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Analysis

Autonomy, reliability, and public transport

In Daniel Pink’s classic lecture about motivation and drive for the RSA, he talks about autonomy and the desire to be self directed. In recent weeks I have been wondering about this when it comes to public transport timetables. What constraints on a person’s autonomy are going to be too […]

Analysis

Europe’s railways: unable to play the role they should in the climate transition

Two interesting pieces of information about transport and the climate transition crossed my timeline yesterday. This tweet from TUMI: Transport: Save money, protect the climate πŸšΆβ€β™€οΈπŸšΆβ€β™‚οΈπŸš²πŸšƒπŸš‹πŸ”Œ@IPCC_CH pic.twitter.com/M04fFglFmN — π—§π—¨β“‚οΈπ—œ for πŸšΆβ€β™‚οΈπŸšΆβ€β™€οΈπŸš΄β€β™€οΈπŸš΄β€β™‚οΈπŸš‹πŸšπŸ”‹πŸ”Œ (@TUMInitiative) April 5, 2022 And this New York Times story entitled In Europe, It’s Planes vs. Trains. For Many […]

Quick takes

Open source mapping tools

One of the headaches when planning the #CrossBorderRail trip was to be able to map railway routes adequately accurately. The number of railway routing tools available in public is considerably fewer than for road transport! But on this – as on so many other railway topics – it was a […]

Analysis, European Union

Night trains, scale and standardisation

I listened in to the Back on Track Belgium conference last week, and the founder of a startup night train company said something interesting. “The reason we are against things like night train rolling stock pools,” he stated, “is that means we cannot configure the trains the way we want […]