It's approaching the end of the year, and that means it's time for my annual reading list. I'm happy to report that this year, especially in the first half, I've read a lot more than in the previous one. While great news, it does mean that there's much more to write about, so this time I'm going to split the list into an English part, and a (considerably longer) Spanish part, which you'll be able to change between using the language switcher in the top right, once it's also published. As before, I'm planning to go chronologically, writing a short background on each book, and giving out some "highly recommended" awards.

Oedipus Rex - Sophocles, Johnson (2005) translation

While I was on my year abroad studying in Spain, I restricted myself to only reading books in Spanish (hence why the English part of this list is relatively short), with the exception of Oedipus Rex. I read this as part of a course I was taking, Cultura Clásica (Classical Cultures), for both the coursework and the exam. Being the first Ancient Greek/Roman literature I looked at, I read it in English to better (and quicker) understand it. The translation I used is a modern text, which made it much easier to parse and more enjoyable, and also came with very helpful footnotes explaining context, characters, meanings, and more.

Sophocles is one of the most celebrated of the Ancient Greek tragedians, alongside Aeschylus ("the father of tragedy") and Euripides ("the most tragic of poets"), and Oedipus Rex is likely his most famous work. I enjoyed it a lot, it was interesting reading something in such a different format to what I'm used to, and it tied into learning about the culture and geography of Classical Greece as part of the course. Interestingly, I didn't feel as strong a sense of wanting to stop what was happening, of things going wrong, as in other fated tragedies, I felt that the characters here were often harder to sympathise with. Overall though I still liked the story and the setting, and at some point I plan to read Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, whose events take place shortly afterwards (while not strictly being sequels).

Autocracy, Inc. - Anne Applebaum

This was, without a doubt, the best book I read this year. As often happens, I found myself browsing the shelves (and tables, in this case) at Waterstones, and came across this intriguing title. After a good half an hour or so of reading in the shop, I bought it, and read it over the course of a few days - the first book I read after coming back to the UK and Exeter. The book is an extended version of recent essays by Applebaum, and both the depth and breadth of her reporting is excellent. It ties together the key parts of modern autocracies - including money and co-operation, information narratives and social media, and their global, transnational effects, into one accessible, factual, and compelling book which I can recommend to everyone.

I found it so useful that I re-read it shortly after to make notes, and it's inspired various projects and investigations since then. Perhaps most importantly, it comes with a wide variety of ideas for protecting the free world and for reversing the current trends of autocratization. So if you're stuck wondering why the world is how it is at the moment, and how we can go about trying to improve it, then there's a good chance that this is the book for you.

Nero - Conn Iggulden

11 June 2016 is when I took out my first Conn Iggulden book from the library: Lords of the Bow, the second of his Genghis Khan and descendants series. Shortly after coming home with it, my mum had a look through and decided it was not appropriate for me, then an 11 year old, and off it went back to the library. So, on my next trip to the library with my dad, 11 year old me tried again - this time with the first book in the series, Wolf of the Plains, making sure to hide it at the bottom of a large pile of books I took out alongside it, and later under my bed. And so began my introduction to the world of historical fiction.

Since then I've loved Iggulden's books, having read most of them (the fiction ones too), and I think it'd be fair to say that historical fiction is my favourite genre - combining historical events and settings with amazing storytelling and prose is simply an incredible combination. This - the opener of the Emperor Nero trilogy (although Agrippina is really the protagonist of this book) - was the first one I'd read in over 2 years, and it was almost addictive coming back to it; I finished this book in the space of a few days while on holiday. I'd say it was also one of the best I've read: I think the story was more unique and the characters/relationships had more complexity than previous ones, although that may just be because my memory of them has faded with time. Regardless, it was the book I enjoyed most this year, and is a great way to get into the genre - as long you don't mind the oddities and at times uncomfortableness of the Roman elite...

Tyrant - Conn Iggulden

Following on, Tyrant is the next in the series after Nero. There's not loads to say here: it's also fantastic, and the only reason it's not "highly recommended" is that it's pretty much a given if you're reading the first. This book develops the character of Nero a lot more, and shows his odd relationship with his mother, Agrippina, and the other people who play a large part in both lives (eg Burrus, the head of the Praetorians). I think Agrippina is still the most fascinating character here though, the ability she has to manipulate and control people around her, and to play Roman politics so successfully, is astounding.

I also particularly liked that Iggulden added footnotes and a historical accuracy part at the end of both books, explaining many of his decisions over what version or interpretation of an event he used to create his story. I don't remember him doing that in previous series, so it was a very welcome addition. It was fun to see some mentions of Roman Britain as well, here and at the end of the first book, and the description of Nero's Naumachia (Roman mock sea battle) was excellent. The only criticism I can raise is that I have to wait until May for the final instalment in the trilogy :(

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

A Clockwork Orange is a book that I'd been meaning to read for a long time. I'm not quite sure where I first heard about it, but I think it was part of some particular grouping of "modern classics" (alongside things like 1984) which were talked about in English classes, or perhaps by my parents. It's certainly a unique book. This particular version is from the 2007 Independent's Banned Books series, which came with a very helpful foreword. Especially interesting is that Burgess claims to have always wanted the last chapter - which flips the ending on its head, to be published in the US, whereas others say that he was happy for it not to be. The slang that Burgess created for the book also added a lot (apparently done to ensure it wouldn't go out of date), and while it made it harder to read at first (lots of flicking back and forth to the glossary), it didn't take too long to get the hang of it.

The dystopian world of rampant youth violence and the ineffectiveness of the state at preventing it is a depressing one, although fitting with the pessimism of the 60s around this topic (especially in certain cities), some which still lingers today I find. And the descriptions of this are very... colourful. The story almost feels a bit like a tragedy in parts, with the previous events and people coming back in highly unlikely and strange ways. The central theme of free will vs violence and the state is an important one, and that alongside the extreme violence is probably what pushed it into the public eye, and spurred the creation of many film/stage adaptations since. I found I didn't agree with some of the undercurrents - religion, inevitability, I don't think those are the best ways to approach the problem (education and environment would be better places to start), but nonetheless, reading it was still a useful thought exercise, and I do think that free will and thinking are important things to protect, especially in a world where those kinds of rights are currently in recession.

Passenger transport by cars, vans and taxis compared to other modes, measured in billion passenger kilometres per year. Great Britain, 1952 to 2023

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Accessibility: Transport for everyone

Driving and owning a motor vehicle is a big responsibility. Learning to drive is a time-consuming and expensive process, and something which is not an option for a lot of people. The young, the very old, the disabled, and many more are largely or not at all able to. Buying and maintaining a car is expensive: purchase, fuel, maintenance and MOTs, repairs, insurance, parking and road taxes nowadays combine to form British people's second largest expense after housing¹.

Average weekly household expenditure in the UK, financial year ending (FYE) 2023, Office for National Statistics

I've titled this article "transport should be for the public" because I strongly believe that everyone has the right to get around and to where they need to, independently and without reliance on their ability and economic provisions to drive, or on a family member or friend to do so for them. I grew up in quite a car dependent place, and I was very reliant on my parents to take me around; if they weren't available or willing to, I often couldn't (easily, quickly or cheaply) get to where I wanted to.

Throughout most of our human history, we've walked everywhere. Or perhaps ridden a horse, maybe with a carriage or cart. Sometimes even a boat if we were feeling adventurous. And these are still very good ways of getting around (bicycles now included as well), but in our modern societies we go much further distances, much more often. While active transport should remain our first option for shorter trips (for those who are able to), we need engine-powered vehicles to go further. And for transport to be truly accessible and universal we need solutions which are available to everyone, low-cost, quick and convenient.

Cars: Unsustainable in more ways than one

I've laid out the moral case for public transport - for why it's needed, but it absolutely should not just be the last option, for those who don't have others. It should be, with few exceptions, the first.

Pollution

It's common knowledge that combustion engine cars are one of the most polluting forms of transport (and the transport sector itself is the second most polluting), heavily impacting global warming and the climate emergency, local levels of air pollution, and noise² pollution. And according to the latest UK Gov statistics, their greenhouse emissions per kilometre are second only to domestic flights, an option so unsustainable that countries such as France are taking steps to ban them³.

