You cannot drive everywhere in the zoo, much of the zoo is only accessible on foot, you cannot see many animals close up without getting out of the car, and the only real benefit in terms of the experience of seeing the animals is one small section with some deer in it where you cannot walk (but you can ride through on the train the zoo operates). But why, when ZSL, who own the zoo, lists climate change as a major risk to animals and their natural habitats are cars allowed in a zoo?

Simple. Its a trade off. While most people parked for free in the car park and walked, many people paid the £30 charge. And that money goes towards conservation work of the zoo and its breeding programmes, including for many species extinct in the wild. That is a choice made by the zoo to help achieve its vision.

Though it was slightly galling to see “use cars less” as a suggestion to help save the Red Panda.

But there are other such dilemmas everywhere. For instance, shifting rapidly to a low carbon economy will significantly affect low income countries. Impacts can be mitigated to some degree, and I am not saying that we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But there are hard choices to be made about who wins and who loses in creating the future that we want.

A sad trend that I have often seen is the ‘othering’ of those who raise concerns. The reality is that it is not just those who we consider ‘deserving’ of negative impacts like the richest in society who will be affected, but others too who you may not intend to harm. Things acting like a system in its purest sense.

For us seeking to make a better world, this is not something that can be solved with a magical method and lots of compromise. But only with plenty of empathy (and where possible action) with those negatively affected by our vision, and some degree of personal comfort that whatever we seek to achieve, there will be losers from it.

What you can do: I cannot answer questions about your own personal comfort with there being people who lose out in your preferred future. Other than I feel for you and it is a hard, but necessary, realisation. But I can help you identify who those people may be, and develop strategies for mitigating the impact.

You will be glad to hear that as you are developing your plans and vision of the future, there are loads of methods to help identify who are the most affected and their experiences. Simple Ethnography, User Experience Fishbowl, and Wicked Questions are some such methods. Deploying these will help.

Another thing is to simply have an honest conversation with family, friends, and colleagues. Tell them your vision, and ask them who could lose out from it coming true. A simple conversation can provide more insight than many hours of research, and can help you understand who will win and lose in your future.

Finally, Equality Impact Assessments are essential tools for understanding the impacts of schemes and strategies, and helping to shape them. Use them, interrogate their findings, and demand to see how they have been used to influence decision making.

🎓 From academia

The clever clogs at our universities have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.

Improving the service of E-bike sharing by demand pattern analysis: A data-driven approach

TL:DR – Balancing demand and supply is hard, but essential to making such systems work.

Working from home and subjective wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of pre-COVID-19 commuting distance and mode choices

TL:DR – We don’t know whether working from home has a long term impact on subjective wellbeing. We should study it.

The impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on health and working conditions of Swiss bus drivers

TL:DR – It sucked being a bus driver during COVID. And unions are good.

Optimizing the battery charging and swapping infrastructure for electric short-haul aircraft—The case of electric flight in Norway

TL:DR – If we are to change planes over to electric planes, it will take a lot of planning.

✊ Awesome people doing awesome things

The Devon and Cornwall Rail Partnership has been doing amazing, and underrated, things for decades. You could run a whole series based upon them doing awesome things. But I wanted to focus on one thing that has helped to inspire children. Namely Coco’s Carbon Reduction Challenge.

Rebecca Catterall, their Development Officer, worked with 8 schools around the Looe Valley and Tamar Valley Lines to get children to become green travel ambassadors, and in turn to influence their friends and family through pester power. This included giving free rides on the train.

The impact? One school counted the total carbon saved over one month by families at the school. It was the same as driving from Cornwall to Scotland and back 3 times. Real, measurable impact. We should do more of this kind of thing.

📼 On the (You)Tube

I love a spot of quick build, tactical urbanism, whatever you want to call it. This exploration of such infrastructure in Denver, and all its positives and negatives, is very good indeed. And a good source of inspiration for how to get things done.

What you can do: Start off by reading the Tactical Urbanists Guide. It will inspire you with ideas on how to progress with some short term, tactical changes to streets that favour walking and cycling specifically. Identify initiatives that may work in your area.

Then, and perhaps as critically, work with others – your local councillors, neighbours, work colleagues, anyone – to identify how you will judge success. And then how to turn that success into something permanent. Will it be by the number of people walking and cycling? How will you collect that data? What funding do you need to make it permanent?

Then, be a tactical urbanist and simply do it.

🖼️ Graphic Design

On the face of this, these figures about 20mph zone compliance are depressing – most vehicles exceed the speed limit. But I urge you to think again. First, 20mph zones reduce average speeds regardless. Second, its a reminder to design roads for the speeds we want people to travel at, and don’t just rely on signs.

📚 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.

• SpaceX and satellite companies are stealing the night sky (Fast Company)

• The Price of Fragmentation (Foreign Affairs)

• How Old Can Humans Get? (Scientific American)

• Is the AI boom already over? (Vox)

• Fixing the World’s Oldest Trolleys Is Like Solving a Century-Old Jigsaw Puzzle (Atlas Obscura)

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