Good day my good friend.

What did I get up to this weekend? Nothing much. Dog walking, Tesco shopping, a bit of reading and playing video games as the heavens opened on Sunday. Not to mention watching very good videos on how people with disabilities in the Netherlands use bike tracks. A far cry from the common theme of ‘all disabled people need access to cars.’

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

James

Mixing passengers and freight – hard to manage, but essential in the future

Many Scottish readers may remember the Postbus (an idea mentioned as something that should be brought back at Mobility Camp recently). While the Royal Mail may have managerial reasons for not continuing the service – costs too much, liability issues with carrying passengers etc. – the concept of combining freight and passenger transport is far from dead. And may in fact be something that we need to do in order to combat the climate crisis.

This article published by SCOLAT (and helpfully pointed to by the excellent Pop Transport Newsletter) provides thought on how this could be applied in the global south. In fact, there has been a lot of academic thought put into this, because it makes sense doesn’t it? Combine the two and it lowers the costs and number of vehicles? The challenge to doing this is not technological, its managerial and operational. Its an extra point of potential failure in an industry that relies on efficiencies and tight margins. And that is a very trick issue to overcome.

The Shape of Cities

Cities come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But the transport networks, particularly the public transport networks, are strikingly similar. Core routes radiating out from a central area with high levels of demand, potentially with lower demand routes servicing major trip generators or feeding into the core network. So far, so not very shocking. But what happens when cities are not like this. Maybe they could be linear like this new city in Saudi Arabia, or even polycentric with strong regional centres and distributed industry?

This research paper seeks to tackle the latter – how to plan a polycentric city. While some argue that you simply put in new circular public transport routes like the North London Line. The impacts of different policy options depend on the impacts on costs for users and the levels of crowding on existing services, but it doesn’t really answer the question – how do you plan for different types of city? Maybe, we just don’t know the answers yet.

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.

• Debunking Net Zero, Carbon Offsets, Nature-Based Solutions, Climate Smart Agriculture, Bioeconomy… (GPE News)

• Comedy Wildlife Photo finalists – in pictures (The Guardian)

• A Coming-Out Party for Generative A.I., Silicon Valley’s New Craze (New York Times)

• US offshore wind sets a record with 58% growth in long-term targets in Q3 (Electrek)

• South Africa approves $8.5bn energy transition investment plan (Climate Home News)

Something interesting

A funny yet geeky video from Half as Interesting on why the USA has to be different from the rest of us when it comes to road signs. In short, its all down to governance and decision making.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

The Guardian’s ‘The Knowledge’ tackled the question of which is the biggest English football club is the furthest from a railway station. Here are their results. If this had been done in 2018, my club – Manchester United – would have been a grand total of 0km away from a station, but services have not run at the station since then despite it technically being open. And while Trafford Park is closer, everyone uses Old Trafford Metrolink stop.