Mobility Matters Daily #180 - E-scooters again, trams, and exercise

The usual transport nonsense to round off the week

Good day my good friend.

When you receive this email, my train will just be pulling into Glasgow Central station. For those of you coming to Mobility Camp tomorrow, I cannot wait to see you there. For the rest of you, well, you will just have to make do with these stories that I’ve selected for you. :)

James

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E-scooters abstract trips from bike share, but does that mean that e-scooters are bad?

After showing the evidence of the impact of e-scooters in Chicago in yesterday’s post, some interesting analysis from Yang et al shows that e-scooters may be abstracting trips from bike share. As the abstract concludes:

The introduction of e-scooter sharing reduced the overall bike sharing usage by 23.4 trips per week per station (10.2%). bike sharing usage of non-members and members decreased by 18.0 (34.1%) and 5.4 (4.0%) trips.

A couple things to note here. Firstly, the e-scooters and bike share systems in Chicago are provided by different companies who are competing with each other, and some evidence shows they sometimes compete for the same market. Of course they will abstract trips from each other. Second, there has been no independent analysis done that I have seen that answers a key question: has this raised the overall number of trips on micromobility? Answers on a postcard, please.

The evidence for more light rail seems strong

I should preface this section by saying this: I am not a fan of trams. Look, I love riding them, and I must admit they have this ability to make a city feel nice. But I strongly feel that that same outcomes can be achieved, and be accessible for more people, with a good bus rapid transit system. Having said that, Urban Transport Group’s latest report on what light rail can do for cities makes the case for them really, really well.

There is some good evidence of the impact of light rail on the communities that they serve, as well as the role that the likes of the Nottingham Tram and the Docklands Light Railway played in regenerating the areas they served. One thing I was disappointed about is the impact of COVID-19 on the long term future of light rail, not even showing things like the how passenger numbers fell¹.

I do have a soft spot for the trams in Nottingham, though (Image credit: Geograph)

1 in 4 of us don’t exercise enough

The World Health Organization stated a bit of the obvious this week, by confirming that 1 in 4 adults don’t get enough exercise. But the corresponding advocacy brief is interesting. Not in terms of the actual solutions to getting more people active - we know what they are - but how finance is an important part of the solution, and its not just about more money.

Two critical factors that are key to the success (or failure) of a strategy are where the money comes from, and targets of those providing that funding. If those are aligned across organisations, the impact will be huge. An interesting report by Public Health England on place-based approaches to tackling health inequality reveals that if these are aligned across different partners, system change can happen.

Random things

Here are some random articles on random things that I found whilst trawling the Internet:

• Facebook's Fall From Grace Looks a Lot Like Ford's (Wired)

• Reorganizing Informal Transport in Uganda: Achieving a Multimodality that Works for All (The City Fix)

• How do Street-Level Bureaucrats categorise citizens to decide who should receive services? (Policy and Politics Blog)

• Govt targets 17% reduction in transport greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (Dominica News)

• Leeds Transport Strategy: London-style charging zone for high-polluting vehicles could combat climate change (West Leeds Dispatch)

Interesting things

The Ancient Trade Routes that built the world (Image credit: China Discovery)

In case you wanted an idea of the importance of transport and trade routes, this map here shows the ancient Silk Roads. These roads and trade routes literally built empires (and brought about their demise), fostered religions, led to countless knowledge exchanges, and a melting pot of cultures and societies. No wonder China wants to recreate them.

If you do nothing else today, do this

Read the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2021. The section on the ambition gap to minimise global warming is sobering.

1. My own sources in the UK inform me that ridership levels were so bad, without the Government bailout for light rail then more than one local authority would have been bankrupted.