Good day my good friend.

Apologies for those of you who got two newsletters yesterday. Turns out that Substack found my scheduled newsletter after all and sent it to people. I am sending the content of this newsletter again to you all as some did not get it. What a mess. Really sorry about that!

This will be my last newsletter for a week, as next week I will be moving house. I have a series of specials lined up for all of you to be published next week, so I hope that you enjoy them. I will see you again on 12th June!

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

James

The impact of moving

For the last 4 months all I have thought about in my spare time is moving to my new home. From organising builders, carpenters, and window fitters to ordering new sofas. You know how it is. It got me to thinking about the impacts of moving home has on our travel patterns. And if I am honest, the tokenistic attempts we make to encourage major behaviour change.

Lets look at the data first. Similar to other major life course events (like going to University or having children), moving house has major impacts on travel patterns and behaviours as we are establishing new travel patterns. But whether there will be substantial behaviour change is highly unpredictable. It won’t shock you to hear, however, that people plan their new journeys more and the old travel habits die, eventually.

Yet, when it comes to moving home and travel behaviour change, we have – what – Residential Travel Plans? If done at scale with dedicated resources and near constant engagement, they can achieve significant modal shift. But their impacts can be over-estimated by a considerable degree. And, in my personal experience, many are just bits of paper to get planning permission rather than something taken seriously.

The practice is well behind the potential. In my move, the only transport advice I got was that the railway station was a 3 minute drive away (its a 10 minute walk, by the way), and that was in the promo material for the house. In the UK, around 270,000 households are moving at any one time, and around 230,000 are looking to move soon. That’s a HUGE potential demand for behaviour change being completely squandered. In times of a climate emergency, that’s appalling.

The capacity of the airways

We are transport planners, so we know a bit about modelling the capacity of transport networks. But here is a question: how do you analyse the capacity of air traffic routes? The basics are, in fact, very similar. For a simple reason: for simplicity we established air corridors based on direction and altitude, maintaining strict seperation rules, and the primary determinants of capacity are airports. This was a practice estabished after a famous mid-air collision over the Grand Canyon in the 1950s, and has remained broadly the same since.

When it comes to drones in cities, however, this basic approach causes problems due to the complex nature of airspace in urban environments. That is why there is some exciting developments in modelling the capacity of urban air space. Even if some just take wider aviation models and apply them to a city. I would love to see the interfaces with ground-based traffic models, or even a new city multi-modal model that includes airspace above the city.

Common Nonsense

I loved reading this article in The Conversation on common sense. It goes into crowd dynamics, echo chambers, and the psychology of it all. And in the conversation around low traffic neighbourhoods, to which the generally excellent (even if I often disagree with her) Claire Fox has waded in on the skeptical, “common sense” side, this is often deployed by way of objection.

Believe it or not, common sense has been extensively studied, primarily as a social and cultural phenomenon. Shockingly, it also has a political history, and indeed is a popular political slogan. And this is important. Such arguments are not an appeal to the rational in us, and cannot be discussed rationally, but focus on things such as values and social norms. So when someone says “the traffic will be awful! Its just common sense!” then don’t reply with statistics and logic. Appeal to values. Because common sense is, by and large, nonsense.

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.

• Why Gen Z prefer dogs to babies (Unherd)

• The Long, Slow Death of Global Development (American Affairs Journal)

• Is simulation theory a way to shirk responsibility for the world we’ve created? (aeon)

• Is cybersecurity an unsolvable problem? (Ars Technica)

• It’s not just a fiscal fiasco: greying economies also innovate less (The Economist)

Something interesting

Yar, me hearties! If ye wants to finds some plunder, ye best watch this YouTube. In all seriousness, I never knew salvage laws were so interesting.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

As many of you know, its Pride Month. So a big shout out to all my LGTBQ+ readers out there. For you, the thing you must do is keep being awesome. For the rest of you, its homework time,

First, if you want to understand the experience of the LGTBQ+ community in using transport, read this article. Then think about how you can help create more inclusive cities and places. Finally, just be an ally. All small steps that could help things a little bit better.