Good day my good friend.
Last night reminded me why I hate driving so much. Having done a presentation at the Home Builders Federation Planning Forum in Windsor, I had the joy of trying to get around the busiest section of the M25 during “rush” hour on a Thursday night.
Oh, and my engine decided it wanted to die after I was advised by Waze to turn off at Great Denham, as apparently coolant has been gradually leaking for a while. I truly, truly hate driving.
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💰 Want it? Pay for it.
As someone with a more than passing interest in economics. I highly recommend anyone read the works of the legendary Adam Smith, the author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (or more commonly known as “the Wealth of Nations”). This book, even 250 years after it was first published, is truly an incredible insight into how markets for goods and services work, and the biggest barriers to their effective operation.
Despite what grifters and ultra-capitalists want you to believe (including the Adam Smith Institute, who having nothing to do with Adam Smith at all), what Adam Smith considered to be one of the biggest barriers to effective market operation was not government regulation, but Rent Seeking. To try and summarise his ideas simply, he agreed that where land was being put to productive use it is justifiable to charge a rent on it, where rent is charged with the purpose of extracting value from the success of others, that is a barrier to effective market operation.
To use a practical example. Lets say you owned some land. You then build an office block on that land and rent it out in a manner that covers your operational costs and recoups your investment in the office block. That’s economic rent, which is good. But, if you find out one of your tenants has suddenly become wildly successful as a business, and you decide to charge them more because they are successful, that is rent seeking. By doing so, value is being extracted from the economy.
Why on Earth am I talking about the theories of Adam Smith? For a simple reason. Transport planning is full of examples of rent seeking. And one that I have come across in my past work on engaging with excluded groups is something simple: not paying people for their time.
Christiane Link covered this somewhat in a recent, excellent newsletter about not paying disability advocates for their time to help your organisation become better. A lot of transport planners are extracting value (rent seeking) for free from subject matter experts who are vulnerable in order to benefit themselves. And in a round about way try and justify this. Namely “if you help us now, we might improve your transport system later.”
But when they ask a simple question of “will I get paid for giving you my insight which you need” we get funny about it? As if giving this out of the goodness of their hearts is not enough? Why should they not be compensated for it? And what is wrong with them asking to charge for their expertise?
I must admit to having this expectation myself in the past. Why should they not provide their input for free? But the longer that I have worked in this space, the more I realised that if we want to make our transport system a fairer one, we really need to do better and start treating people fairly on this. As transport planners, we work in a world where we pay consultants £800 a day to write up reports without thinking about it. Yet someone who is mobility impaired asks for £200 to attend a workshop, and they are being unreasonable?
Sadly, this is a fight that still continues to this day. Where the fight for doing something that is simply fair goes on and on, and against the expectation that the most vulnerable people should help us purely out of the goodness of their hearts. Like we are doing them a favour by involving them.
One of my most significant insights that I gained from Adam Smith was realising your own value, and charging for it accordingly. That is how a free market should work. Its about time us transport planners realised that there is a free market out there for the expertise to make a fairer and more inclusive transport network. We need to pay for that. And we should welcome the opportunity to do that.
What you can do about it: Very simple, really. If you are looking to engage with vulnerable groups, make some budget to pay for their time. I would suggest around £200 per person is the minimum level that you should be looking at.
👩🎓 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.
TL:DR – Lots of countries measure walking trips differently, and there are serious problems with how to measure it.
TL:DR – Autonomous ships will impact seafarers a LOT.
A filtering system to solve the large-scale shared autonomous vehicles Dial-a-Ride Problem
TL:DR – Researchers spend time finding out that piling more people into single vehicles is more efficient.
Is electric truck a viable alternative to diesel truck in long-haul operation?
TL:DR – Its feasible, but not practical.
✊ Amazing people doing amazing things
A little girl managed to lose her doll while transferring between planes at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. An American Airlines pilot heard of the story, contacted the lost and found at the airport, found the doll, and flew to Texas with the doll to hand it back to a very happy girl. Sometimes, someone just doing a good deed is amazing.
📺 On the (You)Tube
Turns out building better cities is hard. Entrenched attitudes, market forces, actual space, and people’s demand for services make it hard. As this excellent video demonstrates, and more.
🖼 Graphic Design
Population Growth by Region (Source: Visual Capitalist)
If you want to know where the change in demand for travel is going to be, look at where the change in population will be. This graphic makes it very clear where in the world the population growth is taking place, and will take place.
📚 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.
- Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone (Nature)
- Pi, pie, and the making of a mathematical star (The Daily Edition)
- Cats aren’t jerks. They’re just misunderstood (Washington Post)
- Battle for the electric car market (German Foreign Policy)
- The Rise and Fall of Japan’s National Public Railway Labor Unions (S(ubstack)-Bahn)
📰 The bottom of the news
Non-transport related this one. But when the solar eclipse hit the UK on 11th August 1999, my family drove to Teignmouth in Devon (about an hour from where we lived in Barnstaple) to go and experience it. One of the insane parts of the experience was hearing monkeys at the nearby zoo going absolutely crazy when the eclipse happened. Now, scientists are planning to study animal behaviour during such events.
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