Good day my good friend.

Thankfully, whatever was bugging me enough to disrupt yesterday’s newsletter appears to have packed it in. At least for 24 hours anyway. And just enough to watch people playing politics with the planned Ultra Low Emission Zone in London. Which is no shock I guess. But a disappointing one none-the-less.

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

James

Euston, we have a problem

Its not often that transport gets to be headline news in The S*n1 newspaper. But HS2 potentially stopping short of London Euston station caught the imagination so much that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to come out and rubbish it. I mean, if you ignore the fact that the site for the HS2 station has been cleared, and that the legal powers to build have been granted, and that funding has been secured, and contracts let to build the station and approach, then there is the possibility that it could not go ahead.

But, that does not mean that the new station at Euston does not have its challenges. The most pressing of which is sweating the station platforms so as to cater for HS2 and the existing services. Especially as there is one less platform than planned. Assumptions on capacity depend on planned service patterns on the existing West Coast Mainline, utilisation assumptions, and the degree of wiggle room you want to maintain when something goes wrong. There is certainly a view that restricting the number of platforms to reduce costs of the scheme gives very little resiliency for not much cost saving. Right now, with construction starting, we are at the commitment point, or certainly the point by which the only way to change the spec is to cut it to keep within budget. When the scheme opens, we will find out if we have enough platforms.

Airports as places

I’m going to start this section with a confession: I like Heathrow Airport. Its a really nice airport that provides a good customer experience considering how busy it is, especially Terminal 5 and the Queen’s Terminal. Its partly why I read this article with interest on “(Auto)ethnography of elite passage and (non)-placeness at London Heathrow Airport.” Or simply, taking an ethnographic approach to understanding airports as places, or non-places.

The role of placemaking in airports, and other interchanges, has usually boiled down to ‘making it look nice.’ But they are places to stop, think, reflect, and transport. Places like stations and airports play a unique role of gateways, and their places allow them to project regional identity to visitors. But we still treat them as a movement function and not a place function, despite recent work on Mobility Hubs. Time to change tack.

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.

• Everything We Know About the Facial Recognition Scandal at Madison Square Garden (Gizmodo)

• China’s Global Mega-Projects Are Falling Apart (Wall Street Journal)

• The Paper Trail: the Failure of Building Regulations (Inside Housing)

• Climate Reparations Won’t Work (Wired)

• Ransom Note (Private Eye)

Something interesting

I’m posting this purely because it made me laugh, and for no other reason. As a nearby resident of the (to be fair, often harshly) maligned town of Luton, I found this incredibly funny indeed.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

The Transportation Research Bureau have provided a fantastic overview of the current state of research on micromobility. You should read it.