🚘 The Prophecy - MM#598
Good day my good friend.
On Monday I didn’t have the space for a witty intro. Now I don’t have the time. Lets get to it.
Not long now until, we are talking ‘changing the narrative’ on sustainable transport at Mobility Camp on 26th September 2023 in Birmingham. It would be great to see you there. Get your tickets now.
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James
📝 Traffic in Towns - A brief retrospective
50 years ago this year, one of the most influential reports in the history of transport planning was published. That report was Traffic in Towns, authored by the late Sir Colin Buchanan. For those of you unfamiliar with the report, its content, and its findings, it is quite a read. Something that can only be summarised as “everything about the modern transport world was foretold somewhere in this report.”
The report itself emerged at an interesting time in the history of transport. Within the UK, the age of the car was only just dawning at the time the report was being written. At the time of the report, there were 10.5 million vehicles registered in the UK. The report predicted that at growth rates at the time, there would be 18 million by 1970, 27 million by 1980 and about 40 million vehicles in 2010. For information, the actual outturn in 2010 was 29 million vehicles.
Much is made of the recommendations around road design, facing particular criticism of being an early form of predict and provide for motor traffic. In many instances, the report taken as read is one that calls for a fundamental rethink of the purpose of urban areas, where there is the willingness to do so then urban areas could be rebuilt with the motor vehicle in mind. That is easy to conclude when Buchanan and his team refer to distributor roads, networks, boulevards, and bypasses.
But to me, that is a poor reflection on what the report does so well. It stated that motor traffic in the urban areas of the UK was fast becoming an issue that affected the quality of life in these areas, especially in terms of impact on the environment and congestion. It stated that, with evidence from the USA, growth in traffic is likely to continue, making such problems worse. It stated that there are a variety of solutions to the problem, ranging from traffic restraint to a fundamental rebuild of urban areas. Buchanan was at pains to stress that there would be no one solution that would be the magic bullet. As the report so pertinently put it…
We have found it desirable to avoid the term 'solution' altogether for the traffic problem is not such much a problem waiting for a solution as a social situation requiring to be dealt with by policies patiently applied over a period and revised from time to time in light of events
And here is the true insight of Traffic in Towns. Traffic is a transport problem of a world and social choices within it that we want to see. It comes down to a question of what type of places do we want our cities to be? There are fundamental laws that transport must obey, notably geometry and space, but what is done is as much a question of what places we want cities to be as they are about the ease by which we can travel from one place to another.
Creating spaces for people instead of vehicles, prioritising public transport over single occupancy cars, lengthening crossing times for pedestrians at lights are but a few of the millions of decisions made every day. Buchanan noted that success or failure is determined by such details, and that every decision made matters.
And if decision making is muddled, confused, or lacking? Well, look at our towns and cities now. The greatest irony is that the main loser in this situation is, as Buchanan states, the motor car…
…given its head [the motor vehicle] would wreck our towns within a decade... The problems of traffic are crowding in upon us with desperate urgency. Unless steps are taken, the motor vehicle will defeat its own utility and bring about a disastrous degradation of the surroundings for living... Either the utility of vehicles in town will decline rapidly, or the pleasantness and safety of surroundings will deteriorate catastrophically – in all probability both will happen.
How prophetic.
What you can do: Read the report on the Internet Archive and enjoy it. Maybe start to think about your predictions for the future of transport in a similar way - what changes in society are needed for them to be realised, and how do we reimagine urban space in accordance with this? What are the trade offs, and what are the choices about what to do?
🎓 From academia
The clever clogs at our universities have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author - they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.
Motor traffic reduction: A road to be travelled
TL:DR - Motor traffic reduction is something we should do more of.
TL:DR - Depends on the cities and the supporting development policies.
Empirical evaluation of behavioral interventions to enhance flexibility provision in smart charging
TL:DR - Pay people to change when they charge their electric car and they will do it.
Promote transport facility Resilience: Persuasion or Subsidy?
TL:DR - The degree to which companies plan for resilience depends on competition, a bit.
✊ Awesome people doing awesome things
If practicing what you preach is a measure of success, then Rosalind Readhead would pass with flying colours. Over the course of a year, she lived in the future, living on just one tonne of carbon per year, something that everyone in the world needs to achieve to achieve Net Zero emissions within the next 27 years. Her retrospective on this is amazing, and her journal of her experience even more so. My takeaway is that it is hard, but it is fun too.
On a personal note, I remember getting into a discussion with Rosalind at an event on autonomous cars in 2018, that was robust but polite. And when you make your case like that, you are good in my book,
📼 On the (You)Tube
Transport networks and services are crowded. As can be public spaces. And this video goes into depth about the science on how crowds behave. It is completely fascinating, and critical in terms of how we effectively manage systems that are busy.
What you can do: If you are planning improvements to crowded spaces, and what to take the opportunity to do some placemaking while you are at it, consider undertaking modelling of crowds. This will also inform your safety case for your scheme.
As part of your engagement with vulnerable groups on such schemes, ask them questions about the experience of being in a crowd. Different people have vastly different experiences of crowds and their ebbs and flows. How can you ensure that your designs provide safe refuges and can be effectively policed? Explore these questions with your vulnerable groups when designing a potentially crowded space.
🖼️ Graphic Design
Is this map of the British Rail network the best rail map ever? So says Roger French OBE, former Managing Director of the (excellent) Brighton and Hove Buses. He states:
It is an absolute masterpiece in cartographic design showing all the different Train Operating Companies and their territorial reach as well as a whole host of fascinating statistics such as the most and least used railway stations by region according to the last figures from the Office of Rail and Road (ORR).
Personally, I am not so sure. It does the practical job quite well, but given the complexity of operation on the UK rail network I am not sure that this is the best way to represent services. But what do I know?
📚 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.
World at ‘beginning of end’ of fossil fuel era, says global energy agency (Financial Times)
Smart toilets could leak your medical data, warn security experts (New Scientist)
How to avoid a green-metals crunch (The Economist)
In Search of Safer Shelters: The Challenges of Replicating Nature (Naked Capitalism)
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