Bad Habits - MMD#575
Good day my good friend.
PSA for you all: My promised changes for the newsletter - them being longer and being published on a Monday, Wednesday, and a Friday, will start from next week. So make the most of your last couple of days of daily newsletters!
Mobility Camp is taking place on 26th September 2023 in Birmingham. It would be great to see you there. Get your tickets now.
If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else who you think will love it. I will love you forever if you do. ☺️
James
Kick the habit 🥾
You’ve heard the phrases. Decide and provide. Vision and validate. But never, EVER talk about predict and provide (unless you want bike lanes or new railways, then its good). So why do practitioners go back to predict and provide so often? I touched on this at my recent presentation to the Transport Practitioners Meeting, but Varsolo Sunio, Alexis Fillone, Raymund Paolo Abad, Joyce Rivera, Marie Danielle Guillen have launched a full frontal assault on it by demonstrating equity-based planning in the Philippines, and demonstrating transport planners are sticking to their guns through social practice theory. Or as they put it:
Our results reveal a high degree of institutionalization and couplings among the elements which embed them as the underlying rationality at the core of the process and practice, sidelining the elements of equity-based planning. Such couplings manifest in the ways by which meanings are codified into formal practices through a translation into material structures, competences, and routines.
Ouch.
Support your local farm 🚜
Recently, I read a Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje. I highly, highly recommend it if you are interested in any way in climate change and tackling it. Supporting local farming isn’t just about soil management (something we constantly under-estimate) or having a fuzzy feeling in the farm shop. It can help build local, resilient supply chains. Researchers have now done the leg work and identified the benefits of shorter supply chains in achieving the sustainable development goals. Or as they put it:
The 348 benefits collected show disparities in current research on the topic across benefit categories, chain structures and continents. Benefits have been reported for ten [Sustainable Development Goal] targets and nine [Milan Urban Food Policy Pact] recommended actions. Quantifying externalities of short food supply chains and establishing causal effects for their targeted usage worldwide are aspects barely addressed by scientific inquiry.
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.
A Dozen Contrarian Thoughts About Inflation (The Big Picture) 📈
The ‘Ulez election’? After 8 years of Boris Johnson, Uxbridge and South Ruislip has bigger problems (The Big Issue) 📣
James Cameron Says He Tried To Warn Us About AI (The Byte) 🤖
Ground Rules (JSTOR Daily) 🌷
The Town That Went Feral (The New Republic) - I think I have shared this before. But just sit back and laugh. 🐻
Something interesting 📼
British Monopoly players will know London Fenchurch Street Station from being one of the stations on the board. Its also the terminus of the (vastly underrated in my view) C2C line from London to Southend. But, it is the only one of the eleven terminus stations in Central London that does not have an associated Underground station. This video explores why.
If you do nothing else today, do this 👇
The Engine Room have produced a great little report on the confluence of digital rights and climate justice (thank you good friend Aimee Whitcroft for sharing this). These intersect with many conversations some of you may be having about transport ethics, and so is worth a read.