Good day my good friend.

Yesterday, I spent a fair amount of the day enjoying the sights of West Yorkshire. And you know what, we have some rather nice railway architecture here in the UK. Do you remember when we treated stations as grand entrances as opposed to modular things that can be quickly built on the cheap?

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

James

Walking and cycling makes you happier

In the latest version in an ongoing series of ‘research that confirms what we already know, but that’s a good thing,’ Norwegian researchers found that people who walked and cycled more are generally happier. What was interesting about their research was that they did this study during COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns. This came out in the research that showed that people were (more) miserable using public transport.

But the links between mood and transport are a bit more complicated than walking and bikes = good. In fact, there is evidence that travel doesn’t really affect our mood in a statistically significant way (tell that to someone stuck in traffic on the M25), and so other factors like whether you are running late to begin with and friends and family are likely to have a more significant bearing on our mood when travelling. But maybe the train being late makes things a tad worse.

Ridership versus coverage versus dynamism

Many of you will have heard of the ridership v. coverage trade-off when it comes to planning public transport. Key to the ridership aspect is that of frequency. Not just because of it making best use of the existing vehicles in a public transport organisations fleet, but because from a customer perspective the higher frequencies make the system more integrated. In essence, delays start to not matter. But a coverage system can also be an integrated one, and that poses a problem when services are delayed throughout a system. Nobody wants to wait an hour for the next bus.

This research paper adds a further dimension to this. That of dynamism. While the experiment is computational, they estimate a dynamism gap, and an associated value, for an integrated on-demand / scheduled public transport network. In essence, if there was a degree of autonomous (but not necessarily technological) decision making in the system, what benefits could be accrued. It doesn’t really conclude anything, but its an interesting way of thinking about the challenges of integration in coverage public transport systems.

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.

• In Some Textbooks, Climate Change Content Is Few and Far Between (Undark)

• Washington Has Trouble Refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve After 220 Million Barrel Draw (Naked Capitalism)

• Why we should all learn to love stinging nettles (The Conversation)

• Edge Cities With and Without Historic Cores (Pedestrian Observations)

• Using machine learning to assess the livelihood impact of electricity access (Nature)

Something interesting

There is a story behind every road. And as this video shows, its not always a pretty one. If you got enraged by Robert Moses, get ready to have your blood pressure soar.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Get annoyed by the appalling state of WiFi on British trains. If you don’t do that, read this really interesting article on what happens when a big ship starts to sink. In short: contain it, slice it, dice it, get rid of it.