Andrew Curry writes:

Over the holiday I had to take myself and my bike by long distance train. I’d heard bad things about the bureaucracy involved, so I decided to visit my local mainline station to sort it out in person. And this story doesn’t turn out the way you’re expecting.

In fact it was one of the best customer service experiences I’ve had all year. When the ticket clerk heard when I wanted to travel, the first question she asked was whether I had some flexibility – travelling half an hour earlier or later made the fare quite a lot cheaper, and it helped that she split the journey into two separate parts rather than selling me a single through ticket (rail’s arcane pricing structure doesn’t do it any favours).

She then made sure that my seat reservation was as close as possible to the guard’s van, where my bike would be, reminded me that the bike needed a ticket attached to it during the journey, and finally, as about eight tickets popped out of her printer, put them all into a little wallet grouped by journey stage.

What I liked about this, apart from the fact that I saved about £30, was that my service representative had a picture of my entire journey in her head, and set about making it as straightforwards as possible for me. I’d like to be able to give credit where it’s due, and name the station, but I’ve heard (though can’t find a link) that at least one rail franchise has responded to the downturn by telling staff to maximise revenues. This is short-sighted, to say the least. Digital media consultancies increasingly say that “earned media” – where a company’s actions earn from their users good digital or personal plaudits, such as this blog – is the most effective form of promotion. The rail company has already earned its £30 back in promotion several times over.

The picture is courtesy of the London Cycling Campaign, and was taken by Lionel Shapiro. It is used with thanks.

London Freewheel rolls down the Mall

Andrew Curry writes:

It was European Mobility Week last week, and London marked it with its second ‘Freewheel‘ event on Sunday. Quite a large area of the city centre (St James’ Park and the Embankment from Charing Cross to Tower Hill) was closed to motor vehicles; there were marshalled rides from feeder points around the city; and Sky Sports provided free hi-viz vests to anyone who wanted one. And during the course of the day around 50,000 cyclists turned out, helped by fine weather.

It brought to mind the idea that successful cities have to be both ‘magnets and glue’ (the phrase is Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s). Magnets are the events and buildings which make a city prominent; glue is what makes people stay there. The first is high profile, the second more about locality and liveability (good parks, good schools). The first tends towards the spectacular, the second towards the participatory.

What’s interesting is the way in which London has used cycling to promote both. There have been the magnet events such as the stages of the Tour of Britain and the Grand Depart of the Tour de France. Freewheel, in contrast, is glue – a social day out. But it turns out that a lot of the skills which are needed overlap. The roads closed off last Sunday were almost the same as for the first stage of the Tour of Britain earlier this month. The marshalling skills are similar.

As well as wanting to stage events such as this, cities have to learn how to do it. London has scaled up over time (the first time it closed off city centre roads for cycling it shut down a small area around Whitehall). It’s part of a successful pro-cycling strategy which has seen cyclist commuter numbers double in the capital over the last five years.

Freewheel photos (c) Peter Curry 2008

Rachel Kelnar writes:

I went to two really interesting futures events last week and was struck by the extent to which some emerging learnings were common to both, despite having expected beforehand that the topics would have little in common.

First, I attended a debate at the London Transport Museum (LTM) on the future of transport – ‘Survive or Thrive: What will urban life be like in 2055?’ The LTM used the intelligent infrastructure scenarios which my colleague Andrew Curry and I wrote for the UK Government’s Foresight Programme as the starting point for this discussion. I also participated in ‘Museums in the Long Now’ – a roundtable exploring the future of the museum, organised by the Cultural Leadership Programme at City University and Compton Verney, with funding from the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE).

An emerging theme of both sessions was ‘we are where we are’ – that if we were to design a transport system for the UK, we would not set out to design what we currently have, and neither would we fund or develop our museums in the way we do now. However, ‘we are where we are’ – and we therefore have to temper our views of the future with the reality of this starting point. We don’t have the luxury of a blank slate.

However, it’s important that this doesn’t limit us in terms of what we strive for, and both sessions used scenarios to help participants resist the temptation to think too short term, or too negatively.

Another interesting reflection for me was the potentially changing role of museums. They are generally considered windows to the past and this is pretty uncontroversial. But, if museums are to remain relevant in the future, they perhaps need to do more than reflect on what has already happened. They need to start providing a window on the future as well. The LTM has certainly embraced this idea, with the Future Generator, which allows every virtual or real museum visitor to explore how their choices can impact the future of London and the type of city we will all live in. It’s about putting the Museum at the heart of the debate about our transport system, sustainability and the London we might have in 2055, and pleasingly, it’s also based on the scenarios we were involved in writing.

Discussing the Museum of the Long Now, it became increasingly clear that many museums may well be a natural home for such futures exploration. They are naturally places where people go to learn – to be challenged, provoked, and to understand a culture, a society or a particular event in our history. This mindset is a good one for thinking about the future of our culture and our society – because thinking about the past is the first step to thinking more effectively about the future.

This shift is not without its challenges – it requires, for example, that museums get a bit more comfortable with conflict than many are at the moment. If museums can successfully place themselves at the heart of our future – regardless of the issue – than they are helping to cement their role in our lives going forward. We are where we are – but we don’t have to be stuck here.

Andrew Curry writes:

You have to pinch yourself as you leaf through the current issue of Newsweek, which is on the impact of high oil prices as pump prices climb and analysts are entertaining the thought of the $200 barrel of oil. Even a year ago, the coverage would certainly have been doom laden, even apocalyptic. But the cover story is almost upbeat, as it decides that this spring marked the moment when America changed:

With average gas prices per gallon edging toward $4, America’s notoriously profligate ways started to change fast. Americans are driving less, using mass transit more, buying fewer gas guzzlers, indeed shopping less wantonly in general, and lowering their previously unshakable confidence as consumers. Suddenly, Americans are acting differently; if not exactly like Swedes, then not quite like themselves, either. It’s a shift that could change the world.

