Mobility Matters Daily #88 - Amazon, Direct Vision Standard, and cycling and CO2
Today's data is about 4th July weekend
Good morning friend.
From the window of my (home office) I can safely say that all manner of modes of transport pass by. Cars, vans, and lorries obviously. People on bikes and e-scooters (illegally), as well as horse riders making their way to the bridleway at the end of the road. 22 trains an hour fly past on the Midland Mainline just behind the houses across the road, while my house is also under an approach path to Luton Airport. But on Wednesday, I managed to spot my first hot air balloon, floating just above the trees in the distance. Perhaps a clever way to get around restrictions on flying away on holiday?
Is Amazon putting delivery drivers at risk?
According to this article in Vice, yes, by getting them to cross large roads with a lot of deliveries. The issue appears to be the Flex app not being able to tell the difference between a quiet street and a major highway, so encouraging drivers to ‘pop across the road’ which is in fact a 6-lane highway. All driven by the one thing that drives the economics of deliveries - drop density. Or simply, how many deliveries you can make in an area at any one time.
This density is in turn determined by a number of factors - notably the urgency of the delivery (the time element) and availability of drivers (the cost element). But routing systems are currently unable to determine whether the street environment is condusive to safe drops. Remember, injuries and deaths have a cost associated with them too. The best data sources simply tell you a carriageway is there, and not the number of lanes and suitability to cross which is hard to identify at scale (see OpenStreetMaps as the best example, which is far off achieving this). Transport for London’s Cycle Infrastructure Database took millions of pounds to create and is already out of date. Perhaps in the case of Amazon, the system should act as a guide, and give discretion to drivers on ignoring it?
The early evidence shows that the Direct Vision Standard is making lorries in London safer, or is it?
Speaking of Transport for London, they recently announced that under their Direct Vision Standard, over 4000 lorries have achieved the 5-star rating - the highest possible. This is out of 136000 lorries registered in London. Not a bad start, although the data does indicate that 51% of these lorries achieved 0 stars, so there is clearly a long way to go.
While the difference between the best and worst in class when it comes to vision from lorries is stark, the evidence of impact is too early to state. In the freight and logistics industry, companies such as Ryder are partnering with others to develop Direct Vision vehicles, the logistics industry has hardly embraced it with enthusiasm. Partly because of the pandemic, but partly because of the need to sweat existing assets as best as possible. Perhaps this will be a slow burner.
More active travel reduces carbon emissions, shocker
So this research by numerous authors should be no shock to you. They collected data on regular transport activities and came to the conclusion that cycling and walking is better for carbon emissions. What a shock. But what is more interesting is the detail behind how this shift works in practice.
The research indicates that life cycle CO2 emissions drop by 14% for each additional cycle trip, and drop by 61% for each car trip removed. That may seem obvious, but that insight on its own has a significant policy implication - that a significant contribution to reducing CO2 emissions from transport can be from just cutting car use. An understanding validated by the impacts of COVID-19 on travel and CO2 emissions. Again I pose the question - who will be the first authority to state that it is a policy priority for everyone to travel less?
Stat of the Day
One for the American audience this, where a survey from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics in 2020 asked how many people stayed at home over the 4th July weekend. The percentage of people staying at home compared to 2019 rose from 19.7% to 24.8%, with people in New York, DC, and Alaska more likely to stay at home.