Mobility Matters Daily #138 - Delivering evidence-based policies and scaring decision makers
With a visual showing we should save the whales
Good day friend.
A morning spent talking to the Department for Transport with a cup of Tetley’s finest is not a bad way to spend the first day of the week. Until you realise at 12:30pm that you failed to press schedule on the newsletter and you are waiting politely for the call to end in order to do it. But your news is now with you.
James
How to deliver evidence-based policies and changes
The Centre for Global Development writes excellent practice papers on how to deliver meaningful change driven by evidence. This background paper by Abeba Taddese is no exception by providing an in-depth look at how evidence-to-policy partnerships work. Traditionally thought of as knowledge exchange partnerships.
This may be seen as irrelevant to how transport professionals do their work, but its entirely relevant in improving our practice. Partnerships like DecarboN8 work not because of their research, but of how they help embed institutional change. Based on established, and trusted, partnerships, their work challenges policy makers and provides needed capacity to do so. Change happens not just because of great ideas (if it did, we would be delivering these ideas already), but because organisations change and grow. Abeba’s paper is worth reading for tips on how to do this well.
Should we be scaring decision makers?
Todd Litman is always an excellent read, and his latest article in CityFix is no exception to this. His questions for new mobility solutions are well-evidenced, thought-provoking, and necessary. But I was somewhat concerned to read this:
To prepare for the future we must frighten, reassure and plan. We need to scare decision-makers about the potential risks of new mobilities. We also need to reassure them that excellent solutions are available. We must identify the specific policies and programs needed to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs.
Most of you know that I often speak of the art of good transport planning, which Todd is alluding to here. The first part of this concerns me. Scaring decision makers? What does this mean? I don’t for one second think this means transport planners giving thunderous sermons from the pulpit about how driverless cars are going to poison our water supply, burn our crops, and send a plague unto our houses. But scaring them can mean many things, and transport planners need to be careful in how we present policy solutions.
Transport planners need to encourage critical reasoning from decision makers. A bad decision maker goes purely with their gut and some evidence. A good decision maker takes the evidence presented and makes the best decision based upon it. Brilliant decision makers do that, but also challenges it in order to make our solutions better. In my experience, scared people often make bad decisions, sometimes make good decisions, and rarely make brilliant decisions. Just because they don’t do what we want them to do, doesn’t mean we should scare people.
The challenge with assessing the impact of electric vehicles is in what happens before we start driving them
Assessing the environmental impact of electric vehicles is hard, but not for the reasons that we think. A recent article in TechCrunch brought to the fore a concern about the supply chains for electric vehicles. We don’t know them, so we cannot assess their impacts. There are several studies about the life cycle impacts of electric vehicles. The challenge with these studies is that they evidence parts of the supply chain, and the good and bad carbon impacts of electric vehicles, but do not provide a whole picture.
As stated in Mark Mills’ article, fossil fuel supply chains have a high carbon impact, but they are at least (largely) auditable. No such supply chain analysis yet exists for electric vehicles, and may not do until they become established. Whole life carbon assessments are riddled with tricky assumptions and questionable analysis, though the practice has moved on considerably in the last 5 years. So while a precautionary principle may be a wise course of action in some respects, this may be a policy area where learning while doing is becoming essential.
Visualisation of the Day
Great visualisations tell a story. This one is about how a whale dodges ships in the Corcovado Gulf in Chile. You should see the whole animation.
If you do nothing else today, do this
Read Professor Peter Jones’ excellent article on how decarbonising transport cannot just be left to the transport sector.