Alistair Ford

Photo of the Houses of Parliament with bike, black cab, and red London bus.

Group of people around a meeting table discussing resilience of transport to extreme weather.

A London bus negotiating a very large puddle on a flooded Euston Road.

A great couple of days in London, first as part of a delegation of academics heading to parliament to meet with members of the Transport Select Committee and then at our regular @darehub.bsky.social meet-up with Department for Transport colleagues. Resilience to extreme weather very apt right now.

When direct connections between the mouth of Tyne and London and Norway were just part of the fabric of our ordinary transport infrastructures.

Map of West Midlands showing areas by car ownership and accessibility.

Great session on TfWM's local transport plan, bringing out the need for positive visions of the future and ambitious targets (50% of urban trips by sustainable modes by 2035, 35% reduction in car miles). Some nice maps too, like this of car use and accessibility. Land-use planning vital too!

The importance of carbon budgets raised by the panel is great. "If you want to build a 3rd runway at Heathrow, fine. But you have to close the M1." Quality of life and carbon reduction needs to be valued much more highly than time savings. Shape transport around what people want, not 1960s vision.

Lovely to be at Pathways to Net Zero in Birmingham, hearing from a great panel on the challenge of decarbonisation and climate resilience in transport. Claire Haigh set the scene with a focus on Avoid-Shift-Improve and we've heard about vision-led planning and the need for positive stories.

A view from a rainy train window over a damp valley filled with mill town housing, heavy grey clouds in the sky.

Off to Manchester to examine a @tyndallcentre.bsky.social PhD on climate risks to transport. My train is slowly trundling at 20mph via Todmorden in the rain after a fire in Standegde Tunnel. It shows the importance of redundancy in the network for resilience but also the need for big investment.

Our cat is very middle class...

That's pretty much what the response to the Masterplan consultation that we put together as academics at Newcastle University said. It should be designed with no through traffic from the outset and as high density mixed-use.

What was the outcome of the scrutiny discussion @mikecookson.bsky.social ?

We're on the verge of submitting a research proposal to explore how to anticipate and plan for building re-use better. We were mainly focussing on healthcare buildings but good point about universities leading the way with their own estate!

Ours refuses to take tablets even in Pill Pockets. The only infallible method is coating them in butter then wrapping them in mortadella...

Meanwhile

Thanks to our North East bus operators, Nexus, and NECA for joining us to talk about the resilience of bus services to disruptive events. It was great to get their insight into how they keep the buses on the road and the challenges of keeping people moving.

“Journeys are safer & smoother when we all work together”

Lovely common sense road rules ad from Wokingham Borough Council.

I cannot think of any other area of public policy where you could get away with something so gobsmackingly idiotic.

“These new powers do not go far enough to protect pedestrians | Living Streets

“These new powers do not go far enough to protect pedestrians. It’s disappointing not to see a nationwide prohibition.”

Our @charitycat.bsky.social responds to the news that local authorities will receive legal powers to restrict pavement parking. https://www.livingstreets.org.uk/pavement-parking

This advert is hilarious!

After five years of contemplation, it seems the solution to the blight of pavement parking is a fudged halfway house that doesn't address the actual problem. Having tried to get police action on pavement obstruction, I know how hard it is. 71% of consultees favoured an outright ban (like in London).

It's a shame a nice pint of Bass is so hard to come by these days! The last one I had was in Belfast of all places.

Road safety strategy leaves vulnerable road users exposed Road safety strategy leaves vulnerable road users exposed Transport Action Network (TAN)1 has welcomed today’s publication of the government’s Road Safety Strategy2. The strategy, long overdue, contai...

No mention of pavement parking in the new Road Safety Strategy 😞

This is a key safety issue for many yet there has been no government response since the consultation on it closed in November 2020!!
transportactionnetwork.org.uk/road-safety-...

The new UK Road Safety Strategy with its target of a 65% reduction in casualties and mandating of a Safe System approach, marks the beginning of the end for the national 30mph speed limit. It's no longer credible when its been rejected by all Welsh and Scottish and 55% of English authorities.

I'm hoping to see a growing 'Ford' node soon!

A fun game for you all to play, but also a useful tool in the ongoing battle to remove traffic from Blackett Street and turn it into a safe space for people.

And we all know that no model is perfect!

Yes, that would be ideal! At the moment these kinds of models take quite a lot of effort (and data) to set up and calibrate/validate but there's a community working on open-source tools to speed up the process. All of this is still to be peer-reviewed, of course, but refutes the Times assumptions...

The reduction in car mileage was ~6 percentage points for 0-2km trips, and 3% for 2-10km trips. There wasn't a huge change in walking or cycling, mainly because in that scenario separated cycle infrastructure wasn't provided. When that was included, cycle use more than doubled, x5 for 2-5km trips.

Obviously it's only a model, not empirical data (all models are wrong, but some are useful), but in a scenario where all residential streets in our simulated region (Tyne and Wear) were made LTNs, the overall car mileage across all distances fell 1.3 percentage points and PT distances increased.

We've been building an agent-based transport model to try and quantify exactly these things, to explore change to transport mode and distance driven due to interventions like LTNs. Paper will hopefully be out this year! Headline: "it's not as simple as that" is a good summary.

Same the country over, if you’re not in a car, your safety doesn’t matter

Just possibly it's the oil? A solar panel is the new peace sign

International law won't constrain Trump's thirst for oil. But every solar panel that goes up makes crude reserves that much less valuable
billmckibben.substack.com/p/just-possi...

YouTube video by Sky News The real reason Venezuela matters

📽️Donald Trump wants you to know he's targeting Venezuela because of illegal drugs.
But what if this were really about something else altogether...?
Dig into the murky world of crude oil refining and you find another, even more intriguing explanation...
Full primer 👇 youtu.be/Pgwny1BiCYk?...