Good day my good friend.

This weekend was very much an unexpected chance to reset. If you took that chance to remember the life and times of the longest-reigning British monarch (or monitor “the queue”), then all power to you. But for me, this was simply a chance to reset the brain ahead of a very busy few months ahead. Maybe these last 10 days have had a silver lining after all.

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

Don’t rank city readiness, rank city doingness

Being a consultant (still working on not being one, which is hard when there are bills to pay) means that you produce the occasional study that can best be described as ‘fluff.’ A classic of the genre is the city readiness index – or the potential of cities to do something. And future technologies is rife with it. Mobility as a Service has one or two of them. As does Electric Vehicles. Autonomous Vehicles is another good one, but occasionally such studies produce something of interest.

This new study does just this. Not in terms of comparing cities – its rubbish at that. But it shows the difference between experts and members of the public in terms of what is important in future transport technology adoption. It turns out, us transport professionals care more about sustainability and equity than others. The conclusion here is that we need to discuss more about what constitutes readiness for a technology. Something that I agree with.

Data is good. Data tools are better. Data processes are God level.

The other day I came across this great map called the Million Neighbourhoods Map. It builds on the great foundation provided by OpenStreetMap by simplifying neighbourhoods further into accesses and places. Thereby, filling gaps in neighbourhood data to enable decision makers to decide how best to improve neighbourhoods. There is a great writeup of this on CityFix. And here comes the but.

These projects are amazing. As are projects to build data tools, including making traditionally proprietary tools open source. But I fear sometimes that we as professionals can use these to outsource our thinking on transport policy issues. We must change our processes so that our knowledge and our data compliment one another, and that opening data actually becomes valuable. And these processes are far from ideal for the data that we are trying to open up. We are making the stuff flowing through the pipes as clean as we can, but next we need to fix the plumbing.

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.

• Form, function, and the giant gulf between drawing a picture and understanding the world (The Road to AI We Can Trust)

• Refreezing Poles Feasible And Cheap, New Study Finds (Science Blog)

• Nearly a Third of China’s Land Now Off-Limits for ‘Development’ (The Wire)

• Suez Canal Authority Hikes Transit Tolls Again for 2023 (Maritime Executive)

• In Venezuelan oil town, solar-powered car offers escape from fuel lines (Reuters)

Something interesting

Occasionally, you need a reminder of what your town or city could be like. As Glenn reminds us, Paris has come a very long way.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read this article on Climate City Contracts. This is an interesting initiative as part of the EU’s 100 Climate-neutral Cities by 2030, whereby political commitment is given to making changes to benefit the climate in a very non-technical way. It is slightly odd, and it could work.