Mobility Matters Daily #145 - Project costs, trade liberalisation, and parking

There's been a few changes around these parts...

Good day my friend.

Thank you so much to all who responded to the public service announcement on Friday. The comments you have had the time to send have been meaningful, and already have inspired me to make some changes. A notable one being less rambling from me! Thank you, again.

Here are some snippets from the world of transport that I am sure you will like.

James

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Are we mistaking cost over-runs for under-estimation?

The excellent Pedestrian Observations makes an astute observation about how we treat costs in major transport projects. Simply, is the out-turn cost being higher than the estimated cost a failure of estimation, or is it a failure of the project in its planning and delivery? Seminal transport planning works by Bent Flyvbjerg and others consider the problem to be one of under-estimation, but this post reminds us that to simply look at this issue through that lense could result in an ineffective solution. Sometimes, better estimation is good, but better cost control is better.

The project budget manager reading the latest “update email”

Improving transport infrastructure multiplies the gains from trade liberalisation

A new study of road infrastructure improvements in Kenya has come to similar conclusions as countless other studies: improving infrastructure makes firms more productive, especially when combined with trade liberalisation. My one criticism is that the study does not appear to control for the effect of improving roads enabling more efficient access to domestic markets, but their theory posed on how better roads compliment changes in tariffs makes a lot of sense.

The relationship between better roads, reductions in input tariffs, and total factor productivity (TFP). The red arrow shows how better roads make the reductions in input tariffs pass through to the input price quicker - e.g. through quicker journeys - with the blue arrow showing the influence of taking this reduction in input price and applying it to improve productvity (Source: VoxDev)

Parking electric vehicles depends on what we want to do with public space

This BBC article from several weeks ago brings together a number of seperate strands of highway policy under a question of where shall we park electric vehicles? A more useful question to start with is “what do you want to use the public space of cities for?” As the excellent Lucy Marstrand-Taussig puts it, three-quarters of public space is highway. Decide what you want your public space to be for, then design from there.

Roadside charging (Source: Wikipedia)

Something interesting for today

It turns out, some of you liked Stat of the Day. I get that, so perhaps we can all be happy with this section. This is where you will get stats, visualisations, and other generally interesting transport things.

How do people spend their time each day? (Source: Our World in Data)

The other week I sent out a visualisation that showed how the average American spent their day. Our World in Data went one better, and visualised how people in numerous countries spend their day. Think of how these variations impact the transport network differently.

If you do nothing else today, do this

Check out this story on BBC Click about hacking electric vehicle parking chargers. Because as Internet of S**t says, if you want to ruin something put a chip in it.