Carbon equivalent per kilometre of different modes of transport

It's true that hybrids and electric cars are a lot better, but they're still not great options. The vast, vast majority of cars on the road have combustion-engines and will do for quite a long time. Even at the time of writing new EVs make up only 22% of new vehicle registrations, and 4.6% of cars on the road. But if you look closely at the chart you'll notice that electric cars are actually not all that sustainable. How can that be? In part because some of our electricity production still comes from fossil fuels. But that's not the full picture, because options such as long-distance coaches which do mostly use fossil fuels are still less polluting, and local buses are significantly better than petrol/diesel cars. The reason for this is that cars typically use a lot, lot more energy per person. The average UK car trip has 1.6 people onboard and a maximum of 5, but an average bus trip has 11.9 and a maximum of 60-100⁴, while only using 4-6x as much power⁵. If you do the maths this means that an average bus carries around 7.5x as many people, while using roughly 5x as much energy - an improvement of 1.5x. But if you take a reasonably full bus, say 80% capacity (64) vs the same for a car (4), you get 16x as many people - an improvement of just over 3x. With a car, you have a lot of car body for very few people, whereas a bus has a much higher ratio of people to vehicle, and will also typically get far more use before having to be replaced while producing less pollution overall from tyre wear.

To really get the point across, national rail - which unlike long-distance coaches typically does have quite a lot of stops - still produces less emissions per km than EVs and the majority of it⁶ is not yet electrified. The very high efficiency of train carriages (person to vehicle body ratio) combined with the low-friction of rail, mostly smooth journeys (no sudden braking and acceleration, traffic or idling) and direct grid-to-engine power (in most cases of electrification) makes them unbelievably efficient in terms of energy usage. The Eurostar - a fully electrified and modern train line - produces less than an order of magnitude as many emissions as an electric car.

Carrying capacity & infrastructure

While most people are familiar with the high levels of pollution caused by cars, their impact on space usage and subsequent effects on city designs is often less well understood. I've already alluded to their poor carrying capacity but to put things into perspective it's helpful to see a visualisation.

Passengers per hour on a 3.5 metre wide lane in the city for different modes of transport

Of all the common methods of transport, cars are the least efficient way of moving people around. Using the same amount of space they carry 6-7.5x less people than cycling or walking, and over 20x less than having dedicated bus lanes. Vs heavy rail and metros systems the comparison is even more stark with differences of 30-45x, notwithstanding that metros are often largely located underground anyway.

So where does this matter? Most obviously it matters in urban centres with high density housing and lots of people (commuters, tourists) moving in and out. Trying to transport hundreds of thousands or even millions of people by car in these locations would simply be impossible. As well as being less efficient to begin with, trying to increase car capacity tends to scale really badly when compared to shared transport. City planners are well versed in the concept of induced demand, where widening or building more roads generally leads to more people using the road and no improvements to traffic (or even worsening). With enough roads you might be able to overcome this problem, but the space and costs needed would be astronomical, as would the complexity of the system - and human drivers are not very good at using extra road space and distributing themselves evenly across it. Public transport meanwhile is comparatively easy to scale as needed to meet the demands of even the most populated places on Earth.

Car-first design & dependency

The effects of car-centric transport don't just affect urban centres, and they arguably have a greater impact on the rest of the population. Over the past hundred or so years many new places - mid and small-sized towns - have been built to be car-first. While older settlements have been retrofitted to adapt, and metropolises simply can't support it, these places - above all in North America and the countries with the most influence from there - are designed around cars. The end result of this is as inevitable as it is self-fulfilling.

Pre-car towns and villages are designed around and for humans. Lots of amenities, attractions and places of work are located within a short walking of each other. Everything is built at a human scale - you can walk along the street and feel like you belong there, passing easily from building to building. When you needed to go between one walkable zone and another you'd take a form of collective transport such as a tram/streetcar or a horse and carriage. In complete contrast, places built around cars are often entirely unfriendly to humans. Buildings are spaced much further apart, and often separated by busy roads and gigantic car parks.

Historically when designing and building a place, there's always been a clear distinction between roads and streets. Roads are designed for transporting people: for going between different zones within a city and between different cities or towns. They can be general-purpose roads intended for all sorts of vehicles such as horse-drawn ones, electric trolley cars, cycles and pedestrians, and of course cars, or dedicated train lines designed for heavy rail. As seen, rail tends to be more efficient, and faster, but less flexible. Both are important to have. But once you enter a town or a zone, you'd find mostly streets. Streets are designed for humans. They are typically smaller, and filled with all sorts of shops, attractions, parks, public spaces and facilities. While roads are usually fairly empty, save for an occasional service station, streets are the places where people live and spend time. Forums and plazas, markets, street musicians and performers, libraries and places of study, civil buildings, works of architecture and art: streets are what make a place.

Left: a road in the US. Right: a street in Amsterdam

The problem with car-first designs is that they blur these lines. They design streets at the scale of a road, where everything is too far apart and very unfriendly, and usually dangerous, for humans. These street-road hybrids are often called stroads.

A stroad in the US

While it would theoretically be possible to walk to and around the above retail parks, they're clearly not designed for it. It would be incredibly dangerous to do so with the narrow or nonexistent pavements, placed near to and virtually without protection from the congested and chaotic lanes of traffic. Just imagine trying to cross them. To make a street an enjoyable place to be it both needs to be and feel safe, and to be inviting to its users by being visually interesting and varied in design. This place and most like it are entirely barren, save for a sparse few repeating trees. I have walked around many of these and it's awful. It feels like you're completely out of place and that at any moment a car might appear out of nowhere and hit you (especially when there simply aren't pavements connecting certain parts, and so you're forced to walk on the roads), not to mention the noise and fumes. But when somewhere is designed for and at the scale of cars this is the result; anybody who's not inside a car is an outsider and the vicious cycle of car-design and car-dependency continues. And children who grow up in places depending on parents to drive them everywhere will learn that driving is the only way to get anywhere there - and that they'll need to learn and buy a car to achieve any degree of independence and mobility.

Car-centric lifestyles & parking

According to research by the British Parking association, there were estimated to be over 45 million parking spaces in 2013 (including private parking) - not far off 1 space per person. And according to the RAC foundation the average car spends 96% of its time parked, and just 4% in use. These statistics helpfully highlight the final but equally important problem with car-centric design. We've looked at how car-first designs are very inefficient at moving people around, and so take up a lot of road (or stroad) space. We've talked about how they cause buildings to become oversized and placed very far apart, while making these areas highly unappealing to anyone not inside of a car. But the cherry on top is that in addition to all this, cars take up space when not in use - a lot of it. If you look at a top-down view of a retail park such as the above ones, or of a typical US suburb, you'll notice that most of the space that's not road is actually used for car parking. Car parks take up vast quantities of space and often take this space away from streets and other human-scale buildings, including from housing and retail - helping drive up prices and scarcity. A welcoming, enticing street or public space is broken by a large surface car park, and providing (or even mandating) multiple parking spaces per home is a sure-fire way to guarantee car-scale designs instead of human-scale ones.

It doesn't really need stating, but shared forms of transport use far less parking space. For one because there's a lot less needed due to their efficiency in moving people around, but more acutely because when you get off a bus or train, or taxi, the vehicle continues on its way to serve other people, rarely stopping during the day. When stored at night they're typically parked out of the way in a station or depot. The difference with private vehicles could hardly be greater. As a real-world example which I came across recently, more people arrive at and depart from Gatwick airport by train than by car. But while the train station occupies next to no space, and passengers arrive practically already inside the airport, the car parks require far more, and have long walks or follow-up trips to then arrive at the terminals.

London Gatwick Airport: red = airport parking, blue = airport train line. Note that there is an airport train service running between the two terminals

The above RAC foundation report states that there were over 27 million private cars in 2012, close to one for every other person, and the Department for Transport estimates that 78% of households have at least one car, with 34% having two or more. With so many people owning cars, driving them around and parking them, it becomes inevitable that many places end up being designed for cars and incorporating large car parks, large stroads, and human-unfriendly designs.

