Good day my good friend.

For as long as I do this newsletter, I will never understand my audience. You surprise me all the day. Looking through the analytics for the links clicked, this week you have loved Transport Planning Day, my new Mastodon profile, and David Platt’s goal for England against Belgium in Italia 90. You lot are as weird as I am, and I love it.

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

Road safety isn’t just about KSIs

This week is Road Safety Week. I don’t need to tell you about the carnage that takes place on our roads every day. 1.3 million people die every year on the roads globally. Scores more are injured – 25,892 seriously injured in the UK in 2021 alone. This are horrific statistics on their own, and ones that should not be inevitabilities. But as someone who works on monitoring and evaluation a lot, statistics can lead to blindness. ‘You are what you measure’ after all.

In a wide-ranging report in 2009, researchers Michael Sorenson and Marjan Mosslemi made an amazing finding. Of 54 indicators of objective road safety that we use every day, only 14 had a demonstrable link with the subjective experience of road safety. Integrating subjectivity has been undertaken through general approaches such as Vision Zero, but rarely has the logical link been made back to road safety statistics. So research has to make that link, or we have to stop judging ourselves purely on road safety statistics.

The Hero’s Choice

What on Earth is that, you are probably asking. In the first (Toby Maguire) Spiderman movie, the Green Goblin gives Spiderman ‘the Hero’s choice’ of save Mary-Jane Watson or kids in a cable car. Of course, he somehow does both, but not all of us have superpowers. Yet sometimes, we face similar, where we have to choose between two very real things that matter to us, where choosing one means we sacrifice the other.

As mad as it sounds, in my other work as a Town Councillor working on planning matters, I had the same feeling yesterday. Where we had to object to a planning application that would have done a lot to provide affordable homes for local people, but was objectively awful in sustainable transport terms. A not-uncommon issue. There is a need to build more homes to make them more affordable. But does that mean we accept any old rubbish, and allow housing even though the development is objectively bad? NIMBY is an easy insult, but objecting is complex and has a variety of motivations. Lets have more understanding on all sides, and less insults.

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.

• If bumblebees can play, does it mean they have feelings? This study suggests yes (NPR)

• Tracking methane from space could be key to helping slow global warming (Axios)

• The Global Shipping Container Shortage Is Now a Surplus (Jalopnik)

• Which cities have seen the largest inflows of migrants in the last decade? (Centre for Cities)

• Remote Maine County Will Help Launch National Digital Navigators Corps (The Daily Yonder)

Something interesting

This week, the world’s population hit 8 billion people. And this simple graphic shows where they can all be found. I’m always amazed at quite how big India is.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

I’m not normally one for promoting parking, but providing bereavement parking at hospitals is very much a good idea. Well done to Bournemouth Hospital on this.