Good day my good friend.

Well, its not really. The first policy that our new Prime Minister announced was to build more roads. Great. Its as if the last 50-odd years of evidence about the impacts of building more roads doesn’t matter. Its partly why I became a councillor myself. I mean, nobody else seems to get it, so there may as well be someone in the room who does. I despair, I truly do.

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

For those of you coming to Mobility Camp in Bristol on 29th September, I will see you there. Tickets are sold out, but if you are still interested you can put your name on a reserve list. Or, sponsorship slots are still available.

James

Do roads generate economic growth? Well…

Partly in response to the previously-mentioned announcements of our new Prime Minister, I did drop a mini-rant on Twitter, stating that the evidence linking transport and economic growth is limited. From my perspective, this is more a matter of poor monitoring and evaluation practice – simply, we monitor badly and inconsistently, so its hard to conclude based on such data. But even then, the evidence is somewhat week.

There is emerging evidence that indicates that while there is some degree of two way link between growth and road building, the link is inconsistent and is weakening. This may be because the effects of new infrastructure are in the long term. But even where it exists, there is a clear dependency on other factors such as urbanisation, which means that the impact of the road specifically can be difficult to quantify. Needless to say that this is a more complex picture than a simple roads = growth narrative.

Poor form PSG

Not in Ligue 1 of course, they will probably win that at a canter. But this refers to this really bad joke when Kylian Mbappe and Christophe Galtier were asked why they flew to an away game at Nantes which is just two hours away by train. Its not gone down well. Mind you, the Premier League isn’t exactly one to talk. Not least my own club Manchester United who once took a 10 minute flight to an away match at Leicester.

We know domestic flights have the highest carbon emissions per passenger. But what can realistically be done about emissions from private aircraft? There is a lot of research that quantifies the issue. But relatively little on what can be done. Some has been done on transitionary policies like specifying that private flights must be powered by lower emission fuels and removing state and financial aid, with varying degrees of impact. Then there is carbon pricing of course. But in all, there are few policy ideas and very little research to tackle this growing issue.

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.

• How to Green Our Parched Farmlands and Finance Critical Infrastructure (Counter Punch)

• Carbon should cost 3.6 times more than US price, study says (Associated Press)

• The Saudi Lobby Builds Back Better (The Intercept)

• This is the sound of the suburbs (En Avant!)

• Firming Up Price Inflation (Bank of England)

Something interesting

How to make a city interesting using data visualisation. Well done Thi Ho.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

My very good friend Katya Leyendecker has published an excellent research on cycle campaigning for just cities. You should go and read it. It will make you think, and in a very good way.