Tree-ts for All - MMD#568

Good day my good friend.

No nonsense today. Just straight down to business.

If you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include in this newsletter, you can email me.

Mobility Camp is taking place on 26th September 2023 in Birmingham. It would be great to see you there. Get your tickets now.

James

It’s been emotional

In classic economics, people make rational decisions in order to maximise their enjoyment from their purchasing decisions, or utility. Behavioural economics challenges this, stating that human decision making is often bounded in irrational decision making frameworks. Much of which underpins work on travel behaviour change. But do emotions and irrationality really drive our behaviours that much?

Well, when it comes to the adoptiong of lower carbon technologies, yes, they do. As this recent study of the adoption of e-bikes in Norway, which explored the role of emotion in adoption, shows. Their qualitative study speaks for itself in the concluding sections, and its good news for e-bikes.

We identified three key themes—freedom, comfort, and speed—through which our participants made sense of their e-bike experiences. Sensory experiences—touch, sound, smell, and sight—led to positive emotions of joy, happiness, pleasure, and excitement, which our participants interpreted as feeling free, comfortable, and fast. In contrast, other sustainable mobility technologies were interpreted as unfree, uncomfortable, and slow.

Do you like trees?

On my local Facebook group, the hot subject of the last few weeks has been grass cutting. On the one side, there is the “just let it grow” contigent saying that this is excellent for insects and other wildlife. One the other side, there are the people who measure their worth by the fact that their grass doesn’t exceed 2 centimetres in height. It makes you wonder whether people actually like natural things. The thing is, there is now a study that looked at whether people like green infrastructure. So what does it say?

That it varies between cities. But that there is some commonality in that those with higher awareness of environmental issues tend to support them more. So while one city may favour green infrastructure more, the residents of another may fight it tooth and nail. This requires an effective understanding of your place, and tactics to navigate it.

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.

• The Second Age of Smoke (George Dillard)

• The Scenic Route: Tenn. Group Urges Drivers to Exit Freeways and Use Back Roads (Daily Yonder)

• John Deere's private 5G journey (Light Reading)

• Magpie Unveils Concept For Long-Range Sustainable Flight (Aviation Week Network)

• What Does a Green City Look Like? Equitable, Connected and Nature-Positive. (City Fix)

Something interesting

Mr Beast does trains. Think younger guy does Top Gear.

If you do nothing else today, then do this

Oli Davey wrote an interesting blog on the simplistic notion that removing traffic one-way systems = good. Like many solutions, its simple, elegant, easily understood, but it doesn’t mean its right. It’s worth reading.