Good day my good friend.

Another day, another bit of bad news about the climate. Not only are we not on the path to limiting warming, we are so far off the path, the path is a dot to us. Its now at the stage whereby if you are not working to prevent climate change, you are working to enable climate change. Enough really, really, really is enough.

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

James

Should transport planners protest?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently. The ongoing Just Stop Oil protests against new oil extraction, Insulate Britain, and of course the ongoing actions of Greta Thunberg. And then, yesterday, school children in London took to the street to stop the removal of a School Street they helped install. It raises a pretty big question for us as transport planners. We know transport is performing really badly when it comes to climate change and social justice. So when do we say that enough is enough?

I have found Steve Melia’s thoughts on the politics of protest in transport to be very helpful in framing my own thinking on this. Protest does something that our charts and analysis cannot do: prompt the imagination and stimulate debate. And does so continuously over time. The decision to attend a protest is a very personal one. Proving a direct link between protest and change is challenging. But no change ever happened through people doing nothing. And we are at a point where doing nothing is not an option. Maybe its time to get our protest on.

Where do driverless cars go from here?

Another week, another driverless car company gets its funding pulled. And Tesla is also having problems with its autopilot system potentially under investigation. Inevitably, very clever people who I otherwise respect take to social media to state how right they were (confirmation bias, anyone?) about driverless cars. Ignoring other things like it being really hard for any tech company to get any funding at the moment because the world economy is stalling. But where is the sector honestly? There is no simple answer.

There is a lot of activity and a lot of research taking place. But we are some years from a fully self-driving service offering outside of very controlled environments. We are not just teaching computers rules of the road, but social norms as well. That’s hard. We still screw up, and we are the experts at social norms! But its not dead, because autonomy itself is valuable as a technology and service offering. The isolated use cases such as mining have shown it is valuable and is worth going for. So, while it won’t happen soon, driverless cars are not dead 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.

• The rise of the dumb city (City Monitor)

• You Can’t Fight Inflation With Even More Giveaways to the Rich (Common Dreams)

• S-Bahn Frequency and Job Centralization (Pedestrian Observations)

• Value Has a Price, But First It Needs to Be Seen (Bloomberg)

• The end of the system of the world (Noahpinion)

Something interesting

This recoloured video of London in the 1930s is a great watch. And shows the emergence of car dominance in the city. But you come away from it wanting a cup of Bovril. Mmm…Bovril…

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read the World Resource Institute’s report on the State of Climate Action. Below I have pulled out some of the excellent / depressing findings on action on transport emissions posted by Giulio Mattioli yesterday.