Good day my good friend.

Looking ahead to the next few weeks, time is going to get very tight. I have several projects that are reporting over the coming weeks that will make it hard to both write this newsletter and have a life. So, this is a quick newsletter with a few interesting bits and bobs I have recently seen that you may find, well, interesting.

📕 I have co-authored a book on Mobility-as-a-Service, which is a comprehensive guide on this important new transport service. It is available from the Institution of Engineering and Technology and now Amazon.

💼 I am also available for freelance transport planning consultancy, through my own company Mobility Lab. You can check out what I do here. 

🥁 Without further ado…

To start with – events! On Monday it’s Transport Planning Day. Not only will I be at the evening event in London, but I will also be presenting at a webinar at lunchtime for the RTPI and TPS North East on Transport and Planning. Both are free to attend, so I will see you there. Plus also, in early December, at the Local Transport Summit (which is not free). Which is being held in Bedford – so just around the corner from me!

Onto research. Allanfield Consulting published a very interesting report on remote working and agglomeration effects. Specifically how we quantify the effects in estimating the benefits or costs in transport scheme appraisal. Essentially, it concludes that while data is limited, remote working could, in some instances, reduce the agglomeration benefits of schemes to not-unsubstantial degree. So the benefits and costs need separating out further to reflect that different sectors and places will have different degrees of remote working.

Someone on the London Underground Sub-Reddit is setting a challenge each day: the top rated comment each day changes the Tube Map. Naturally, the internet is going to internet. My personal favourite was when someone suggested all the Acton Stations be merged into a single interchange, which is renamed East Ealing.

Speaking of which, Farringdon station has one of my favourite station frontages on the whole network. And I got to visit it again recently. It looks lovely.

A few books are worth reading in this somewhat troubled time, even if their titles are not exactly what you would think of as inspiring. I previously recommended At Work In The Ruins by Douglas Hine. Collapse by Jared Diamond is surprisingly positive given the subject of collapsing societies. The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac is probably the most important climate book I have read. While They Thought They Were Free by Milton Meyer is the best book I have read about the rise of fascism, and it might really scare you into taking action.

Procurement is about the most boring subject in history. But done right, it can actually achieve a load of great outcomes. This CIHT report on building carbon reduction into procurement processes is brilliant. You should read it.

When rolling out electric vehicle charging points, we often worry about grid capacity. When the other side of the equation is energy demand and the ability to ‘flex’ it to account for constraints on the grid. Some excellent recent publications by the Energy Demand Research Centre shed some light on this. One on the range of flexibility services offered to energy customers. The other on the experience of those with smart pre-payment meters using the Demand Flexibility Service. Read them both.

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