Good day my good friend.

I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t watch any of this World Cup apart from England games. But for this video of inside the Saudi Arabia dressing room after their shock win against Argentina yesterday, I will make this one exception. To paraphrase the legendary Barry Davies: look at their faces! Just look at their faces! Sometimes, the looks of sheer joy transcend everything, even if for a moment. Anyway, onto transport stuff…

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

James

School buses are where the cool kids are at

As if the title doesn’t say it already, but I haven’t been cool since at least 1998. Anyway, schools buses are funny things. Here in the UK, local authorities spend in excess of £1bn every year fulfilling their statutory duty to get children to school safely. There are countless thousands of school buses in the UK (and normal buses running school routes) with a lot of money ploughed into them. So why not do things that are more innovative with them?

A lot of work has been done over the years to tackle the school bus routing problem, mainly to save money by combining routes. There has been some recent interest in electrifying the school bus fleet, with the Biden Administration in the USA throwing $1bn at the problem, with such systems potentially providing school savings of up to $6000 per seat (heavily caveated). No wonder there are over 12,000 electric buses committed to in the US. Maybe, after being the reserve of nerds for so long, school buses are becoming cool.

Bypasses are valuable

No, not the highway bypasses. I mean railway bypasses, which are slightly more controversial than needed. The idea is simple: where there are intercity services that are not stopping, build a bypass so that the express trains can fly past and make good time. They are everywhere, from the Selby Diversion on the East Coast Mainline to the Ashford Viaduct on HS1. Yet the argument of sacrificing local connections for speed still comes back too often.

This comes back to an issue which is the classic balancing of capacity on a railway. Not just how do you balance local connections and intercity services, but how does a new bypass adjust that balance to deliver a reliable timetable? But this also relates to the overall role the rail trip plays in an end-to-end journey. Simply, if the rail part is a greater proportion of the overall trip, having an intercity service fly through on a bypass to save 5 minutes delay on shared tracks is good. Maybe, in some instances, having railways serve fewer places is good.

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.

• Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program (ScienceAlert)

• Younger Chinese are spurning factory jobs that power the economy (Reuters)

• Life Expectancy and Inequality (Jeremy Ney)

• Can randomised controlled trials help develop effective green innovation policies? (LSE British Politics and Policy Blog)

• Does faster public service delivery decrease corruption? Evidence from the Bangladesh Civil Service (VoxDev)

Something interesting

This infographic on how the Royal Mail makes money is a perfect visual for how hard it is to make money in logistics. Off net revenue of £12.7bn, the net profit is £617m, or a 4.8% profit margin (for comparison, Apple’s is over 25%). And that’s not bad.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

You’ve heard of Zero Emissions Zones, but how about Zero Emission Delivery Zones? This blog by Hamilton Steimer and Vishant Kothari explores this idea, currently being trialled in Los Angeles. Give it a read.