Number of cars per household, UK, 1971-2022

Safety

The final way in which cars can be considered unsustainable is in relation to safety. While we have let ourselves get accustomed to it, cars are dangerous. The US National Safety Council states that 1 in 7 preventable injury-related deaths comes from transport, and the vast majority of these from car related incidents.

Fatality rates per distance travelled of different modes of transport, US, 2010-2019

Looking at data from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics⁷ we can see that motorcycles, trucks and cars have the highest rate of occupant fatalities (private jets notwithstanding). But the true picture is worse than it looks because a significant number of the fatalities caused by these vehicles are not the vehicle occupants or even other vehicles, but rather pedestrians and cyclists. In fact, walking and cycling are statistically some of the least safe forms of transport, despite causing next to zero incidents themselves.

Fatality rates per time travelled of different modes of transport, US, 2010-2019

Averaging by time instead of distance presents a similar picture, with trains and planes doing a bit worse due to generally going longer distances in less time, while buses and ferries improve.

It shouldn't really come as a surprise that private motor vehicles are so deadly given what they are: large, heavy chunks of metal going at high speeds in any direction that the drivers end up taking them, often in spaces shared with or very close to pedestrians, cyclists, and other transport. Unlike train or plane journeys, road vehicles don't follow fixed routes and schedules in order to avoid contact with all other vehicles and people. Road vehicles are able to go anywhere, often weaving in and out of and overtaking each other, with drivers following new routes while doing their best to avoid all the other road users and obstacles. On top of this, human drivers⁸ are usually bad drivers. They get tired, annoyed, stressed, distracted (eg using their phones), drunk or sleep deprived, and sometimes even put some distorted sense of ego, pride or showing-off before the safety of others, as well as speeding and driving less carefully when they're running late for something. Professional, public-vehicle drivers such as those found in buses and trains are at least being employed to follow the rules of the road and to take their jobs seriously; treating their passengers and other vehicles with respect and safety.

While we do seem to have got used to it, we should expect better from our transport systems. It's hardly an uncommon sight to see a crashed car (just "another accident"), on the motorway or on a smaller road, and I have people in my family who've suffered debilitating injuries or even death from these crashes. If none of the previous arguments have resonated with you this should: the number of people we're killing and seriously injuring with our car-centric lifestyles is unacceptable, and needs to be drastically reduced. A shift away from such high car usage - especially in our streets and other pedestrian-heavy areas, is a must in order to achieve this.

When private road vehicles do make sense

Despite their many, many downsides, there are some use-cases where cars and especially larger private vehicles do make a lot of sense - we just shouldn't be using them where they don't.

The first situation that comes to mind is moving lots of or quite unwieldy things over a short-ish distance. Trains and buses can work for this - I've seen people carry all sorts of things from tables to desktop computers on them, but sometimes it's more convenient to go door-to-door (even if only for a drop-off). Perhaps the most obvious example would be moving homes. When I move into my UK university in Exeter (around ~3 hours away by train or car), the easiest way to do it - to take all the things I want with me at once, is to fill up a car with it. Otherwise, I go by train when travelling there, but taking all of my things when moving would probably require 3-4 trips, even with help. When moving into a bigger home, a removal van/lorry is usually the easiest way of doing it, again to avoid lots of trips and excess carrying.

Another example of moving things is instruments. When I play in music gigs most of the musicians make their own way to the venue, carrying their instruments and walking, cycling or taking transport. But certain larger pieces of equipment, including percussion, music stands, chairs, and large instruments like tubas or double basses are not very comfortable to take like this, especially if it's just a few people doing it. As with moving homes, the best way is often by car or by van, depending on how much there is. So we ask if anyone knows anyone with a car, or book out a taxi or van if needed, which costs relatively little just for these events.

The same is true when moving lots of people to the same place, such as a school trip. Public transport often works great for this, but if there's specific requirements such as an itinerary and stops, unusual places, lots of baggage (maybe it's a music tour!), it can be easier to hire out a private coach to better fit around the plans. Finally, short-distance deliveries. Rail and sea are great for freight, but after getting to the nearest station/depot it's often necessary to deliver things directly to their destinations, such as for commercial/industrial buildings, or large item deliveries. Vans are good ways of doing this, and these deliveries (especially commercial) can normally be scheduled to be done in off-peak hours so as to not disturb people's movement patterns too much.

As well as deliveries, private vehicles are also useful for unusual situations. By its nature, public transport is designed to cover routes and destinations where a substantial number of people live and/or want to go. Sometimes you do get stations and stops designed to go to less populated places - national parks for example, or other coaches/vehicles serving these routes, but if you're going someone that's really off-the-radar, there may not be many options. So for off-road/remote locations, it can be quite helpful to use your own vehicle, which can just be hired or borrowed instead of owned. Taxis are of course another option for this, and they tend to be particularly useful for unusual times. There's been a few situations where I've had to travel when a public transport line is closed due to being too late or early, and if there aren't good alternatives, taxis are sometimes the best option.

It's also worth coming back to disabilities and other mobility issues. As I'll explore more later, well-designed public transport is usually the best way to enable everybody to get around, but there's some situations in which going by car is easier. If there's someone with very poor mobility for example, who's only able to walk a few minutes, and who can't always use a wheelchair or scooter for whatever reason, being able to be dropped off and picked up directly at their destinations can be easier. And if this is something that somebody does frequently, eg if they have a carer, it probably makes more sense to own a car than to rely on taxis/other people/rentals. This is one of the reasons why, even as we should be reducing overall parking, keeping disabled spots and drop-off places is important. When combined with human-scale design and less vehicles on the road, as well as accessible public transport, this makes places as easy as possible to get around. The final situation which I can think of is people who really don't feel comfortable spending time in public places. This could include some young children or pets, or those who have severe allergies or illnesses (eg weakened immune systems). I do understand that public transport is not always the best option for everyone, but, when well-done, it should be for the vast majority of journeys. And on those (typically) rare occasions where a private vehicle is needed, it can be easily hired out (eg local carsharing schemes), rather than everybody needing to have their own.

Motorbikes

Talking about private vehicles wouldn't be complete without mentioning motorbikes. Motorbikes fit an interesting niche, somewhere in-between pedal/electric-assisted bikes and cars, and I have very mixed feelings about them. At their best, motorbikes do function a lot like bikes, they're far more space efficient than cars (especially for 1-2 people), both in road space and in parking, and more efficient in terms of fuel usage and other material costs. For certain journey types they can be quite convenient, and when used like this, they're definitely an improvement on cars. That being said, they can also come with quite a lot of downsides.

Unfortunately, my experience is that, at least in the UK, motorbikes are usually used as a leisure device, and generally done so in a way which is unkind, if not outright obnoxious, to other people. Perhaps it's just that I notice them more, but a lot of motorbikes are incredibly noisy, enough to disturb everyone in a few kilometre radius. This is bad at any time, but especially so when they go charging down the streets in the middle of night, or when it's close to frequently used walking or cycling routes. While I think the slightly more open chassis of the vehicle doesn't help, it seems like most of these cases are caused by drivers who purposely buy/modify their vehicles to be like this, so it is at least something that can be regulated - and in theory often is, although seemingly not very well enforced. Motorbike riders also seem to have a habit of driving in often illegal ways; overtaking where not permitted or not waiting for the lights. These are also issues you get sometimes with regular cyclists, but I think the difference is in the speed and size. (E-)bikes normally only go up to around 25-30 km/h, whilst motorbikes can go at full motorway speeds. These speeds, along with their increased bulk/weight, make them much more dangerous (the most dangerous form of transport in fact) and unpleasant to be around, even aside from the frequent noise and fumes. So while I'm not strictly opposed to them, I think they're not appropriate in a lot of walkable/public areas, and need to be more closely regulated in terms of pollution (both noise and air), and speeds, when they are used in these populated areas.

Public transport: systems and advantages

Before talking about the different ways of running public transport, I'd like to quickly take a look at some of the positives of travelling on it. So far I've been focused on the many drawbacks of car-first systems, but there's also a few ways aside from these in which shared transport can really shine.

