Good day my good friend.

Its bad enough to lose a child to a road traffic collision. But to lose a child in such a way and be stuck with medical expenses – I cannot imagine the pain. 4-year-old Cordelia Kuether was killed recently in a road traffic collision in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and a fundraiser has been set up to help the family with medical expenses. If you want to help a family in desperate need, then please donate.

Also, a correction! Friday’s newsletter referenced a study on the use of technology by the elderly, without providing a link to it. Here is the link to the study.

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

James

Innovating without subsidy

The most popular electric vehicle in the world is not a Tesla. Nor is it a truck. Nor is it any electric car or even electric cars collectively. It is, in fact, electric bicycles. Which have been beating the hyped up electric vehicle market hands down for years, and will continue to do so until the middle of this decade at least. All without the need to subsidise sales, or the installation of infrastructure. But, could that be about to change?

In the USA, policy makers are considering extending tax credits for purchase of electric vehicles to e-bikes. The UK Cycle to Work Scheme – which offers new bicycles at highly discounted rates through a salary sacrifice scheme – has long permitted the purchase of electric bikes from participating retailers. Might there finally be parity with electric cars? It certainly looks like it.

Streetview or Streetexperience?

Last week, a couple of interesting papers were published about the application of Google Streetview to a number of transport planning contexts. In this case, counting people using Streetview images and automating the assessment of public open space. Both are interesting applications of this technology in their own right. And the application of video technology and image processing to the counting of people and undertaking assessments is hardly a new thing in transport planning. But how useful is it?

There has been no formal research how useful each technology is to transport planners. But from experience in other sectors, and personal experience, a warning. Little is known about when such images are taken – a big issue where daily and seasonal variation is important. They should not be a substitute for local knowledge, but a means of augmenting it by helping to validate in person findings. As the old climbing saying goes: you don’t know something until its directly in front of you. So while Streetview is a useful analytical tool, seeing the places in person is critical too.

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.

• Too many jobs feel meaningless because they are (Bloomberg) – References this book which is very fun to read

• A Brief History of the Ludicrous (And Misguided) Plots to Blow Up the Moon (Popular Mechanics)

• Forget Teslas, India’s EV revolution is happening on two wheels (The Economist)

• Hong Kong’s John Lee open to using mainland Chinese-made transit link to revive scrapped Kowloon East monorail plan (South China Morning Post)

• Alcohol and Agriculture: Results from a Field Experiment in Kenya (Econ that Matters)

Something interesting

Next month I will be taking the famous Caledonian Sleeper to Scotland. Its a great service, but I could never imagine spending 97 hours on a sleeper. But this is what you can do between Toronto and Vancouver.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Transport for Wales has been working on a Confidence to Travel Project that you should read up on. But more importantly, you should check out the videos, and get some insight into the experience of those without the confidence to do things that we take for granted.