Smile! - MMD#373
Good day my good friend.
Swimming the English Channel is no easy feat. But doing so after going on a great personal journey and doing so for charity is even better. That is what Graeme Souness has done, after meeting Isla Grist who suffers from a rare skin disease called Epidermolysis bullosa. Graeme Souness of this fame, or that fame. Too often when it comes to changing who we are (and this is the same with transport too), we focus to much on the destination and not on the journey that people take. Well done Graeme.
If you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include in this newsletter, you can email me.
James
Innovate, innovate, INNOVATE!
The transport sector has been no stranger to the adoption of the innovation district. Usually called Living Labs (looking at you ADEPT and Helsinki), they are often used for ‘real world’ experiments of new transport technologies and service offerings. There is one, teeny-weeny problem with this. They tend to change urban areas so that those within the affected area are not typical of the population at large. Because not all parts of a city are young, hip, and tech-savvy.
Unless places want to be interventionist in matters like urban design, this is a problem. How can you test the wider applicability of your solution when the place where you are testing it is atypical? If the goal is simply to test the technology, or test adoption among people who are typically found in innovation districts, then its fine. But Living Labs (or Innovation Districts or whatever you want to call them) need to be the right solution to test your problem. They are not the solution to all your innovation need.s
Cameras, cameras everywhere
A few weeks ago, something strange happened in my town. By all accounts, where I live is (generally) safe. Yet when my Town Council asked whether people feel safe, more people feel unsafe than the national average. And people called for more CCTV. In a country where there are a lot of CCTV cameras. That gives rise to the question: do camera’s make us feel safe?
As usual, the answer is a big old maybe. Some new research from China indicates that there may be some link between the coverage of CCTV cameras and perceived safety, but it varies by area. Although wider research indicates that the overall relationship is a positive one. Meanwhile, the strongest support for CCTV can be found in areas where perceptions of safety are poor. In conclusion: CCTV should be good for improving how safe people feel on transport services and infrastructure, but the relationship is not straightforward.
Random things
These links are meant to make you think about the things that affect our world in transport, and not just think about transport itself. I hope that you enjoy them.
A Slow-Moving Disaster — The Jackson Water Crisis and the Health Effects of Racism (New England Journal of Medicine)
AIs will become useless if they keep learning from other AIs (New Scientist)
The Old, Old Idea of High-Tech Cars (Human Transit)
Something interesting
Us transport planners like our models. But what do you do when you don’t have the computers to do it? You build it. This excellent Tom Scott video demonstrates how the US Army Corps of Engineers built a working model of the Bay Area.
If you do nothing else today, then do this
Read this article by Charles Hughes Smith on why we won’t do anything about climate change until it is too late. Then, I highly recommend reading At Work In The Ruins by Dougald Hind. Maybe part of our work as transport planners is not planning for mitigation or revolution, but planning for the world that will emerge once our current one fails.