Good day my good friend.

This last weekend has been a lesson in the art of using the internet to enable trip reductions in the Gleave household. Not content with working from home most days, on Friday I used click and collect on the B&Q website to pick up the fence posts I needed to build the fence, while on my trip to take the dogs for a walk (so 1 trip and one chained-trip as opposed to 4 trips). Then we had our weekly shop delivered (1 trip instead of 2). Just from that, 3 trips were saved, before you count the impact of working from home.

I find it amusing how when it comes to Avoid – Shift – Improve, we often speak of either placing land uses close to one another, or this nebulous thing of “the internet” reducing the need to travel. Yet we don’t often think of quite how many trips the internet is already saving. It is something that, I feel, is hard to understand but easy to imagine.

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🚗 Car free like you mean it

On September 24th this year, it will be World Car Free Day. The premise around this is a simple one: encourage people to go without their car for a day, close off some streets to cars, and give pedestrians and cyclists a free reign. Several years ago, I ran such an event myself as part of my old job, working with the community to close off some streets in the Beecroft area of Dunstable for a few hours to stop traffic rat-running through the streets. I especially remember the Highways Agency, who operated the main A5 trunk road at the time, getting very vexed about the plans.

Car free days are extremely popular around the world. Shenzen in China, London, the thousands of towns that take part as part of the associated Mobility Week in Europe, Vancouver, and many others. The most famous of all car free days are undoubtedly those hosted by Bogota in Columbia, and Jakarta in Indonesia. The former was pioneered by Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, meanwhile Jakarta gives over the area around Sudirman-Thamrin Avenues to pedestrians and cyclists every weekend.

I am a person who likes to see the impact of initiatives to bolster active travel, and so it is somewhat disappointing to see that not only is the impact of such initiatives not measured, but sometimes their impacts are highly variable. As in, while they may encourage sustainable travel and improve air quality in some areas, in other areas they do not. Interestingly, in researching the impact of the Car Free Day in Jakarta on air pollution, the researchers concluded that while the impact of the initiative itself was not optimal, that was beside the point:

The result shows that [Car Free Day] is not optimal in terms of the environment effect, but it is very good to maintain the program because it can be as a good health campaign tools, familiarize a healthy lifestyle and as a public space. However, the implementation must be improved from spatial planning and waste management.

This kind of conclusion chimes well with me. When people seek to change things in favour of sustainable transport, they are often challenged with the need to provide evidence, and when they do something they should measure their impact. Something that I mostly support.

But measuring this impact, you can confuse impact with identifying what is valuable about what you are doing. Sometimes, the value in doing something can be found simply in doing it. Play Streets, for example, should not be determined valuable by counting the number of children playing and saying that only when 5 children are playing consistently it is worth continuing. People would say that its just valuable in providing the space for children to play.

So the fact that Car Free Days have little by the way of evidence of impact is fine with me. The value of such days can be found in simply providing space for people to enjoy the area as they see fit for a few hours without having to fight traffic. And if as a result then a few more people walk and cycle more, then that’s great as well.

Sometimes, what you can measure does not correlate with what is valuable about what you do. And that is just fine.

What you can do: While you may not be able to demonstrate the value of what you do, qualitative research can get you some insights on what is valuable. This great paper on ‘action research’ by Karen Lucas gives a few ideas on how to integrate qualitative research into transport actions, and you should read it. Then identify opportunities to integrate qualitative research into your monitoring and evaluation.

👩‍🎓 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.

Does Crowding Have a More Complicated Effect on Public Transport Users with Respect to Perceived Travel Time?

TL:DR – People on crowded trains perceive travel time to be longer.

How stakeholders influence MaaS implementation? An analysis based on evolutionary game theory

TL:DR – Government subsidy impacts the tactics of stakeholders the most.

Car harm: A global review of automobility’s harm to people and the environment

TL:Dr – An extremely cathartic rant dressed up as a journal article.

Investigating the impacts of bike lanes on bike share ridership: A holistic approach and demonstration

TL:DR – Nearly half of trips on a new cycle track in Hamilton were induced.

✊ Amazing people doing amazing things

I’m going to stretch the meaning of amazing people, here, as occasionally the people who you don’t like do something that is good. Anybody who has ever tried to get to a football match knows it can be a pain. Manchester City have tried to overcome this by funding a network of buses to the Etihad Stadium on match days – no fewer than 17 routes. They also have a tram service to the stadium every 6 minutes and public bike share. Which all, to be fair to them, is a good thing. Now, if they could stop winning everything, then everyone would be happy…

📺 On the (You)Tube

Not Just Bikes tackles an old truth that still stands up. Namely just plonking an extra lane on a road doesn’t sole congestion in the long term.

📻 On the Wireless

The always-excellent Streets Ahead podcast has produced an episode on the problem of cargo bike storage. What is great is the insight from potential users of cargo bikes, as opposed to going to celebrate some bike parking being installed.

🖼 Graphic Design

Source: Visual Capitalist

Being able to afford where you live is an important determinant of travel patterns. And increasingly, it is becoming harder for people on average salaries to afford renting in many cities. In the US, according to this infographic, the problem is particularly acute in Miami, Boston, and Chula Vista in California.

📚 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.

• You Sound Like A Bot (The Verge)
• Students lose out as cities and states give billions in property tax breaks to businesses (The Conversation)
• When a Digit Makes a Difference (Econlife)
• Massive solar farms could provoke rainclouds in the desert (Science)
• Some People Actually Kind of Love Deepfakes (Wired)

📰 The bottom of the news

For those of you not up-to-date with the latest news in German football, fans are extremely unhappy about the idea of private investment firms getting involved in the German game through a stake in future forecasting revenues. While fans at last weekend’s VfL Bochum v. Bayern Munich match threw tennis balls on the pitch in protest, a week before fans at the Hamburg v. Hannover match had something just as creative, and even more transport relevant. They attached bike locks to the goals. The match was delayed by half an hour while staff tried to remove them.

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