Mobility Matters Daily #156 - Cows on the motorway and employment rights
Also, if you want a job, healthcare is the sector to be in
Good day my good friend.
Animals have a funny way of making transport more interesting, as you will see from one of the stories today. But perhaps we should start designing our streets and services with them in mind? Anyway, here is today’s selected articles for you.
James
Employment rights and the gig economy
When is an employee not an employee? It seems that a lot of courts are taking the duck analogy1 and applying it to gig economy workers that help to deliver. The latest is a Dutch court ruling against Uber. This follows a similar ruling in the UK, and work by some companies to lobby against rules that would classify their workers as employees. You may think what does this have to do with transport planning? It has everything to do with transport planning for a simple reason: it affects the labour market dynamics.
The UK currently has a major shortage of HGV drivers. Part of the reason is simple: HGV drivers can earn more money doing gig work delivering for Amazon than they do driving a HGV up and down the motorway. This is how a labour market is supposed to work, and not simply drive down costs by cutting wages. This in turn impacts on when people travel and how, as well as the direct impacts of less lorries and more deliveries. Often, when you play the logic out, an economic problem also creates a transport issue as well.
Planning for the unplanned
Unplanned events can have significant impacts on transport. Last week, a cow wandered onto the busiest motorway in the UK, and would not moove for anyone2. But a lot of work has gone into modelling the impacts of these sudden, unpredictable changes. A recent study from China has done some work to tackle the issue of oversampling imbalanced data during unplanned events3, although if you really want a great text on the difference between modelling impacts and delivering a robust traffic management plan, this paper by Sasan Amini et al really is one worth reading.
What amazes me is how much of an emerging field this still is. When a major event happens, the process is still check-list led. Partly because you just have to deal with the issue as it arises. I mean, how can you model the impacts of a cow running around in rush hour traffic on a motorway? But partly because relatively little time is spent in preparing for such instances, and developing an evidence-led action plan for dealing with the problems as they arise. Risk management 101, really, but too often not done.
Changing perceptions isn’t enough. Sometimes you just have to do, but be clever about it
I linked to this research a week or so ago now, but this TransportXtra report of the deliberative research on the future of transport by the UK Department for Transport gave me pause for thought. Particularly how ‘perceptions’ must be improved for people to accept change - in this case shared mobility and mobility as a service. This made me consider a core conflict on how we enact change in transport planning - balancing deliberative democracy and governance by consent, with actually doing things to make change happen.
We learned this the hard way last year in the UK with emergency active travel schemes. They are arguably necessary, but hardly had a democratic mandate for such immediate and obvious action. But needing approval does not mean that action cannot take place, as sometimes getting understanding of an idea means delivering it and showing people how it works. I daresay that perhaps our process of delivery could be more deliberative, and securing consent could be more action-led.
Something interesting
Understanding how the labour market works is essential for any transport planner. This data from Visual Capitalist perfectly shows forecast changes in different professions in the US over the next 10 years. Its a good time to get into healthcare, and a bad time to be a florist.
If you do nothing else today, then do this…
Go for a walk. Usually I have a link in here for interesting stuff, but nothing for the benefit of you. So go on, make some time, and just go a for stroll for a while. The impact on you and your mental health will be immediate!
…And finally
As those of you who saw my LinkedIn post last night are already aware, I’ve been told by my business advisor that I don’t tell you what I do enough. So here we go.
Something I have done a lot of work on over the course of the pandemic is something called Rapid Fire Trend Briefings. The idea is that all of the things I share with you are distilled into something meaningful that your organisation can take action on. This is through a rapid process of briefing - research - trend analysis - presentation and debate.
Quite a few organisations have done it over the last 18 months, and you should too. To find out more, click on the below button.
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck, and acts like a duck, chances are its a duck.
I will not apologise for this pun. Don’t have a cow about it, as I won’t milk it.
The abstract is free to read, but you need to pay to access the article.