Life under Network Rail offers a glimpse of the future if Corbyn were left in charge
The shambles that is Network Rail continues to blight our lives. City A.M. readers may have experienced the cancellation of many services into Waterloo on Monday, due to engineering works overrunning. Even the best-laid plans can go astray. But this week was not just a one-off event. It seems to be a permanent feature of […]
Should AVs be held to higher standards?
In the three weeks since the first fatal crash involving an AV and a pedestrian, plenty of questions have been raised about the safety of self-driving cars. A question to think about soon will be: ‘how safe should AVs be expected to be before they will be accepted on our roads?’. AVs have massive potential […]
Altruism and information deficits: What snowstorms teach us about economics
While weather may not seem like a typical economics topic, there are always interesting aspects to behaviour in any context. Quite a number of drivers, for example, appear to have ignored notices of road closure. They drove on regardless, until becoming stuck in the snow. In Greater Manchester, which seems to have been the vortex […]
Volterra in joint team to undertake City of London Traffic Reduction Study
The City of London Corporation has commissioned a joint team comprising transport & traffic specialists Norman Rourke Pryme, our consultancy and transport planning specialists Markides Associates to undertake the City of London Traffic Reduction Study. The City’s economic performance is vital, not just for London but for the UK, and motorised vehicle access has played […]
There are economic lessons to learn from TfL’s hated bus announcement experiment
The Transport for London (TfL) bus experiment has proved to be overwhelmingly unpopular. Supposedly at every bus stop (but more usually once the bus has pulled away) a disembodied voice informs the passengers that the bus is about to move. The hated announcement is being run as a trial for four weeks. TfL will then […]
Paul Buchanan at LLT Local Transport Summit in Manchester
In its second year, the LLT Local Transport Summit is a gathering of senior level decision-makers and professional experts in local and regional transport initiated by Local Transport Today and supported by the Department for Transport. This year the Summit took place in Manchester on the 16th and 17th November. The intention is to provide […]
Mind the gap: Economics is catching up to the fact that we’re not always rational
Do Tube strikes make Londoners better off? At first sight, the question is simply absurd. The answer is surely “no”. But a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics comes to the opposite conclusion. Cambridge economist Shaun Larcom and his colleagues analysed the two-day strike of February 2014. They obtained detailed travel information on nearly […]
What’s next for ‘Pricing for Prosperity’?
Our shortlisted Wolfson Economics Prize entry, and the thinking behind it continues to be of interest to various organisations. Paul Buchanan was recently approached by Transportation Professional for comment. A copy of the latest edition of the TP magazine can be viewed here.
Neo-Luddites won’t like it, but the UK must keep on (driverless) truckin’
The announcement that experiments will take place with driverless lorries on UK motorways ought to be a cause for celebration. Once again, human ingenuity is pushing out the frontiers of technology. But the general reaction in the media has been one of anxiety and concern. Wholly contradictory arguments have been advanced against them. Driverless cars […]
Paul Buchanan discusses ‘Pricing for Prosperity’
It is over 200 years since road pricing was first suggested but there are only three significant schemes in operation: London, Singapore & Stockholm. All are ongoing and popular, even though they cover only a small % of the city and levy a simple, and relatively ineffective, cordon charge. Our proposal (Volterra with Jacobs) for […]