Positives

I've talked about how driving a car is a large responsibility - and a dangerous one, and given the statistic of an average of 1.6 vehicle occupants, if you're in a car you're most likely driving it. But driving is a stressful and involved activity. It's true that after doing it a lot the mental load lightens a bit (although it's also the case that experienced drivers typically have some of the worst driving habits), but it's never something natural or easy like walking is. It's really quite bizarre that we've created a world in which a significant chunk of the population spend a lot of time doing it, and not as a job or a hobby. On public transport you don't need to worry about this. Instead of having one driver per every 1.6 people, you have one (or none on driverless systems) per every ten, hundred, or even thousands, meaning that most people instead of focusing on driving can spend their time doing something else. I'm actually writing at this very moment from a train, and so far the entirety of this article has been written while on some form of transport. I also like to read, listen to podcasts or watch things, reply to messages and talk to friends, or simply relax. All things which you can't (at least not easily and safely) do while driving. And the statistics agree, showing that travelling for leisure is the most common reason for travelling by train in the UK, being roughly twice as common as the average for travelling.

I've just said that driving is not a very natural activity, but I think this can be said for the whole experience of being in a car. Humans have evolved to travel under their own steam, as human beings, not to go around everywhere hunched up inside a small metal box. Obviously we can't go everywhere by foot or pedal due to the long distances involved, but I think public transport is the closest to this ancestral past. When travelling on transport you normally have to, or at least have the option to, walk a bit. Walk to the station or stop, walk to get on and off and change transport, and to the final destination(s). I'm aware that not everyone is able to or always wanting to do this, and I'll talk more about that in the next section, but I think for a lot of people a lot of the time this is actually quite a good thing. Spending a bit of time each day being active and building this activity into our routine is really good for us. It's a much healthier and more natural way of being than going from point A to B without moving at all and being nearly isolated from the world - instead we take part in it, in our communities, and alongside our fellow human beings.

It's also worth pointing out that living car-free - not owning or regularly leasing a car - means that you don't have to worry about the vehicles you travel in. If you own a car, that car is your responsibility: your responsibility to keep it in good working condition and to get it repaired and MOT'd when necessary, to insure it and to pay for any damage you cause (or prove that it wasn't your fault), to pay for tolls, congestion or emissions charges, to find places to park and to refuel or charge. And if the car breaks down, ends up in an accident, or is stolen, it's not easy, cheap or quick to get a back-up or replacement option. Relying on renting can be just as problematic as often the renting companies put strict requirements on what you can do with the vehicle⁹, while expecting the car to be returned in a similar condition as to how you received it, ready for the next customer.

The final point I'd like to raise is that of going somewhere with other people. By car you might be able to go and pick everybody up, and then take them somewhere, and then drop them off again, but this is highly dependent on how far apart you live, and how many people and cars there are. While most cars will fit up to 4 or 5 people, more or less any other form of shared transport has a much larger capacity. This can make it a lot easier to go places together, as you simply get on at your nearest station or stop, and more often than not you can arrange with everyone to catch the same train or bus and then meet each other on it. If someone's running late that's okay, they can get the next one and catch you up later, and the same is true if they want to leave earlier or later. It's more flexible for each individual person, and yet an easy option for larger groups. This works especially well if ticketing systems are easy to use, ideally being cheap and with flexible, unlimited travel like in the Community of Madrid, or entirely free like in Luxembourg. More on this in the pricing section of the article.

Buses vs trains

Surely the most iconic form of public transport is the bus. And buses do have some quite important features. Unlike many heavier forms of transport, they're very flexible and easy to run. To set-up a bus route you just need to get a bus running, and place some bus stops (they can be as simple as a sign). This means they're able to go almost anywhere, and are able to quickly accommodate new developments and destinations into their routes. Buses are also typically very easy to get on and off as, at least with local ones, it's usually as simple as getting on¹⁰, without any need to pass through a station and find a platform. This, alongside the fact that they usually have a lot of fairly close-together stops given they can quickly brake and accelerate, makes them generally better-suited to less mobile folk who aren't able to walk so far.

That being said, buses - especially local ones - also have some quite serious drawbacks which makes them not suitable for some use cases, and which probably goes part of the way to explaining their falling ridership over the past few decades. Most buses go on regular roads with mixed traffic. As seen, this makes them very easy to run, but causes some significant issues. When run like this bus routes have a much lower capacity, typically move people at a slower speed, and are often less reliable than other options - especially in comparison to rail. While we've said that most buses have a maximum capacity of 60-100, the average train carriage is closer to 200 (likewise including standing) - and trains usually come with quite few carriages attached. Trains are also much more efficient at getting people on and off than most buses, as each carriage will usually have 2-3 different doors that all open at the same time onto a long platform, meaning hundreds of people can get on and off in the space of a few seconds. And while buses and coaches are usually limited to around 100 km/h (60 mph) or less for reasons of safety (again, lots of large heavy chunks of metal going quickly and freely in any direction), UK trains can reach up to 200 km/h, and in much of the rest of Europe, Japan and China this figure is more like 300-350.

Map of high-speed rail in Europe

As well as being inherently slower due to their size and their more frequent stopping, buses on regular roads are all too often overrun by cars. It's a classic collective action problem: if everyone (or a significant number of people) were to take the bus, everyone would get to their destination faster, but if just one individual person decides to take a private vehicle, they're going to arrive faster. So more and more people do that, far more vehicles get on the road, and traffic slows everyone down a lot. UK buses have quite a reputation for arriving late, or not at all, and traffic and other vehicles are more often than not the reason why. As well as that, they're often (especially in more rural places) viewed as only for the young, old, and others who are unable to drive - or unable to afford to. As such it's crucial that we design systems which encourage the use of public transport in order to benefit us all, which I'll expand more on later.

Distances

Having looked at some of the usual characteristics of buses and trains, we can begin to try and assign them to different use cases.

Mid-to-long-distance

I think it's pretty clear that trains are the best option for mid-to-long-distance travel (ie, between distances of roughly 200 km up to 1000-1500 km with current technology - such as Amsterdam to Barcelona, or Bucharest to Athens). They're capable of reaching speeds unattainable by any other form of land-transport, whilst remaining very safe and very efficient. They also tend to be more comfortable for travelling in than road (and air) vehicles, having more space (tables, toilets, baby changing, lots of luggage storage, sometimes even a bar with food and drink), and smoother journeys (gradual speed changes, gentle turns and inclines, and good "roads"), although this can vary a bit depending on the place. These kinds of trains are designed to go at high speeds, and as such shouldn't have many (if any) stops along their routes. They also shouldn't have complicated or long boarding procedures or baggage policies if they want to be a viable and indeed better alternative to air¹¹. Road vehicles are useful for filling in gaps in the system where trains don't go to, especially to more remote places, and for replacement/back-up services if there's works going on or emergencies (such as Spain's recent power cut), but generally are less well suited to this category.

A word on planes

When talking about long-distance travel, planes are the option that come to most people's minds. And it's true that planes can go quite fast, with an average cruising speed of ~900 km/h. However, the actual time taken to complete a plane journey is a lot longer than the advertised journey time.

Total travel time vs distance going by conventional train, high-speed train, or plane.

The worst high-speed train systems only require you to arrive 0.5-1h before departure, while the sensible ones (eg France) suggest a minimum of 5-10 minutes before. A domestic flight will usually be 2h, and an international one 3h. After arrival you also have to spend a lot longer going through the airport, especially if you're waiting for baggage collection. And due to their size, land use and noise, (commercial) airports are only located on the outskirts of major cities - typically far from where people live, and where people want to go. Boarding and booking a train is usually a much less stressful experience too. There's far less to walk through and wait around for at the station, less security, shop-corridors, water queues and baggage restrictions (none of those often arbitrarily applied weight/size requirements). Nobody's going to ask you to pay for "priority" boarding or security, and often seat reservations/preferences are free as well. You also get the ability to have a good internet connection and use your devices the whole trip. And while not directly related to the transport itself, booking flights is painful. Booking a train takes about a minute using your preferred choice of app; booking a flight takes me at least half an hour to look through all the options, and fight my way through the booking pages (no, I still don't want to buy insurance, however many times you swap around the buttons and hide them...).

