Good day my good friend.

A bit of news on social media. After thinking long and hard, I have abandoned the hell site with the bird and I am now set up on Mastodon. You can search for me at @james_gleave2@mastodon.uk.com. I am still on LinkedIn, of course. As much as it is incredibly funny to watch a billionaire spend $44bn on finding out how the Internet works, I’ve been here before on Internet forums, and it rarely turns out well.

If you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include in this newsletter, you can email me. I know that plenty of you have suggested articles – I will get to them soon!

James

The transport impacts of major tournaments

This Sunday is the first match of the 2022 Men’s Football World Cup. I have loved the World Cup to an unreasonable degree since Italia 90. David Platt’s volley against Belgium, Maradona’s second against England, Diana Ross, Marco Tardelli, Zidane on Marco Materazzi, Jordan Pickford’s penalty save against Columbia, I love it all. But…this year I’m just not excited. There are a lot of reasons to object to this year’s World Cup. But the carbon impact of it is one that is often – and maybe rightly – overlooked.

Qatar is making a lot of investments in low carbon tech, including the construction of 3 metro lines. But some evidence indicates that FIFA may be cooking the books in an environmental sense. If you think Qatar is especially bad, its not. Major sporting events emit a lot of carbon, even the relatively minor ones like the FA Cup Final. Transport is a huge part of that impact, and not enough is done to tackle it. As much as I love a 4 week festival of football, we must do more to reduce the environmental impact.

The theory of delivering more charging points

As I pointed out in the newsletter for paid subscribers on Sunday, we need more electric car chargers. The evidence shows that we do. So here’s a question – how do we get to more chargers? The traditional approach is throw lots of public money at it. But is that right? And at some point there will be a law of diminishing returns. There’s not much evidence that shows that this is effective. To be fair, there isn’t much evidence on what works generally.

New research from China has tested a model for an alternative approach: prospect theory. Very simply, where there is a risky choice leading to gains, people are risk averse, whereas where there is a risky choice leading to losses, people are risk seeking. Its completely counter-intuitive, but links closely to loss aversion that is a studied phenomenon. In this case, by encouraging property owners to act in a manner that plays on prospect theory, the potential roll out of EV charging can increase.

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.

• Mehran Karimi Nasseri: Iranian who made Paris airport home for 18 years dies (BBC)

• Poverty’s toll on mental health (Urban Institute)

• The 1960s Experiment Created Today’s Biased Police Surveillance (Slate)

• They Want to Kill Libraries (Cory Doctorow)

• Wealthy Countries Propose ‘Global Shield,’ a Climate Change Insurance Plan (Gizmodo)

Something interesting

America’s roads keep getting deadlier. We know why, but Vox do an amazing job of explaining this in an accessible way.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

We are nearly a decade into the transport data revolution, and its still hard to get data on local roads. But don’t worry everyone, we know what is needed. Another consultants report!! Actually, to be fair this one from TRL is pretty good. We just have to do it!