Mobility Matters #65
Your daily does of whats important in the world of transport
Tackling safety issues on rural highways is complex
A recent article from Queensland in Australia shows an interesting debate taking place on how road safety issues on rural roads should be tackled. Should speed limits be reduced? Or should roads be upgraded and designed for the higher speed limit? Or listen to road safety engineers, who will say what the best value solution is.
There is some data from the UK that indicates that rural roads are more dangerous in terms of the collisions more likely to be fatal (compared to urban roads). But an interesting twist on rural road safety has emerged from research from Appalachia in the USA, where road crash data is linked to cultural norms that drive user behaviour. From this data, researchers have been able to specify areas where cultural norms differ, which in turn could drive the types of interventions delivered. One to watch, this one.
Should there be lower speeds on risky country roads in Queensland? | UK Road Safety Statistics | Examining Rural Traffic Safety Culture: An Appalachia Case Study
Elevated walkways get funding in the Phillipines
Traditional urbanist thought is that walkways should be provided at street level, to be on a more human scale. Walkways should only be elevated where absolutely necessary, such as to cross a river or a railway. So why are covered walkways being delivered along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in Manila, Phillipines?
Within context, there has been major expansion of the commuter railways, metro, and light rail in Manila. This project connects to 5 such stations along a highly congested and dangerous traffic corridor. But local environmental groups say this is not radical enough, and that it should be a green corridor (the road itself has already been part of two revolutions, so its social role should not be underestimated).
Elevated walkways along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue gets ABD loan | ADB Project Files | Transform ESDA into a green corridor
Uncertainty and complexity are joined at the hip
The excellent Modelling World - a must-attend for transport planners everywhere - had uncertainty in a post-COVID world as a major theme. No suprise, really. But less so it seems on its conjoined twin - complexity. Perhaps its the engineers in us, but whilst we recognise that the world is uncertain, our instinct is still to predict, even if that prediction is sometimes dressed as a vision.
Complexity, however, realises that systems (of which transport is one) behave in ways that do not match their constituent parts. Take a transport example - if you close a road to traffic in one neighbourhood, some traffic will re-route, let’s say 20%. If you did the same in another neighbourhood, will 20% (+/- 3% say) re-route? And can all of that be explained through assumptions on journey time and cost? Complexity states that the world works in mysterious ways, and uncertainty concludes that the outcomes are mysterious. Maybe we should apply complexity to our work, as much as we uncertainty.
Uncertainty and innovation emerge as key issues in Modelling World | An introduction to complexity theory | The excellent the Clock and the Cat podcast on complexity