Friday Reading List – 31 March

As anyone looking to properly understand London’s transport needs and network knows, context, background and best-practice are important. As readers might imagine, behind the scenes here at LR Towers we thus spend a lot of time sharing links and reading around the subjects we cover here.

We also occasionally share links containing good information about transport topics that we know we just don’t have time to cover. We also all, as authors, occasionally write elsewhere on this or tangentially related subjects.

If you’ve have something you feel we should read or include in a future list, don’t forget to email us at [email protected].

24 comments

  1. In the articles from “The Policy Exchange” they seem to be engaging in the compulsory Two Minutes Hate against diesel vehicles, in spite of the fact that until VERY recently, Diesel was being pushed as the less-polluting option.

    To continue the metaphor … “some of the labels & posters had been changed, it was obviously the work of Goldstein & his agents” (paraphrase)
    And, of course – “No, we have always been at war with Eastasia”

  2. To be fair, Greg, I think it’s more a question of: “Oh f***, we didn’t realise just how bad things were and how much worse our encouragement of diesels was making it.”

  3. Greg: You may be recruiting George Orwell onto the wrong side of this debate. In a dystopian world, it is far more likely that “the authorities” would have valued consistency over public health. Whereas in the somewhat less well-controlled world which we actually live in, the choice between the long-term harm of climate change (possibly made worse by less fuel-efficient vehicles, though of course it’s not quite as simple as that) and the immediate harm to nearby breathers caused (possibly) by use of some diesel engines — is less co-ordinated and, to an extent, left to a much-nudged public rather than imposed forcibly.

    (Note that I said “to an extent” – I do concede that some compulsion is being used here in addition to some persuasion).

  4. Not relevant to this thread I know, but nobody from LR has answered my post (17 March) in the Magazine issue 5 thread and my e-mail to [email protected] of 24 March has also gone unanswered. Are LR on holiday?

    repost
    “17 March 2017 at 12:24
    I’m a paid subscriber. but can’t remember how to download the issue – or is it just e-mailed to me?”

  5. Hello Romic – digital issues are emailed. We can send you a link again if you can’t find it.

    Sorry. I’d not seen your original comment. I’ll check the spam folder on the questions account for your email about it.

    JB

  6. Malcolm & quinlet
    Interesting & entirely possible.
    However, for a display of complete inconsistency this takes some beating with a n other set of “Authorities” insisting on a switch to diesel.
    Note: The last time I caught a river bus ( Blackfriars-Putney ) I noted the really filthy & choking diesel fumes from some of the “clipper” cats, though not the one I was on.

  7. @Greg

    Thames Clippers is looking for cleaner CNG or LNG engines for its future cats, but units of sufficient power are not yet available. More details in the next installments of the River Bus series.

  8. I’m puzzled by that Policy Exchange ten point plan. Surely top of the list, if we’re really serious about tackling air quality, would be “reduce the number of vehicles being driven in London”….?

  9. A compliant – the Irene’s Law piece is hardly an indepth article but just a blog post from 2013

    However the Ashford Station one is very good and of a similar quality to the main articles posted here as stand alone pieces.

  10. @ChrisC

    Thank you! You have no idea how the occasional nice comment like yours keeps one going.

  11. @IslandDweller On a practical level, you’re not going to be able to significantly reduce the number of vehicle driven in London. They’re going to fill all available road space. More feasible in the medium term is to require that the same number of vehicles cause less polluting.

    @Greg I remember a Tomorrow’s World piece on diesels causing particulate pollution. Probably early nineties. It’s just that CO2 was the shiny thing and general health didn’t matter as much as it does today.

  12. @TomHawtin. If the political will was there, there are lots of ways of reducing road traffic in central London. But no politician (other than former mayor Mr Livingston) has ever had the nerve to suggest it, even though driving in central London is very much a minority activity with massively disproportionate dis-benefits inflicted on the majority who don’t drive.

  13. @Island Dweller
    As it happens, road traffic has been decreasing in London for some years, particularly in central London. Ironically, this has been coupled with increased congestion because the amount of road space for general traffic has been cut back somewhat faster. While Policy Exchange may not have mentioned it (the articles are over a year old) reducing road traffic has become a more generally accepted goal. Where there is not yet consensus is the mechanism to achieve this.

  14. Re: quinlet – not sure that is ironic: possibly London is a special case but given the position of the motor car in British life I would have thought that reducing road space is the only way that traffic would be reduced, i.e. congestion cannot be reduced, only made to occur at different levels of traffic.

    Re: GT – I’m struggling to think of anything less relevant to general public health than the type of engine fitted to follower vessels in the Oxbridge boat race…

  15. I’d like to second ChrisC’s praise for The Beauty Of Transport – very pleased that one of these reading lists first pointed me to that blog and I now look forward to seeing what’s new there on my Wednesday evening homeward train commute.

  16. @ Balthazar Thank you! Much appreciated. And I’m very grateful to have been included here @Long Branch Mike.

  17. @Bathazar
    I entirely agree that congestion is unlikely to reduce in a city but that we can influence how many people and vehicles and of what type get caught up in it. Sadly, the political rhetoric is (and has been for many years) about reducing or eliminating congestion as this is more acceptable to the voting public. Maybe if we could get the rhetoric changed to reducing the number of people or journeys affected by congestion?

  18. Yes, I very much enjoyed the article on Ashford too. I once spent a fair few hours there back in 1999… It’s a very nice station, even though it was a bit lacking in the entertainment department….

  19. @ John Bull

    Thanks
    I’ve just checked through past e-mails and I see the one with the link for issue 5 arrived on 1st March and I somehow missed it! Now downloaded.

  20. @quinlet – I believe latest data shows that vehicle traffic in central London is now increasing after many years of decline.

    The primary culprits are services like Uber and internet delivery services.

    I read somewhere recently that an office in central London recorded more than one hundred separate Amazon deliveries in a single day. Internet delivery services are in a logistical arms race to offer faster delivery times to customers and there doesn’t appear to be financial incentives for them to consolidate deliveries.

  21. @ Reynolds953
    The figures vary. DfT counts certainly show an increase since 2013 with traffic levels now back up to 2011 levels. However, DfT only count on major roads and extrapolate on a fixed basis to allow for all other roads. But it’s the minor roads that have seen the bigger capacity reductions. The Central London cordon count shows a decline in traffic levels between 2013 and 2015 if not to the lowest ever (that might be 2010) but certainly pretty close. TfL traffic counts show broadly static levels of traffic in central London between 2013 and 2015 but a significant drop from then to 2016. I would expect the latter given the levels of highway works (primarily the cycle super highways) in central London in 2016.

  22. @ Reynolds 953 – I think it’s highly likely the new Mayor’s Transport Strategy will specifically reference these “new” forms of congestion. I also expect consolidation of internet deliveries to feature given comments made by Val Shawcross and others in recent weeks. Whether City Hall will be deploying “carrots”, “sticks” or a combination is not at all clear neither is whether they have any specific powers to intervene directly.

  23. @Reynolds953
    Thanks for the link. Any comparisons using 2012 as a starting point are immediately suspect because of the peculiar effect that the Olympic Games had on traffic levels in that year. This particularly applies to numbers of road works and delays caused because there was a moratorium on all but essential works during 2012. It also applies to traffic levels more generally because of the vigorous campaign for people not to travel by road if they could avoid it during the 6 weeks covering both sets of games. Good for journalistic copy but not for rational analysis.

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