But as well as being slower and less convenient, planes shouldn't be used when not necessary because, as we've already seen, of how polluting they are. Electric trains are a decades old technology, but electric planes are estimated to be another 20-25 years¹² before they're in frequent commercial use. This is expected to be hydrogen-powered, as this kind of energy storage has a much lower weight-to-energy ratio. Unfortunately, "green" (not-from-fossil-fuels) hydrogen is still quite rare, and requires a lot of (clean) electricity to make it in the first place - far more than trains which are attached directly to the grid. So for all these reasons we should try to avoid flying wherever possible, but especially for these shorter distances - including for anywhere within Great Britain.

Metropolitan areas

As with mid-to-long distance, metropolitan areas are best served by rail systems. Due to the immense number of people moving around, it's pretty much a necessity to use one in order to avoid massive amounts of traffic. Great metro systems are mostly underground in the centres of large, dense cities, so as to be fast while not disruptive to street activity, have good coverage of a city and its dependent suburbs, link up to other transport hubs (long-distance trains, airports, bus/tram stops, bike rentals), and have regular, reliable service. They don't allow excessive or unrestricted street vendors and performers on-premise, and unlike longer-distance travel, are designed with fairly frequent stopping and starting in mind rather than for reaching top speeds. But what they lack in top speed they do make up for in service frequency, coverage and, most importantly, capacity. It's also a good idea to have local buses and/or light surface rail such as trams as well, focused on shorter trips, as they can have closer-together stops and require less walking to access, meaning they're usually more accessible. While underground and otherwise heavy metro systems are good for going medium distances, such as to the other side of the city or to a nearby suburb, buses and trams in this context can be seen more like walking accelerators, due to how well they can seamlessly integrate into urban environments and how frictionless they are to ride. A city which has bus and especially tram lanes on its streets is a much nicer place to be in than one which has mixed traffic lanes.

Left: a tram integrating well into an urban environment (Manchester), right: car traffic not integrating well (Manhattan). Despite the car lanes occupying much more street space than the tram lane, and making this space entirely unusable by anyone else, they move less people, likely at lower speeds when considering traffic and signaling priority which is often given to trams. They're also far louder, more polluting, more dangerous, less accessible, and probably cost the city more.

Shorter-distance with lower-density

This is the category where trains usually fare the worst. If there's not enough people or density it can be hard to justify the costs of building out a (heavy/dedicated) rail network, beyond perhaps a single branch or through line, and this is especially true if there is not currently anything in place. As we'll see, it's much easier and more effective to build places with transport in mind than to try and retrofit it later. That being said, there's still a lot of reasons to build out some form of transport in smaller places, and to start out with buses are probably the better option. Importantly though they should have both local stopping services and more direct longer-distance ones. Where I grew up the only bus services (there was no train) were ones which would stop everywhere, and so take at least three times as long a car journey would - often being slower than a pedal bike. If that's the only option, you're going to push everyone towards going everywhere by car. The more direct ones should connect up to larger places nearby with more built out networks so that people are able to effectively get around without a car. And both these services should also be regular and reliable, both for weekdays and weekends (this somehow isn't always the case in the UK and North America). Later on if the town grows, and especially if people are more accustomed to transport and when there's traffic problems, it then makes more sense to build out more dedicated systems such as light rail (including trams), or substantial amounts of dedicated bus infrastructure.

How to design transport-first

People-first

The best way to design a transport-first city or town instead of a car-first one is to not directly build it around any transport. This sounds quite counter-intuitive I know, and a little off-brand for a transport article, but I promise it does make sense. I say this because the best types of places are almost always walkable (and often bikeable/wheelable) places. I've mentioned this a few times throughout, but designing a place around people is the single best thing you can do, because as humans we're happiest and healthiest when we're in places that have been made for us. This means for example putting people near to where they need to go, with at least a little bit of density. One of the worst development patterns I think I've seen is to entirely separate where people live from everything else - often by quite substantial distances. I'm not saying you need to put homes next to large retail parks or heavy industry, nor am I proposing that everybody should live in an urban centre. But what I am saying is that we should be thinking a bit more at the local level and about where people need and want to go to on a daily basis. Grocery stores for example can and should be located close to homes, the same goes for cafes and pubs, pharmacies, newsagents, primary schools, nurseries and medical practices; all the places we go to regularly which really can be quite small. But as well as being near to people, these places need to be nice to walk to and be at. This means not having an unprotected narrow pavement (or sometimes just track) alongside a busy road, or a sprawling surface car park in the town centre, it means thinking about everything from the perspective of a human being: safe, interesting (varied) and pleasant.

The reason it's crucial to get walkability right is that only then can you make places that work well with transport. If everything is so far apart that you can't or it's unpleasant and dangerous to walk between destinations, this makes transport a lot less effective as people will naturally not want to walk, in which case they're going to spend a lot of their time inside a vehicle, which will likely lead them to doing so in a car. But when a place is walkable, when there's different walkable districts with places of interest, and utility, located close to each other, transport becomes much more viable as it's generally only needed for going between these different zones rather than for going within them. This is especially true as transport, due its much higher carrying capacity and freedom from parking, can often drop people off right in the centre of these places.

Adding in the transport

So you've planned out¹³ a walkable place, or a collection of them, and you've got the desire and the resources for transport: how do you go about adding it? This part really should be quite obvious, yet it's surprisingly often not the case, but transport should follow where people go. This means identifying where a lot of journeys are likely to take place, and then figuring out what will be the most useful and therefore used. Two big things are to place transport stops next to where people live, and to place them where they frequently go to, such as work, school, shopping, or popular tourist spots. And in case I haven't stressed it enough, these stations and the places around them should be pleasant, safe places to be, where walking comes naturally. You don't want to build a station that's surrounded by a lot of unused (unless it's a particular site people like to go to like a national park) or even run-down land. Nor should it be located in a car-centric location where the riders getting off are going to feel completely out of place and unwelcome.

Transport should also be relatively fast. It might not always be as fast as a private vehicle, but it should be fast-enough that speed is not a significant barrier to it being used. As mentioned before, stopping services are important (for those less mobile, with luggage/shopping, etc), but so are more direct ones which do go faster - and the two types need to link up in sensible places and be easy to change between. If your place is not-small, and especially if there is often traffic, you should definitely consider adding in dedicated bus lanes and signaling¹⁴ along the main roads and where the traffic is to keep your bus route competitive on timing and on reliability. And if you're a reasonably large place you should be considering a rail system, as well as a congestion charge and perhaps a low-emissions zone for the city centre to reduce car traffic and arrivals and to improve and move people towards transport, helping out everyone. Larger places should also consider pedestrian(/transport/bike/delivery/emergency vehicle)-only zones or hours (eg during popular/busy times of the day) in the centre and other highly-walkable areas so as to further discourage people from driving in them. And if there is need to put in parking, don't put it at street-level next to the walkable places and transport stops, put it either underground/on top of a building, or slightly further out. The aim is always to discourage driving when not necessary and to improve the place for transport and above all for humans. The only exception to this is spots for disabled parking, and unloading (deliveries, or perhaps taxis/drop-offs), which do need to be closer, but which use a lot less space.

It's also worth considering bikeability. Biking complements walking, as it's more suitable for longer distances but still maintains the pedestrian and people-first approach. Bikes takes up far less space and parking than larger vehicles, and are much less dangerous, and larger cities can encourage cycling by having cheap and easy bike rentals schemes (preferably with electric bikes, especially in hilly areas), helping people who might not want to invest in their own bike to try out using them. Building bike lanes alongside busy roads and between popular biking destinations is also a good idea to make cyclists feel safer, especially those who are less confident or starting out.

