Good day my good friend.
After yesterday’s pessimism, comes the optimism. Mainly stoked by this report about the business case to switching to renewable energy. Its main conclusion? We may have understated the economic benefits, overestimated the costs, and the business case for going green is overwhelming. You can argue the figures and the assumptions all you like, but we are seeing the same elsewhere. Keeping the status quo means economic disadvantage. And that is a climate game changer.
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
We don’t think of the wider impacts of what we do. We should
I’ve just got off the phone to a good friend (who has asked to remain anonymous, but they know who they are :)) where, among putting the world to rights, we discussed about how the traditional way of appraising scheme impact is very constrained. We very often use logic mapping to directly link inputs with outputs and outcomes. Formal guidance tends to focus our monitoring effort into direct impacts for which there is a direct logical link, with wider impacts inferred. There is one small flaw with that: the world doesn’t work that way.
The impacts of what we do in transport fall outside counting cars and monitoring passenger numbers. We are talking changing people’s lives and reducing emissions. We have impact assessment frameworks and calculators to estimate impacts outside of transport. We even have ways of thinking about these things outside of logic mapping like causal loops. But we never monitor these things. And that is critical for us to make good transport policies in the future that show we are having an impact. We should start doing this.
What can be learned from the German experience of discounted rail travel?
In case you have been living under a rock for 3 months, Germany offered a 9 Euro a month ticket that allowed unlimited travel on public transport in Germany during the summer. There have been many column inches written about how this discount is a very good thing indeed. But what do we know about it? Right now, its too early to tell, but data that is emerging shows a nuanced and far more interesting picture.
These results in summary are as follows. It got more people travelling by rail (regardless of the German railway’s now legendary reliability issues). It may have reduced congestion in urban areas, but that does not mean that car traffic is down. It was also very popular, selling over 60 million tickets. I very much look forward to the future reports on what behaviour change this scheme will have achieved.
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.
Why a Mission to a Visiting Interstellar Object Could Be Our Best Bet for Finding Aliens (Gizmodo)
A New Approach to Car Batteries Is About to Transform EVs (Wired)
Engineers Make Green Hydrogen From Air (IEEE Spectrum)
How an enormous project attempted to map the sky without computers (Ars Technica)
Something interesting
Alexander runs the Ukrainian Railways. Apparently, he failed the other day. But in doing so, he repaired overhead lines, broken tracks, cleared active minefields, disposed of a misfired missile, and many other things. I’m astounded that can be counted as failure. Read the thread.
If you do nothing else today, then do this
Fans of transport appraisal will have been feasting recently on the changes to WelTAG. But this excellent report on Broadening Transport Appraisal by the International Transport Forum is a very nice desert. There is a lot of good thinking going on that may change the way we appraise schemes.
Mobility Matters 