Good day my good friend.

This week, my work as a Town Councillor has mainly been about planning consultations. In addition to changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, my local council is consulting on changes to supplementary planning documents as part of their Local Plan. There are only 100 questions to answer. No wonder so many people are disengaged from planning!

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

James

Did Transport for London tell fibs?

This article on Transport Network makes a worrying claim. That Transport for London reported a reduction in road traffic collisions using a comparison of pre and during COVID data. This is poor form on behalf of Transport for London, who should have at least stated that the statistics presented were based on this comparison. And I don’t expect any ill intent on behalf of them. A question does remain, however, of how important this point is.

It is well-evidenced that traffic volumes did reduce during COVID. But the changes in total collisions takes place more slowly than changes in traffic volumes. Though the speed of this change varies according to whether it is a high traffic volume environment or not – in other words, the pace of change in total collisions accelerates as traffic congestion worsens. So, in the end, TfL probably didn’t lie (but they didn’t tell the whole truth), and the real truth of the changes that have happened is hard to determine.

I want to get away, I want to get away

Nope, not that song by Lenny Kravitz. Nor is it talking about evacuations from a flood or other natural disaster (or human made one). But this is about the role of escaping as a reason to travel. As a means of escapism. You know, that idea that people who have invested billions in city centre real estate say is why the commute is so great and that everyone should be working again in offices now. But in all seriousness, someone has now studied the role of transport as a means of escapism.

The research does not indicate that escapism is a major reason for travelling. But it does indicate that people do travel for this reason, and there is a significant utility in doing so. And in some instances, speeding up travel would be of significant disadvantage to these people who are less able to travel. Which runs contrary to everything we assume about the value of transport as a way of getting around. It would appear that many people love taking the slow way purely to get away from life.

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 a hotter, more crowded world, immigration is inevitable (Quartz)

• Remote Work Is Costing Manhattan More Than $12 Billion a Year (CityLab)

• War and subsidies have turbocharged the green transition (The Economist)

• Why craft beer fosters better communities than its corporate competitors (The Conversation)

• Can We Stop Aging? (Scientific American)

Something interesting

Big Oil Companies spout climate BS. Literally everyone is not shocked. But this is a good TED Talk regardless.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

This research report by the Technical University of Gratz got a bit of press recently, by claiming that plug-in hybrids perform worse on emissions in the real world compared to the lab. Read it, and come to your own conclusions. But remember, there is a different between cheating the tests, and failures in ensuring that the labs represent real-world conditions as closely as possible (harder to do than you may think).