Good day my good friend.

Yesterday, I couldn’t help but think a lot about the first items of news in today’s newsletter. Not just the implications of it from a policy perspective, but also how much its findings reminded me of this Goofy cartoon on Motor Mania from the 1950s. On a related note, I hate to be all ‘old man yells at cloud’ about this, but removing Looney Tunes from streaming services? Sacrilege! Anyway, 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

We can quantify car brain

Yesterday, this very, very good pre-print paper dropped. Its probably the first academic study of “car brain.” I mean, we have known car brain exists for a while. We know that attitudes to road safety of vulnerable road users differs significantly to that of drivers. And we know that driver attitudes to road safety is significantly different to that of everyone else generally, even compared to when those same drivers are travelling by other modes. But this paper actually quantifies it.

Some of the results are terrifying, like how changing two words on a question reveals vastly different attitudes to car-related risks. But this is needed research. It quantifies the attitudinal problem of hardcore car drivers and the general population. And so we can start to think of behaviour change strategies and policy initiatives to tackle an addiction. I’m still mulling what this means, and I urge you to as well. What a paper.

Britishvolt shows how transport is a sometimes risky economic investment

Ask a transport planner what the economic benefits of transport are, and they will quote you values in the TAG Data Book or something similar. Ask a politician, and while they may say stuff like “transport investment is good for the economy,” they may also say that transport itself creates jobs. As much as I sometimes dislike the automotive sector, in the UK it employs some 780,000 people in well-paying, accessible jobs. Investing in transport is as much an economic and business policy as it is a transport one. Its why the UK government department for business has a mobility grand challenge – there is money to be made there.

But in business, it can all go belly-up. As British EV battery start-up Britishvolt did yesterday. Investing in the supply chain, infrastructure, and skills to realise transport as a business opportunity is hard. Its a decades long commitment to creating the market and then exploiting it. The UK has invested heavily in battery technology for decades, and is struggling to capitalise because the skills and market are not mature. While we transport planners need to think about wider social and environmental objectives, we also need to be concious about the kinds of business winners we will be choosing in the future. And how we create the conditions to maximise their chances of success.

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.

• Earth Care: A History of Community Gardening From Schools to Prisons (MIT Press Reader)

• For the first time since the 1960s, China’s population is shrinking (The Economist)

• Japan confronts a stark reality: a nation of old people (National Geographic)

• How games can make behavioural science better (Nature)

• The legislative battles to watch in 2023 (New Statesman)

Something interesting

If you are after a YouTube channel to watch, I highly recommend the Fully Charged Show. It gives a really good overview of current developments in the EV market, and this video on the potential impact of the Tesla truck is no different.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Read this excellent paper on Key questions for road investment and spending. The authorship reads like a Harlem Globetrotters of transport planning academia, and the paper reads like it as well. But a special mention goes to Glenn Lyons whose LinkedIn post alerted me to it.