Making it accessible

Touching more on accessibility and inclusivity, I believe public transport can be really good in this respect, but it does need to be designed with it in mind. Buses should have low boarding, and trains level-boarding with small or no gaps with the platform (this makes boarding both easier, and faster - by a factor of 2-4x). Underground stations and bridges need escalators and lifts, and long walks within stations should also have ground-level escalators as found in many airports. Well-maintained toilets in larger stations and vehicles are a good idea, as are food/basic-supplies shops, and there should always be reserved (disabled) seats as well as space for wheelchairs/pushchairs/scooters. It's also important to have some personnel around and visible to reduce and help with incidents and to help those who need more assistance, as well as easy ways to ask for help if necessary (emergency/driver contact buttons). Additionally, having good lighting and reasonable temperatures, comfortable, well-designed vehicles with relatively quiet¹⁵ and smooth journeys, combined with well-covered stations/stops with live information and public APIs¹⁶ and which are free of harmful or excessive advertising can go a long way towards making these places both be safer and feel safer. British national (heavy) rail trains tend to do this quite well actually, while Madrid's Cercanias tends to feel more industrial and impersonal.

The great thing about public transport is that when thought-out, almost anyone can take it. I've seen blind people, people in wheelchairs and with other physical disabilities, those with mental disabilities, the very old and very young and much more using it. This allows all these groups a lot more autonomy and independence than would be possible if they were to rely on someone else to drive them around. This is particularly true when those with physical disabilities or poor mobility can combine scooters/powered-wheelchairs with transport and with walkable (and bikeable - scooters go great with biking infrastructure) places, giving them much more freedom than would ever be possible with car-first approaches, and avoiding the difficulty of and assistance needed for getting into a car and storing a wheelchair in it. Another key advantage is that as mentioned, transport (especially buses and trams) can drop people off right where they need to go, rather than having to walk from a car park to their destination, even in busy city centers. Taxis are another more direct, if more expensive and less efficient, way of doing this, which also benefit from having less vehicles on the road and so less car-first infrastructure. Again, the more spaced out and supersized everything is (car-centric, especially with parking), the further apart buildings have to be and the more difficult it necessarily is for those with impaired mobility.

Pricing: Why the correct price is (usually) free

I've made the case for why public transport is better for the environment, for cities and towns, and above all for people. However, transport suffers from one pretty major and already mentioned problem: the collective action problem. Transport works better the more people that take it. The more people who use it, the bigger, better serviced and more efficient the network can be, and the greater the reduction of private motor vehicles on the road. However, what can all too easily happen - especially if public transport is not the norm somewhere - is that for a significant number of individuals, owning and relying on a car, despite all its drawbacks, can appear to be the better option. And once someone makes the investment in a car, they're a lot less likely to take alternative transport options, even when they do work out to be better. This is known as the sunk-cost fallacy: that once you've invested significant time and money into something, you often feel like you have to continue down that path. Whether that is learning to drive, buying a car and insuring it, moving into a car-dependent neighbourhood, or even something as simple as losing (or never gaining) the knowledge, confidence and ability to use transport and to go by foot or cycle.

In order to make public transport the primary and default way of getting about, which is what any place should want (alongside active transport), it needs to be competitively priced with easy to understand ticketing. The simplest and most effective way of doing this is to make it free. This means that everyone, regardless of their financial position, is able to use it, and it removes a lot of cost and complexity from the system. No need for ticket gates, machines, offices or inspectors¹⁷, people don't have to worry about buying or renewing tickets or passes, and boarding (especially for buses) can be far quicker and easier. It means that the option to use transport is no longer a mental dilemma of is this worth it to me; do I need this pass/trip/ticket, or can I save money by avoiding transport and walking or driving instead - even when it's not the best option for me. And this can dramatically shift transport habits and cultures: it turns transportation into something that's inherently inclusive rather than exclusive. You can make plans and know that everyone is able to partake. Nobody is excluded or disadvantaged because they're not in a position to drive or otherwise afford the trip, and transport becomes something that's truly universal. Equally though, it should be free because ultimately being free (or at least heavily subsidised) costs both governments and individuals less, while increasing financial productivity and solvency...

Government-level economics vs individual costs

We've pretty thoroughly covered the individual inefficiencies of cars; their disproportionally high road, parking space and energy use, their often dramatic changes to scale and to all infrastructure, their pollution and even medical system/workplace costs (more deaths and illness, less healthy lifestyles). But to help look at the impact of this as a whole we can take a look at some analysis done by Urban3. These analyses look at the operating cost vs the property tax of different areas in a city, and what they reliably show is that traditional and otherwise walkable development patterns - despite often being run-down and poorly funded - are wildly more financially productive than newer car-first ones. These newer car-first ones bring in anywhere from 2-10x less for the local government on the same amount of land, while having very similar or higher costs, especially over the long-term. Car infrastructure is expensive, and places that are designed around cars such as the aforementioned stroads and big box stores/retails parks almost always cost a town more money than they bring in, while sometimes even actively driving smaller, local stores out of business.

Lafayette Parish’s net cost model with net positive parcels in black, rising up, and net negative parcels in red, sinking down

Meanwhile, investment in walking, biking and public transport infrastructure are some of the best investments an authority can make, having a return of at least 2x that of car infrastructure, while often being much cheaper and easy to build. And these RoI comparisons don't even take into consideration many of the other knock-on effects that we have covered in this article.

On an individual level, the average UK household currently spends 14% of its expenditure on transport, the vast majority of which is spent on cars. And the government spends substantial amounts of money on car infrastructure, due to the above reasons of car-first design, but also on simply building and repairing or replacing roads, bridges and tunnels, parking, dealing with collisions and accidents, subsidising car purchases, manufacturers, and fuels, and much more. And as we've seen, the costs of car infrastructure grows exponentially the more of it you build, and pushes people away from other much more sustainable and financially-sound modes of transport. 17% of local roads are estimated to be in poor condition, and somewhere between 4 and 7% of main roads are in need of repair right now. But most of these costs are fronted by the government and not paid for directly by the road users. Why shouldn't it be the same for public transport?

Rail industry finance (UK), annual income and expenditure breakdown

In a way, it already is. Public transport is subsidised by the government; they fund just under half of national rail costs, and a similar proportion of buses. But the amount which the government directly spends on all transport, including road construction and maintenance, is really quite small. It's currently at around 3.8% of the overall budget, of which about 2.6% is spent on directly funding public transport, or just 1.3% after taking into account its current revenue. This is about as much as we spend on foreign aid, or 4x less than is spent on defense. Imagine how much better our transport could be if this figure was just a bit higher; even 4% or 5% (what do we spend on defense) would be enough to transform our transport, making it a viable, accessible, modern and reliable way of getting around - without the public directly having to pay anything. This would mean most households could give up car ownership entirely, or at least downsize in terms of vehicle count, size, and usage, massively decreasing that 14% spent on transport. It would make our towns and cities so much more pleasant and nice to be in, and improve mobility for everyone - especially those who are currently losing out.

Real-world examples

Is this a realistic, feasible option you might ask? We can look to some other countries, and closer to home, to find out. My first introduction to free public transport was in Luxembourg. I happened to go for a day trip while in Germany (using the Deutschland ticket - more on this later), and on the way I was looking up how to buy tickets and found to my surprise that you didn't have to. And indeed when I arrived I just got off the train and entered the city, no ticket barriers in sight. Along the main street and heading into the old part of town was one of the tram lines, which was absolutely frictionless to take. It comes every few minutes, you hop on, and go. Because of this great service and small roads there weren't many cars here, which made walking along this street and nearby places really nice. Everything was quiet, felt safe, and was interestingly designed, at a very human scale. Maybe the tram was a bit slower than a car might be (without traffic and signals), but it didn't really matter given that things were so close together and accessible. The tram, which does have level-boarding, was no more than a few steps away from the closest shops, parks and museums, and space was well-used and always pedestrian-friendly. Things which are only possible when you don't have a high-level of car usage and dependency.

Avenue de la Liberté, Luxembourg

Luxembourg is a small country, with a population of just under three-quarters of a million, a population-density a tad lower than that of the UK, and a slightly higher level of urbanisation. All public transport has been free since 2020, with plans to keep investing into and improving their network. But while Luxembourg is one of the richest countries in the world, the largest place with free transport is Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, which has a 2.5x lower GDP per-capita than the UK. Other examples include Tucson (Arizona, US), Tallinn (the capital of Estonia, residents only), Malta (residents only), and even the UK for some people. Buses here are free for over 60s (pension-age in England outside of Greater London), Scotland for residents under 22, and various cities with free bus routes.

