Good day my good friend.

Its taken me a while to get through the podcast backlog, but listening to this Streets Ahead podcast about what it is like to be a Councillor really struck a chord. I can tell you from experience, you may not like the people who become Councillors, but you don’t do it for the prestige or the money. As you don’t get either. But you do get a lot of hate. And Councillors remember the people who are nice to them. Remember that.

Also, listening to Behind the B*stards podcast episodes about dictator and all-round b*stard Nicolae Ceaușescu reminds me of his own folly, the Transfagarasan Highway. Which even I will admit looks amazing to drive on. For those of you interested in it, here is the Top Gear segment where they actually drove the road.

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

James

Projecting your biases on autonomous vehicles into the future

This article by David Zipper on autonomous vehicles being a climate disaster has got a fair bit of traction during the last week. The central thesis is this: autonomous vehicles will definitely result in more trips and the carbon footprint of electric vehicles. Which is obviously bad. And I don’t think anyone is arguing for more vehicle miles on the road. But false certainty like this makes me feel uneasy. A vision of the future is very compelling when you agree with it, and when you agree with it is when you should be extra cautious.

For one thing, this article looks at the acting of a single phenomenon: the Jevons Paradox, where efficiency improvements lead to more consumption. First, there is significant debate about the extent to which this paradox exists in transport. Behavioural changes are extremely complex, and the rebound effect observed is often difficult to test. After all, over the course of decades, surely efficiencies cannot be the only thing driving changes in travel patterns, and thus the degree of rebound from those efficiencies achieved?

Additionally, there has been some good research on potential changes in driver behaviours. But they are not without their flaws. For instance, the excellent and often-cited paper on Tesla drivers using autopilot driving more miles compared to other Tesla drivers fails to control for factors like income – which is well-known to influence miles driven. And the use of chauffeurs are not a perfect replication of autonomous vehicle use, purely due to the presence of the chauffeur. This is not to say that these are bad studies – far from it. But that studies seeking to understand speculative behaviour need to have their flaws more closely considered than those based on observed and tested behaviours.

There is also the need, as part of responsible strategy making, to consider the alternative. Autonomous shared vehicles have been modelled in terms of their impacts, admittedly with the same blind faith in the power of their vision as Mr Zipper. Ultimately, this is what transport planners should be doing. Exploring alternatives, testing assumptions underpinning them, and guiding decision makers towards a shared vision. And not relying just on our own preferences to make an argument for the future.

People who don’t like a thing don’t do another thing. Therefore we must judge them

Last week, climate charity Possible published some statistics where those London Borough’s who have come out against the Ultra Low Emission Zone expansion were found to have installed fewer electric vehicle charging points than London Borough’s who were in support. To be fair, its a decent analysis, and the conclusions I largely agree with.

But the method, I’m not so sure. Possible say they submitted FOI requests to local authorities to get the data, when they could have consulted DfT statistics and the National Chargepoint Registry, both of which are correct and validated up to January. This shows a fair amount of variation from their statistics. From this data, on average Borough’s opposing the ULEZ have 130 charging points installed (compared to 97 in Possible’s data), 181 in those seeking to delay or weaken the ULEZ (v. 166), and 452 in those who support it (v. 456). I mean, it still says the same thing, and I think that those who oppose the ULEZ expansion are idiotic, but lets at least do the data collection well.

High Speed Rail means more visitors in the off-season

I must admit, that I am still very annoyed at Eurostar’s decision to axe the routes from London to Disneyland, and to the Alps. Thanks Brexit. But leisure travel more generally is a market that we often do not talk about. Despite the fact that leisure trips take up a significant proportion of our trips. Although the number of trips for holidays and short breaks are still a relatively low proportion of this.

But this paper of the impact of High Speed Rail on tourism is very interesting indeed. Taking Spain as an example, it shows that the better the place is connected by High Speed Rail, the less the effects of seasonality. Or, visitors become more evenly spread across the year through growth, decline, and redistribution. Imagine a transport investment having that big an impact on the visitor economy, to the degree where it affects the type of visitor and when during the year. Incredible.

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.

• The Ohio train derailment underscores the dangers of the plastics boom (Grist)

• ‘Tipping Point’: IEA Says Surging Renewables to Be World’s Top Electricity Source by 2025 (Common Dreams)

• Why we’re still building islands: Risky but desirable artificial islands remain popular urban solutions (City Monitor)

• The oil from Super Bowl chicken wings is about to get a second life as airplane fuel (Fast Company)

• Benchmarking Adoption of E-commerce across the G20 Members (Asian Development Bank)

Charts of the Week

It is Black History Month this month, and I thought that it was worthwhile teasing out some the racial disparities in travel here in the UK. I will do a more comprehensive analysis for the next special, but even just looking at total trips and car ownership, the differences along racial lines are clear.

Something interesting

House affordability determines where people live, and consequently who and how people travel. I’m guessing that from these prices, a lot of people use helicopters and yachts in Monaco.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

My good friend Marie Godward would like your input into a project on medical drones. Its the AiRMOUR project that aims to tackle a real life application of drones and other urban air mobility technologies – Emergency Medical Services. The project is aiming to collect the view of residents of the UK and professionals. This survey aims to understand the level of public acceptance of the technology. So fill it in. And forward this on to others for them to fill in (if they live in the UK, then ideal!).