Good day my good friend.
Just when you thought climate change was giving it a bit of a rest, the UK and much of Europe is having a bit of a heat wave. Which is leading to snow shortages in the Alps of all places. But for my fellow Brits who are concerned about future winter heat, fear not. For there is a good chance that climate change will disrupt the Gulf Stream, making these fair islands colder in the future. Because of course that’s what will happen. Still, carry on polluting at your usual rate, I’m sure it will be fine.
For this newsletter, I need to give a special shoutout to Robin Lovelace, who’s Mastodon profile provided many of the links for today’s newsletter.
If you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include in this newsletter, you can email me.
James
Large cities are worse for sustainable transport
What? I can hear it from many transport professionals now. Heresey! Lynch the unbeliever! Down with this sort of thing (careful now)! Large cities are good for sustainable transport, aren’t they? Yes, they could always be better, but their sheer size encourages the use of sustainable transport, particularly public transport. And in the UK, we have data that shows that the places with the lowest carbon emissions from transport are generally in cities. What gives? Turns out, you can have too much city.
This is because of a very simple thing. As city sizes increase, trips by all modes become longer, as this analysis of over 800 cities shows. This means that, while the percentage of trips by public transport increases as the city gets larger, this is offset by the increasing distance travelled by car. The thing is, the National Travel Survey data on trip lengths by region appear to back this up, with longer car trip distances in larger conurbations (notably London and the West Midlands) compared to other areas.
Batteries make scheduling buses harder
Running buses on electric batteries is a good idea. So good the UK Government is putting money into it. So good that the use of batteries on buses is common place. There is a good example in Milton Keynes near me of the use of inductive charging on bus routes. London proudly boasts about the size of its fleet. And that’s just two examples. They are becoming more common, but this also creates an issue that you may not have thought of.
Clearly, these vehicles need charging. And so you have to plan time into the schedule to charge them. And when the slack in your schedule is very limited (as you want to run the service with as few buses as possible), that’s a problem. Modelling in China has shown that scheduling can be augmented with reliability estimates and estimates of costs of electricity to determine optimum times to charge. But the relatively high relative error in the model shows that the reliability of services will determine the ultimate success of any plans for charging buses. Put simply, making the buses run on time is a great way of encouraging the uptake of electric buses.
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.
‘We’re being a little more picky’: How cities are rethinking their trees in the face of climate change (Fast Company)
Monty Python’s silly walks recommended by doctors to stay healthy (Big Issue)
No Place to Call Home (Capital and Main)
How 1950s bombsites in the UK were turned into adventure playgrounds (The Conversation)
Something interesting
Many of the air routes that we currently have in the skies were set down in the 1950s and 1960s, to provide order to the sky following some fatal collisions. But a big part of the reason why they are where they are is simple geography (or in aviation terms, making sure this is an airport nearby in case it all goes badly wrong). As this excellent video by Real Life Lore on the lack of flights over Tibet shows.
If you do nothing else today, then do this
You need to check out A/B Street. Its a basic traffic simulation of the effects of making small changes to roads and how they will affect cyclists, public transport users, pedestrians, and drivers. And you can apply it anywhere, and its free to use.
Mobility Matters 