Good day my good friend.

Its always great fun when the BBC’s leading current affairs programme pitches there being a war between cars and cyclists (note the use of the word cars, and not drivers). While the content was not as bad as the title suggests, the fact that one in three drivers don’t think cyclists should be on the road at all is slightly worrying. While a lot has happened in the UK to better protect cyclists, we still have a long way to go, clearly.

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

James

The flexibility of informal transport

In this newsletter, I cover informal transport a fair amount. Not as well as the Makeshift Mobility Substack, but that’s by-the-by. We often forget about it, and how important it is to how people get around. There have been many attempts by states to formalise informal transport over the years, which even then relied on a high degree of informality in politics to regulate the sector. It gives the impression of a sector that is nimble, and flexible. But is it?

A new paper by Tamara Kerzhner of the University of California, Berkley adds depth to this question. It argues that in situations where individual drivers compete for trade, the flexibility experienced is relatively minimal as it limits incentives for seeking out niche services. Expanding into niche services requires experimentation and a gradual process facilitated by larger companies. Maybe this is a transport truism. Larger companies experiment more because they can take on the commercial risk of failure compared to smaller companies. Don’t tell that to SME-loving politicians.

The movement of people we don’t talk about

Migration is…a hot topic here in the UK right now (clicking on this may result in becoming angry or depressed). I’m not going to get into the politics of it all, but its amazing how much us transport professionals don’t actually talk about this as a transport issue. The World Economic Forum estimates that there are 272 million international migrants. The World Migration Report and its excellent visualisation platform shows how the patterns vary significantly across the globe. And the impacts on transport and social systems are highly complex. Just because we don’t think of the transport impacts of the mass movement of people, doesn’t mean they don’t happen.

The question sometimes boils down to how to deter migration. A political hot potato for sure. But an interesting paper worthy of consideration asks whether a non-transport and non-turn-them-back-at-the-border solution is worthy of consideration: cash transfers. If we give people cash, what happens? Amazingly, if you make such cash transfers conditional on people investing in themselves (e.g. education), they are more likely to travel and migrate. This shows how important non-transport factors are in transport decision making, and how tweaks in the design of these can have a big transport impact. We should remember that for our policy making.

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 scramble for rare earths, part 2 (BBC World Service)

• Will cost concerns harm Melbourne’s $11bn airport rail project? (City Monitor)

• China reminds world shock and ore can hurt tech supply chains (The Register)

• Under the radar (New Economics Foundation)

• The pros and cons of discretion in procurement (World Bank Blogs)

Something interesting

Ever wondered how a petrol pump knows that your car’s tank is full? This wonderfully geeky video shows how.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

If you are in the UK, more data has been released from the Census 2021. Ok, not the Travel to Work Statistics (yet), but there is some amazing data on the population at the neighbourhood level. This Twitter thread by Ahmad Barclay gives and overview, but why not just dive straight in?