What’s interesting is that it isn’t just journalistic hyperbole. The latest data from America’s Department of Transportation shows that high gas prices are changing consumer behaviour. Estimates for March show that Americans drove 3.4% fewer vehicle miles this year – 11 billion miles – than last year. It’s the biggest year-on-year monthly fall ever seen in the US transport data, and to give a sense of scale, the last time the year-on-year March data tipped downwards Jimmy Carter was President. In fact, there’s been a general downward trend since last November. So it turns out that driving habits do respond to price signals provided the price signals are sharp enough and persistent enough. And this has good effects; one result has been that nine million fewer tonnes of greenhouse gases were discharged into the atmosphere in the first quarter of 2008.

And this also bears out one of the central findings of the recent report, Dollars and Consumer Sense, from our colleagues at Yankelovich, which looks at consumer trade-offs in the face of recession. Certainly consumers plan to cut costs, for example from buying at stores which have cheaper prices but a smaller product range, and by trading down on quality. But quite a lot of the trade offs reported in the research involve lower consumption, even less consumerism – delaying purchases, cutting back on food and gasoline, cooking from scratch instead of buying prepared foods, buying second-hand, and giving up ’shopping for fun’. Not exactly Sweden, at least not yet. But not exactly ‘shopping for America‘ either.

Thanks to Matt Cutts for the photo.

Update: Trendspoting, The Oil Drum has an account of the new American phenomenon of ‘hypermiling’ – or getting the maximum mileage per gallon from your vehicle. There’s even a website.

Andrew Curry writes:

This is one of those unexpected pieces of data. According to figures just released by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), more miles were travelled by train in the UK last year than in any other year, at least in peacetime. The total mileage – just over 30 billion passenger miles – topped the previous record figure set in 1946. In fact, rail has been growing much faster than car mileage since 1995; the reasons include greater road congestion and rising car costs, investment in new trains, and more accessible information and booking (through online, for example).

ATOC marked the occasion with a booklet, The Billion Passenger Railway (opens in pdf). As it happens, it has been involved in a recent scenarios project we’ve run for the rail sector on the future of a sustainable industry, and through this I was invited to contribute a picture of rail in 75 years time – a story I thought might well be about European connections. That future scenario, ‘A Europe of City States’, is below the fold.

Image by Atlan at his Cityscapes and Skyline Photos blog.

Europedia Le Monde September 2083

Dateline : Mayors’ Convention, Vienna

The annual gathering of the Mayors’ Convention in an Inter City Express (ICE) terminus complex in a leading European city is always a good time to take the mood of the modern Europe. For the Mayors are both the beating heart and the economic engines of the re-shaped Europe, in which nation states have largely lost all but administrative powers.

If co-operation is the public face of the Convention, the smell of competition is always in the air. These women and men know that membership of the Convention is not bestowed lightly; it goes only to the 30 cities which have the most dynamic economic, social, and cultural influence across the Union as a whole. A year or two of poor performance and another contender is knocking at the door.

With the internet long hamstrung by crime and fraud, and air travel the preserve of the hyper-rich, the cities which keep their place at the table are those which have solved four problems, according to Vienna Mayor, Kristal Stangl, the host of this year’s event.

“We must make sure that our cities have enough energy to function, to be sure, and that resources like water are secure. There must be enough food. They need to be good places to live. A lot of cities can make these things happen, even in our present conditions of scarcity. But the economic part is about getting the best brains to work on the complex problems which need to be solved to build new knowledge and value. That needs good transport links, and the cities which invested in high speed rail in the first part of the century are the best placed to compete”.

Some cities have slipped off the map as the European periphery has grown and the core shrunk. Most of the ‘Euro-30’ come from the ‘Golden Diamond’ between London, Hamburg, Krakow, and Marseilles. Some long-standing rivalries have been settled; Madrid is no longer a member, while Barcelona holds on to its Convention status. Rome plays second fiddle to Milan. Manchester’s high speed link to the tunnel has helped it stay in the club, while Glasgow’s failure to gain one has exiled it to the fringes.

INSEAD’s public policy professor Regis Bertrand argues that nations are no longer tthe right size. “Europe has taken over migration and manages the single currency. Solving the energy and food issues has required a much more local focus. But the economic aspect needs both good local environments and long-distance connections. The fact that ICE sponsors the Convention isn’t just good marketing. It is a shared interest.”

London’s representative at the Convention, Mayor Nasr Hysen, an economist by background, says it comes down to labour markets. “With closed borders and a single economic framework, labour has to be able to move around, to follow work. But often this migration is temporary, for a few weeks or months, for a project. That’s why rail links are so central. But you need to remember that a lot of the money that’s earned goes back to their homes. It’s not perfect, but it helps to equalise incomes across Europe.”

Looking forward, the overall direction may be back to the future. Bertrand observes that ‘In the 19th century the railway built the nation state by standardising time and reducing regional differences. By the 22nd, as long as Europe can maintain the security of its borders, Europe will be more like the city-states of the Holy Roman Empire”.

Andrew Curry writes:

Our collegue Suvid Bajaj sends this map (click on the thumbnail) of the planned Shanghai metro – planned to reach 960 kms of track by 2020. In comparison, the London tube has a total track length of 450 kms, and the New York subway runs to around 400 kms.

One feature of the map which struck me was the fact that Harry Beck’s ‘wiring diagram’ model of mapping a subway system – which revolutionised the way we thought about the London tube in the 1930s – seems to have become ubiquitous.