Good day my good friend.

Wow, it seems you lot like Workplace Parking Levies. Sorry for those of you who I haven’t replied to yet. Its been a manic week, and will be for a couple more days. I will find time to respond to you! In the meantime, here is more mobility goodness.

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

James

High speed rail is great at reducing flights

Yeah, we’ve known this for ages. Good high speed rail between cities can abstract passengers from competing air routes. In fact, recent evidence from the East Coast Mainline in the UK shows that even non-high speed lines (but still intercity) routes can abstract passengers from airlines. So much confidence is there in the evidence – not totally conclusive in my view – that the French Government has banned short haul air routes where there is a rail alternative.

My skepticism for this comes from the fact that the interaction between airlines and high speed rail in terms of cross elasticities of demand is relatively poorly understood. But there is some evidence for the idea. For example, this recent study from China shows that for every 1% decline in the accessibility of a high speed rail station as measured in journey time, that results in an additional 809 passengers on the competing air route every year.

Mapping transit networks is harder than you think

We are lucky in the UK when it comes to public transport information. Despite the odd horror show, we live in Harry Beck’s world. Simple lines based on a highly-organised system with some degree of central control, and its (reasonably) easy to navigate. Unless you want to do some mad journey, then you will be getting out spreadsheets, a scale rule, and probably navigating using dead reckoning at some point. Anyway, I digress.

But what if your network is highly informal? That’s hard to map. Thankfully, this is where things like the General Transit Feed Specification help a lot. Using this, and smartphone data, researchers have mapped the transit network of Cartagena in Columbia. Similar approaches have been applied to Cairo in Egypt as well as Kampala in Uganda. While the likes of Citymapper are great, this is where the revolutionary potential of the new world of transport data lies.

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.

• Limits to Growth: Inconvenient Truth of Our Times (Challenging Development+)

• New Go-playing trick defeats world-class Go AI—but loses to human amateurs (ArsTechnica)

• UN unveils global ‘early warning’ system for disasters at $3 billion (Bangkok Post)

• The Russian gas habit Europe can’t quit: LNG (Politico)

• United Airlines eliminating seats as Americans get fatter (New York Post)

Something interesting

Ever wondered why trucks in Europe and the US are different? Well, this video from Truck Topia answers that question for you.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Yesterday I posted a link to an article about bad data in policy making. But here is a great thread on the experience of policy making. There is far too much ‘being busy’ and not enough doing good work. Policy making is hard to do right, and easy to get wrong. Those who get it wrong tend to be busy.