Mobility Matters Daily #81 - Shrewsbury, SIDS, and fruit at stations
Plus some data on how your food gets delivered
“Shrewsbury doesn’t want it”
The popular discourse would dictate that people support new roads. But the local evidence often states otherwise. That is the case in the town of Shrewsbury, where the Town Council has come out fighting against plans to build a new relief road to the North of the town.
Extensive evidence collection has shown that local views on transport are far more nuanced than we think, and that methods to engage with people often fail to pick these up. The majority of people favour investment in sustainable transport over road building. Yet our dominant media narratives around road construction do not reflect this. We have to ask why.
The climate impacts of transport are especially important for SIDS
Most of you (and I have seen the reader statistics, so i know the countries where you are!) are in a pretty priveleged position when it comes to experiencing the really bad impacts of climate change. A group of countries on the front line are Small Island Developing States (SIDS). An excellent World Bank report sets out in stark language the impact of losing transport infrastructure in these states to the rising tides.
The stats are amazing. 82% of the value of Dominica’s GDP is tied up in its dispirate transport assets, and Fiji spends a third of its budget keeping its vulnerable transport network going. Reports like this are a wake up call for us to take action, not just to cut carbon emissions, but to invest in tbe resilience of the networks of these vulnerable countries.
The new station checklist - ticket, newspaper, coffee, tomatoes, bananas, pears…
The renewed interest in Mobility Hubs in recent years has given rise to thinking about public transport interchanges in new ways. And one catching onto trends around ordering online is using stations to pick up deliveries. In Belgium, operator SNCB is partnering with local food suppliers to offer passengers the chance to pick up fresh fruit and vegetables every Friday evening.
What is interesting is quite how much of a lack of evidence of impact there is of such initiatives - either on passenger demand or on deliveries. When researchers looked at such hubs in China, this showed a lack of evidence of integration outside of joint ticketing between transport modes - which is nothing to do with having a local delivery offer. Meanwhile, the decisions driving choice of location of parcel drop off facilities is economic as opposed to convenience. Another area where more data is needed.
Stat of the day
Speaking of fresh food, what if eating local didn’t actually matter that much in terms of reducing the carbon footprint of what you eat? Well, again, its complicated. Whilst ships (that are heavily polluting) make up the most “food miles” by different modes, air travel (the most polluting) is tiny. Whereas local deliveries often take place by road.
Data source: Our World in Data