✊ Equal Opportunities - MM#621

I'm going to try to create an equitable transport strategy

Good day my good friend

For many years now I have been thinking a lot about the different tools that we as transport professionals use in order to, at least in theory, improve our work. We have all sorts of impact assessments, and yet very little by the way of understanding the impacts of these impacts assessments on what we do. Many years ago I came to the conclusion that it is not about the tools themselves, but our processes and the way that we do things. As an old colleague from Transport Systems Catapult used to say.

We focus on having the best taps, when the plumbing needs fixing.

Today’s newsletter is the start of one of my own missions in fixing the plumbing by doing, specifically on equality. I will come back to it occasionally as things progress.

If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else who you think will love it. The main way my audience grows is through your recommendations. I will love you forever if you do. ☺️

James

👊 All being equal

Some weeks ago, a very brave woman (who I know reads this newsletter and I won’t share her name) stood up at an event that I was at and made an impassioned observation. She was the only person of colour at the event, at women were also in the minority at the event. If this event was meant to represent the needs of the region that it serves, then why is the region not there?

I also happen to now work for the organisation that ran the event. While there were some in the organisation who were not impressed by the points made, two important people were. Namely me and the person who I am working closely with on refreshing a whole regions transport strategy. So, we decided to do better.

The majority of strategies adopted in the UK have associated with them Equalities Impact Assessments (EIAs). Under law, EIAs specifically are not required, but they are widely used as a tool to ensure compliance with the Public Sector Equality Duty. This is defined under Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010, as public sector bodies being required to:

• Eliminate discrimination, harassment, victimisation and any other conduct that is prohibited by or under the Equality Act 2010;

• Advance equality of opportunity between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it;

• Foster good relations between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it.

This all sounds good. And looking at an EIA, such as this one for Lambeth’s Transport Strategy, it all looks good. There is just one problem.

There is no scientific evidence that I have seen, anywhere, that they actually work.

What I mean by this is that there is no evidence that plans have been changed as a result of the EIA. Nothing verifiable that can be tested scientifically anyway. Worse than that, my own experience of seeing EIAs done is that they are often put in as an afterthought at the end, and more than one time I have heard people say they will “knock it off in a couple days at the end.”

Many people in the profession see EIAs as an output only. What it is, in fact, is an output at an end of a process where the outcome is policy is changed as a result of the assessments that you do. The net result of this is that the EIA is undertaken separate to the policy development process, or as a separate activity within the policy development process.

How an EIA is done in transport strategy development

Some of this can be overcome with good engagement with groups, which is often those with protected characteristics under the Equalities Act. But when the process is quite this flawed, you are reliant purely on the sound judgement of decision makers to ensure that the outcome fully considered the equalities aspects of the policies.

In a perfect world, a policy development process that fully considers equalities would probably look something like this. The reason why you cannot see the EIA is because it is integrated within the strategy development process itself. Evidence of the impact of current transport systems is embedded in evidence collection. The assessment of the impact of policies is integrated comprehensively within policy development and in action planning. And through a process of extensive engagement, the perspective of different groups is fully embedded within the strategy development process.

The ideal strategy development process

There are processes like the double-diamond design process which seek to adopt something similar. But they are best used on relatively small, defined problems with notable boundaries. When you are trying to develop a transport strategy for all modes, all people, and all organisations across a whole region, it doesn’t work so well. Hence why us planners fall back on traditional policy development processes.

At this stage, all we know are three things. First, that the EIA document is an outcome of us fully integrating equity considerations within the development of the strategy. Second, this is something entirely new, and while we know what failure looks like (an EIA which has not influenced the development of policy), we are laying the tracks in front of the train as it is moving here. Thirdly is something that I want to touch on briefly here - when we engage with people, our approach to engagement needs to move beyond simple co-creation.

For reasons of space, I will be brief. Traditional EIAs focus on what many in disability activism would call ‘the medical model.’ In other words, because a person is - say - a woman, that results in them experiencing the feeling of being unsafe on public transport. What we know from evidence that has been collected on matters like social exclusion (Transport for the North have done some excellent work on this) is that the world is not like this. Consequently, in our engagement and our policy development approach we will be expressly adopting a social model of exclusion in transport. Which, for now, we are defining as…

Society, its socio-economic systems and the decisions made within it - including those of transport systems and services - act in exclusionary ways, which manifest themselves for different groups and people in different ways.

The reason why we consider this idea to be important is a simple one. It is easy to get lost in analysis attempting to analyse every possible outcomes of your policies for every possible group (or worse, you base judgement of impacts upon lazy assumptions or let a few excluded groups dictate the outcomes of the EIA). And whilst this is important, at a policy level focussing your effort on the exclusionary elements that may affect more than one group can help ensure that policies result in prioritised areas of action.

In policy making terms, outside of maybe design thinking in policy, we don’t think this has been done before. And we are really excited to be giving this a go. I have no doubt that it will be a learning experience, and one that I hope to share with you all in due course.

What you can do: Watch this space. In the meantime, if you want a primer on social exclusion and the impacts of transport on marginalised groups, check out the works of Dr Karen Lucas. Also, Transport for the North has done some brilliant work on social inclusion that you should look 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.

Exploring practices for facilitating integrated strategic land use and transport planning in the Nordic countries

TL:DR - Informal collaboration can be as effective as formal collaboration.

Economic and air pollution disparities: Insights from transportation infrastructure expansion

TL:DR - Expansion of transport infrastructure in Japan improved Tokyo’s air quality - elsewhere not so much.

A road segment prioritization approach for cycling infrastructure

TL:DR - An integrated approach to designing cycle networks. Me likey.

Environmental and economic evaluation of a low emission zone for urban freight transport

TL:DR - Making low emission zones bigger gives more economic benefits that making the emissions standards much tighter.

✊ Awesome people doing awesome things

I must give a shout out to everyone involved in the Fixing Transport Assessments Working Group, especially to Nicola Waight, who yesterday published their findings into why getting transport assessments right is so hard. Transport assessments are far from the sexiest thing in transport, but they are hugely significant in deciding what transport interventions happen with new developments. Read the report.

✒️ I wrote a thing

This week, the National Association of Local Councils published a blog I wrote. Its on how town and parish councils can do loads to decarbonise our transport network. You should read it, and maybe get inspired.

What you can do: If you do become inspired, become a councillor. Look on the website of your local town or parish council to see if they have vacancies, and become a councillor yourself.

🖼️ Graphic Design

The hype of different technologies (Source: r/dataisbeautiful)

Is artificial intelligence at the peak of its hype? Only time will tell. While methods like Gartner’s Hype Cycle are useful in helping frame how people talk about technology, their predictive capability is…questionable.

📚 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.

• AI churns out lightning-fast forecasts as good as the weather agencies’ (Science)

• Giant UK programme to lower people’s blood-sugar levels really works (Nature)

• Natural Infrastructure: A Cost-Effective Alternative to Supply Clean Water to Bogotá (The City Fix)

• The Male-Female Longevity Gap Widens (Harvard Magazine)

• Arming Ourselves Against The Future (Trying To Understand The World)

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