Getting beyond the MaaS hysteria
I don’t know about you but I’ve seen more than enough Power Points by now explaining with breathless excitement what Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is – as if no-one had ever heard about it before. And as if frequent repetition of the phrase in itself has alchemic properties which render immaterial base considerations as economics. […]
Six to watch on urban transport from the new Government
Early days but here’s six to watch that could be early indicators of the long term direction of the new government on urban transport. 1. All the political big names love buses these days – if they can’t claim blood relatives in the industry they are making models of them in the evening. True […]
Sociable housing meets public transport – 10 things I learned in Eindhoven
The UK has a housing crisis. Not enough of the right kind of homes in the right formats in the right places and at the right price. We can and must do better and part of this means making better connections between transport and housing (and professionals working in these two sectors) in order to […]
How Merseyrail dared to be different
“Liverpool, surreal. Liverpool, sardonic. Liverpool battered dignity. Liverpool, flotsam of maritime memory. Liverpool never quite what it was because everything it does changes what it does … Liverpool, welcoming the world. Liverpool cutting edge, keeping pace, dropping anchor.” Extract from The North by Paul Morley Liverpool is different. And so is its very own rail network. None […]
We know the pledges – but what’s the plan?
In signing up to climate change pledges politicians are also signing up to a seismic public policy shift – especially for the way we travel Climate change is the challenge of the century, both in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the worst effects of the continuum we are already on. We all […]
How can we support towns like Batley?
There are so many policy reports on transport and cities you could stack them up as high as the Beetham Tower. However, the pile of reports on transport and towns would struggle to get higher than the front step. Of course, getting big city transport networks right deserves attention. Wider city region economies, and indeed […]
When transport met housing…
Yesterday we held a roundtable in parliament chaired (at different stages) by both the Chair of the House of Commons Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee , Clive Betts MP, and his counterpart at the Transport Select Committee, Lilian Greenwood MP. Round the table we had housing associations, developers, planning bodies, transport authorities, local government, […]
Northern Ireland is getting ahead
Of the four main constituent parts of the UK, only one of them saw bus use grow last year. It is the same one on track to having a smart and fully unified ticketing system across all forms of public transport, and which has also seen the use of its rail network double in 10 […]
Health in All Policies – the transport connection
A few quick reflections on the thought provoking Health in All Policies conference we were a sponsor of on Wednesday and which our AD Rebecca Fuller spoke at (as part of our long term aim of getting better coordination across the health and transport sectors) – shamefully, health inequalities in this country are getting worse – all the […]
What do we really feel about the bus?
Most of the discourse on buses treats people as if they know what they are doing. It assumes that travellers are constantly making fully conscious rational economic trade-offs between cost and journey times and then making the logical choice as a result. And of course there is part of the brain that does this. This […]