Other options

While I do think it's the best approach, being free isn't the only way to achieve this. Another, more common, and also effective method is to provide cheap passes with unlimited travel (eg for a month) across all modes of transport, such as the Madrid Abono or German Deutschland ticket. This provides many of the same benefits of removing the dilemma of whether to take transport or avoid it (at least for residents, if not visitors), and can similarly turn someone into a transport user, who takes it by default when active transport isn't appropriate. This is something we're sorely missing in the UK. When I go by transport here¹⁸, I do need to do these mental calculations, and unfortunately the answer of whether it's worth taking transport is often a no for me, and for my friends and family. When I'm in Madrid, Germany, or Luxembourg, I don't have to think: if it's too far to walk or cycle, or I don't want to (bad weather, tired, very late, etc), I take the most convenient form of transport. No stress, no deliberation.

Ultimately, the choice between free and heavily-subsidised depends on the specific situation. While free is a good long-term goal, it tends to work better in places with established and built-out transport networks and cultures, with good social safety nets (less vandalism and anti-social behaviour), and strong public support for transport. For those that are not in that situation, and especially those that are trying to get started and build their network, it can make more sense to charge a low fare for people who are able to pay (not children, the elderly, the disabled, or those on a low income) to help invest more in improving the network faster. As long as transport is fairly and accessibly priced, it can still provide many of the same benefits as being free. The most important thing is that price is not an impeding factor to anyone using it, and that governments take it seriously, understanding its importance, and its multitude of social and economic benefits. It should never be used as a way of trying to make money, eg by under-providing on service and over-charging on prices, or for private companies to profit from, but should be considered for what it is: a public good, and a basic right.

The global outlook

I started out this article by showing the current breakdown in modes of transport in the UK, and I'd like to wrap it up by doing a quick comparison with other places.

Modal share of trips in some of the largest cities in the UK. "Bus" includes all public transport, active includes walking, cycling, wheeling, and skating, and car includes all private cars and taxis.

In our cities - the places where you'd expect the lowest share of car-usage - the UK typically has figures of just over 60% of trips by car, with the exception of a few outliers such as London or Edinburgh.

Modal share of trips in some of the largest cities in high-income countries. This includes much of Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea, Australasia, and Hong Kong.

If you then take a look at all high-income countries you can see that there's far more variety. On the one hand you have North America and Australasia occupying the bottom-right; the most car-dependent places on Earth. But on the other hand you have shining examples of cities from all over the world which have much lower levels of car usage. Metropolises like Tokyo (34 million people) where only 12% of trips happen by car, but also medium-sized cities like Bilbao, Spain (12%) and Utrecht, Netherlands (19%), which are very friendly to active transport, and have 1 million (similar to Birmingham or Manchester) and 350 thousand (closer to Stoke-on-Trent or Coventry) people respectively, and even small towns like Breclav, Czechia (15%), 25k population, or Houten, Netherlands (31%), 50k population.

And some of these places are not actually all that dense either. Breclav for example has 320 people/km2, vs 2900 in my quite spread out university city of Exeter - both are quite rural. Utrecht has 3646, lower than my local home city of Portsmouth (5147) - which despite its high density urbanness and okay rail links is still very car-centric and not that walkable outside of the historic part of the town. I'll reiterate what I said earlier: you do need to have a bit of density to be walkable and for public transport to work well, but you don't need to have loads. What's much more important is the design of the place itself, whether you put people near to where they want to go to, and whether you make it attractive, safe and easy to walk or cycle around, and if you have a well thought-out and run transport system.

As a final country-wide example, we can take a look at Japan. Japan has a slightly higher population density and urban-ness than the UK, a slightly lower GDP per capita, a slightly higher life-expectancy, and is also a highly-developed island nation. Unlike the UK, it has high levels of public-transport use and quite possibly the highest levels of rail usage in the world (although other countries are higher when considering all public transport), and its robust and reliable high-speed network (average of 24 seconds of delay, including natural disasters) has by and large put short-distance flights out of business (the same has also been happening in countries like Italy and France). All of Japan's trains are so reliable in fact that in the rare event of a delay, passengers are given a ticket to show to their employers or schools. Without one it won't be believed.

Distance travelled on rail vs road, Japan, Western Europe and the US, 2021

And it's not just Japan - almost all of our neighbours are outdoing us as well, with Switzerland (lower population density) and the Netherlands (higher) being two particularly good examples of places with good transport and good walkability in Western Europe.

A vision for the future

There's a well known quote by Brian Howard (often misattributed to Margaret Thatcher) that goes something along the lines of "Any man who rides a bus to work after the age of 30 can count himself a failure in life", and these sorts of opinions are still fairly prevalent in the English-speaking world. Aside from the classism and sexism, they betray a complete lack of understanding of the financials and sustainability of transport systems and the numerous reasons why people individually and collectively should prefer travelling on public transport. Our country quite literally invented and exported the train, and we once had one of the best national and local transport networks in the world. While we've left it severely underfunded and forgotten about for the best part of a century, things are starting to change, here and in the rest of the world. More and more people are realising that walkability is important to them, and that cycling and public transport can be great ways of getting around, while car-dependency is not. Over the past 20 years the average number of car trips and distance has been steadily falling while rail usage has almost doubled, and levels of learning and ownership in younger people is now lower when compared to previous generations. Many of the formerly-closed tram lines are being rebuilt, bike rental schemes are popping up everywhere, road speed limits are being lowered and car-free zones or charges are being created and extended. The last Conservative governments, despite traditionally trying to axe public transport and promote motoring cultures, made half-reasonable attempts to re-open some of the routes it previously closed and to invest in new infrastructure, while the current Labour one have made it something of a priority to improve service, reliability, and pricing.

I truly hope and believe that the UK can return to the forefront of public, and active, transport. It won't be easy to change generations-long habits and development patterns, but bit by bit I think it will be possible. And I hope that more people and especially politicians can come to the same understanding that I've reached; that I'm happier, healthier, and better-off economically and socially living car-free and above-all in walkable, cyclable and transport-friendly neighbourhoods, and plan to keep doing so for as long as I can.

Appendix: further resources

If you'd like to find out more information about the issues and topics I've talked about here then I'd highly recommend Jeff Speck's book Walkable City, and the NotJustBikes YouTube channel and podcast. And if you'd like to get more directly involved, I'll point you in the direction of Campaign for Better Transport (UK), and Strong Towns (US), two charities of which do great work to build more resilient, walkable and transport-friendly places.

Representing OWA from left to right: Roderick Gadellaa, John Ozbay and me, outside the EC building on the morning of the Apple workshop. Alternatively, "The Chauffeur, The Piano Man, and The Hepcat."

If you haven't heard of it before, the DMA stands for the Digital Markets Act, an EU law which designates certain products as gatekeepers - based on end and business user count and importance, who need to interoperate with their competitors. So for example, an operating system which meets the criteria, such as iOS, Android or Windows, needs to provide equivalent access to software and hardware features to third-parties as they give to their own products. Gatekeepers can't self-preference, and so can't act anti-competitively. Some key examples for iOS would be allowing third-party browser engines and third-party app stores - two things they've outright banned until now, and for third-party devices like watches and earbuds to work as seamlessly as their own products. At the moment there's 7 companies with 25 different products designated as gatekeepers.

Onto the workshops: we started with Apple's first presentation on how they thought they'd complied with the DMA law. Most of the talk was used as a marketing opportunity, talking about how great Apple thought they were, and how unfair they thought it was that they have to comply with this law...

• “We’re an amazing company"
• “Apple is different to every other company out there”
• “Apple alone have to comply with these requests”
• "...unfortunately, it's impossible to do all the complex engineering to comply with the Commission's current interpretation of the DMA..."

