Good day my good friend.

No time to chat. I have a meeting to be at this evening where we will be talking Town Council stuff. Its about as interesting as it sounds. So lets get on with it, then.

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

James

Travelling healthily is healthy. Nobody is shocked

I don’t need to tell you about the health benefits of some forms of travel, especially walking and cycling. I’ll let the literature tell you that. But are some forms of more active travel more beneficial to health than others. You can make the case that walking to the bus stop and taking the bus to work is less healthy than cycling all the way (though the latter is still good for you). But what if you had to choose between walking and cycling, say?

A new study explores this, and finds that the relationship is complicated. While it concludes that travel by both is generally good for your health, cycling is marginally better. Maybe because their results on walking are not conclusive, whereas the results for cycling were. But it makes sense, as cycling is a slightly more intensive activity. Not that we should choose between them, but this kind of detail is interesting and fun to know.

On inclusivity, progress is slow

Its fair to say that when it comes to moving our focus in transport on the white middle-age guy with a white-collar job (i.e. people like me), progress is slow. I get the sense through organisations like Women in Transport and Women in Mobility that things are moving in the right direction on the gender equity side (if somewhat slowly). But progress elsewhere is painfully slow.

This review of practice in South and South East Asia is a case in point. Where in some cases equity isn’t even written into law, though cultural and societal attitudes do not help. Nor does the lack of tools to help us be more equitable. This can be (and is) depressing to read, but I liken it to steering an oil tanker. The wheel might be hard to port, but the tanker takes ages to make its move. But when it does move, it will take something special to stop it.

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.

• Remembering the Golden Age of Airline Food (Atlas Obscura)

• I Asked ChatGPT To Control My Life, and It Immediately Fell Apart (Vice)

• Buckle up because El Niño is almost here, and it’s going to get hot (The Verge)

• The war on Japanese knotweed (The Guardian)

• Implementation, compliance, and pandemic legal obligations (Science)

Something interesting

To some of you, this video covering induced demand may border on heresey. But I post it here to provoke thoughts, which I very much look forward to hearing!

If you do nothing else today, then do this

The Asian Development Bank bang out some great reports. And this one on digital supply chains and resilience is another cracker. Well worth a read, and great for thinking about problems of resilience in a new way.