Good day my good friend.
A public service announcement for you all. This will be my last newsletter for two weeks, as I will be taking some well-earned rest. I’m heading to the Norfolk Broads. Where I plan to spend some time putting my feet up, reading books, and walking the dog. Which is just what I need.
🗓️ Mobility Camp is back, and this September we are going to Cardiff. It promises to be an amazing day. It would be amazing if you can be there, or maybe sponsor the day.
💼 I am also available for freelance transport planning consultancy, through my own company Mobility Lab. You can check out what I do here.
🌙 Every night I lie in bed…
As I write this on the train home from ADEPT’s Spring Conference in London, some of the words said at a panel on devolution are ringing around in my head. About how people who write transport strategies need to be ringmasters rather than vision setters on their own. As funny as the image is of many of my transport planning colleagues wandering around dressed like PT Barnum, I cannot get this idea out of my head, even though I disagree with it.
The UK is a great place for writing strategy as opposed to delivering it. Through just a quick brainstorm as my train passes London Blackfriars, City Thameslink, Farringdon, and St Pancras International, I can think of the following strategies and policies that local highway authorities are required to develop:
- Local Transport Plans, obviously;
- Sustainable Modes of Travel to School Strategy (SMoTS);
- Home to School Transport Policy;
- Local Plans (if they are a unitary authority);
- Minerals and Waste Plans;
- Council Plans;
- Community Strategies;
- Economic Development Strategies;
- Joint Local Strategic Needs Assessment (Public Health);
- Climate Action Plans;
- Local Nature Recovery Plans;
- Local Growth Plans.
This is all before you look at other plans and other strategies developed by other organisations. Off the top of my head, a transport planner should think about the following:
- Department for Transport strategies on almost anything;
- Devolved administration’s transport strategies
- National Highways’ Business Plan
- Network Rail’s settlements for the current Control Period;
- The National Planning Policy Framework and National Planning Policy Statements;
- The Industrial Strategy;
- Combined Authority Transport Plans;
- Combined Authority Economic Strategies;
- Local Energy Action Plans.
I am sure that there are numerous other examples that I have forgotten about.
If transport planners were ringmasters, currently we are trying to do this, and in the ring the clowns are throwing pies, the trapeze artists are flying all over the place, the fire eater has two sticks down their throat, and every single animal in the entire circus is wondering around, all at the same time. How do you try and put on a show with that kind of chaos taking place in front of you?
The traditional approach to doing this is to make sure that your objectives are broadly aligned (and as they are usually worded the same they usually are), you note it in the policy review, and you just then hope that the delivery broadly aligns in the future. In other words, keep doing your own thing, and hope it works,
More recently conversations take place between teams responsible for different strategies. And there is likely to be extensive collaboration on some areas where there is large amount of cross over. I know plenty of local council transport strategy teams who have effectively written transport supplementary planning documents for their planning teams, and whole sections of Local Plans. So some action is being taken to try and join up delivery much better.
But the reality is that policy alignment between a variety of complex documents, each of which have different requirements but each of which impact on other areas of work of the council, is extremely hard to do. Nor, do I think should it be the responsibility of a strategy itself to bring this complex web of policies together into something that is remotely understandable.
My view is that the ringmaster is a poor analogy in this case, and what is needed instead is a collective team effort on behalf of senior managers within councils to make the connections between these strategies on their own. Most critically this should translate that into things that are deliverable to their teams.
This is so often where local transport plans fall down. They may be excellent strategies on their own, but without that translation into something actionable to teams it means nothing. Teams need to understand why the Local Transport Plan is important, how it affects their area of work, and how they can include it within their area of work.
An example of this is from early in my career when I worked on the Second Bedfordshire Local Transport Plan. A key part of this work was engaging with our highways teams, and arguably our biggest success was when we managed to get the performance indicators and targets written in the transport strategy written into our new local highways maintenance and improvement contract at the time. Our highways teams and their contractors were then required to deliver against these targets, making the plan meaningful to them. Sadly, aside from road maintenance we did not achieve most of our targets, but this process made the strategy understandable and relevant to other teams.
Delivering our plans is a team effort, and even the best strategies in the world will fail unless you make it meaningful for people to deliver. We are in a situation where the ring is crowded, and the ringmaster is furiously cracking their whip to try and bring some order. What the ringmaster does not need is more power, they need allies to take their asks and make them meaningful. Maybe we should try that first.
👩🎓 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.
Who’s still riding? Subgroup analysis of bicycling in the US
TL:DR – Rich white guys and, increasingly, older people.
TL:DR – Someone put a lot of time into the economics of cruising. Turns out in some instances, its more economically viable to cruise for a space than park.
TL:DR – Shockingly, after childbirth women’s commuting time goes down.
Opening the tracks: The impact of rail liberalization on ridership growth in the Czech Republic
TL:DR – My inbox is about to be filled with people who want the rail network renationalised. Oh, and while ridership on trains has grown in Czechia, they don’t know if its due to competition.
🖼️ Graphic Design
The world’s carbon emissions by sector (Source: Visual Capitalist)
No shock from this data – transport is the second most polluting sector globally for carbon emissions in 2022.
📺 On the (You)Tube
While the opening of the Silvertown Tunnel has caused consternation, did you know two bus routes run through it? Here, Geoff Marshall takes a look at them.
📚 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.
- Analysis: Clean energy just put China’s CO2 emissions into reverse for first time (Carbon Brief)
- On (the) Sublime (Longreads)
- From Messiaen to Radiohead: How great music uses prime numbers (Big Think)
- Three takeaways about AI’s energy use and climate impacts (MIT Technology Review)
- Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem (The Economist)
📰 The bottom of the news
A flying duck has been caught on a speed camera. I was thinking it was Launchpad McQuack flying “Mr McD” around. But nope, its a normal duck.
Mobility Matters 