to drop density (basically, how close deliveries are to one another). So if delivery companies can cluster deliveries, then their chances of profitability also increase. But this simplistic view of the world ignores one thing, and one thing that makes a huge different to the cost: the delivery drivers. Hiring them and keeping them on board costs money. And this is a major issue for delivery companies.
This article on workers for a delivery app delves into these issues in more detail. Notably that delivery riders are not that invested in the company, that software cannot solve everything, and there is a little thing called labour laws to take account of. These affect how profitable delivery apps could be, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
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 Wood the Climate-Friendly Urban Building Material of the Future? (Naked Capitalism)
‘They said it was impossible’: How medieval carpenters are rebuilding Notre Dame (The Observer)
German companies halt production to cope with rising energy prices (Financial Times)
How Helicopters are shaking up the hunt for life on Mars (National Geographic)
Something interesting
Do bike lanes reduce traffic? This video answers that question from a pro-cycling perspective. Thanks for the recommendation from David Levinson. You should subscribe to his Substack, by the way.
If you do nothing else today, then do this
I’ve been plugging Mobility Camp for months. But it now literally has just one or two tickets left for sale. You should sign up for it. We also have some sponsor spaces still going as well, so if you are after an awesome event to sponsor, you should let the organisers know!
Mobility Matters 