You might've noticed Apple's use of "the Commission's current interpretation". This is a line they use rather a lot:

• “extreme interpretation of interoperability by the EU”
• "the commission has taken... extreme positions, that we hope can be tested as quickly as possible by the European courts”
• “we will not waver on our approach to the DMA”
• “defend our rights aggressively”

And I'll give them that - they certainly arrived guns blazing. In fact, they wouldn't stop talking even when Lucia, the workshop chair, told them they were quite overtime - reacting by sulking at her instead. By the time we got to the first Q&A, Apple's lawyers had already wasted half of our time. A lot of the language they used actually surprised me; I wasn't expecting them to act like best friends, but at times it was downright disrespectful to the other participants in the room. Google went for more or less the same approach the next day, but in a much more toned-down way. Both saying the law is too difficult and somehow, in their view, actually hurts consumers - and other businesses.

It's important to note that Apple have a rich history of being obstructive to any kind of regulation. They've challenged every one of their gatekeeper designations to date¹, two articles of the law itself, they delayed the UK CMA's investigation by a year on a technicality, and a recent US court injunction said that they chose “an anti-competitive option at every step” of its previous ruling, referring a senior exec for a criminal contempt investigation. It's also highly relevant to point out that these gatekeepers have the money for this; both Apple and Google have twice as much revenue as the entire EU budget, and far more employees than the Commission². Every day wasted is another day of monopoly profits³, and so the small fines on the side are more than worth it.

Approaching the workshop from this lens then, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Apple and Google didn't answer a lot of the questions asked, either skipping over them or giving unhelpful generalisations. The format of having 3-5 questions asked at a time made this much easier, as one could more reasonably "forget" to give a detailed answer. The first section was on interoperability, processes and connected devices. Open Web Advocacy were mostly focused on the later browser section, but John and I asked a couple questions on Apple's process, specifically on why the absolute best tracker system they could come up with in ~6 months was a link to a static, once-a-week-updated PDF, hidden behind an Apple developer account. They assured us it was all that they could do in time to meet the EC's specification, ignoring the part asking why they didn't simply use GitHub or Bugzilla like in their other projects.

Next up was App Store, a very sought-after topic. Unfortunately Riley from the AltStore was unable to attend due to passport issues, which is a shame as he's one of the most knowledgeable people on it. We asked why Apple is so insistent on using human review for everything (even third-party iOS stores and apps) when their internal documents quite plainly show that they know it's near useless - “App Review is [like] bringing a plastic butter knife to a gun fight”. Apple said they're "not here to deny there's any problems", but that again, they do it better than anyone else.. and that "Open Web Advocacy is getting a good run at it today". We replied saying that there's a lot of scam apps on the App Store, and that there isn't an easy report scam button. We should have clarified that the relevant button only shows after installing an app, as well as being located at the bottom of the page - a text link saying "report a problem". Gary⁴ from Apple did a quick search, and replied with what sounded like, and hallucinated like, a Gen AI answer: "it's on every single product page for every single app that's available on the App Store, very prominently". Apple's Kyle followed up by saying that "I guess OWA get to talk to Spotify then" - more on this later.

Now we get to the browser section. Apple were clearly uncomfortable with this part, having had previous experience with us at these workshops, and having no technical responses to our criticisms and suggestions. First up, Roderick asked about Apple's absurd requirement that anyone who wants to ship their own browser engine has to release it as a new app, and so re-acquire all their users. Mike from CODE (Coalition for Open Digital Ecosystems - 13 members including Google, Opera, Qualcomm, Meta) asked why Apple doesn't provide a system prompt to switch default browsers, and why they've placed so many onerous contractual requirements around launching an alternative engine. Apple started trying to deflect here, saying the topic is only supposed to be on choice screens and defaults, but that "many of you with the same group have traveled very far to have this conversation" so they would, oh-so-generously, answer the question.. by saying that "for whatever reason, they've chosen not to [bring their engines to iOS]", claiming that "everything is in place to ship here in the EU today", and repeating that "there's a lot of OWA people here in the room. So well done on that". Now, despite Apple's comment, CODE does not have anything to do with OWA, although when it comes to browsers we do happen to want a lot of the same things. OWA talks to browser vendors of course, but we don't represent them. We represent the interests of the open web and web apps - which need good browser competition and browsers on iOS to reach their full potential. Apple also here made a comment while answering DuckDuckGo - "you had a question... or maybe it was OWA". They seemed to have two strategies in confronting the browser questions, one being to try and avoid talking about anything difficult like engines, web apps, etc, and the second to try and lump everybody who's asking questions into the same, over-represented, group, as a concerted, competitor-lead effort to gain "free access" to their OS.

At this point, Lucia from the EC had to intervene, saying that "to the extent there is no 6(3) questions which will be taken by priority, it's okay to ask questions which are other questions related to browsers. So I think that's totally okay given the name of the session". John then brought up the age restrictions issue - something we did discover via the choice screen, as it breaks it entirely. The TLDR is users with "Age Restrictions" parental controls (11-15% of EU users) can only use Safari. All browsers - including Safari - get a 17+ rating on iOS. Which makes no sense, as the separate "Web Content Restrictions" manages all web content on iOS. Apple know this - iOS makes an unique exception for Safari, allowing it to be used despite age restrictions, and doesn't similarly restrict apps using in-app browsers, such as social media. My impression was that other people in the room really understood the problem, nodding along to themselves and looking slightly taken aback by the obvious self-preferencing. I followed up asking Apple why they don't allow web developers outside the EU to test 3rd party browser engines on iOS, bringing up their own point that EU iOS will "experience unique vulnerabilities and bugs", and so it's crucial that all web devs serving EU users can test the browser engines currently unique to it, to not put them and their users at a disadvantage compared to Safari. Before my question though I gave a reply to the Apple representative who'd implied in the App Store section that we have some kind of hidden connection to Spotify:

"I'd like to quickly clear up my connections to this. Because I think, Kyle, you were suggesting that I'm a front for Spotify, or that OWA is. That's what I heard. I'm just a student. I volunteer because I truly believe in the open web. I don't get paid. I don't receive any compensation. I paid for myself to be here because I want to be. And the organisation does not receive any money [from them] either. It's just donations."

In response Kyle said:

"I don't think I referenced that you were getting funding from Spotify. I don't know where you're getting funding from. My reference is more to the CODE representative who does get a lot of funding from Google and Meta, Qualcomm and Spotify and others. But not yourself. I understand that. And I actually really -- Hold on. So just so we're clear, I really respect the way that your team has approached this. I don't question your motives. I don't question your funding... We've read your papers. We've read your advocacy... I am not in any way disparaging where you're coming from. I understand you're a well-meaning person who believes that he understands how to best design our operating system."

As a side note, CODE does not get funding from Spotify, I think Kyle was getting confused with the Coalition for App Fairness, an attending group which prominently includes Spotify, Epic Games, and Match Group amongst its members.

Now, to my surprise, Apple actually gave somewhat acceptable answers to the technical questions. To my testing one:

"I think we've been discussing it with Mozilla and Google also and the Commission. I would expect to see some updates there."

And to age restrictions:

"that is an area that we will be looking at, and are looking at, I'm happy to say on that"

Knowing Apple's history with these things, their words are anything but a promise. But at the same time, they're a whole lot better than entirely avoiding the question - or an outright no. And we, and I hope the Commission, other browser vendors and web developers, will do everything we can to hold them to this, and get all the many issues fixed so that other browsers and web apps can compete fairly on iOS.

Something which was very hypocritical of Apple is that, despite making a lot of noise about some of their competitors being in the room, and insisting on all questions having a person and organisation, there were a lot of people attending who were paid to be there by Apple. Last year the EC did an investigation into this after the workshop, found there were a lot of hidden links, and so said that this year everybody had to disclose if a gatekeeper or other relevant party funded them. Unfortunately though it wasn't always enforced. The most notable example of a pro-Apple group was the App Association. The chair/founder did disclose that he was (majority) funded by Apple (who "molds policies", according to Bloomberg and former employees), but the other two members in the room did not. As well as that, one of them introduced themselves as being from the "ACT Association", an acronym which isn't obviously related to the App Association. According to the association, and unlike the aforementioned groups, Apple (and Meta, Microsoft, etc) are only "sponsors", not members, and so are not as prominently listed on their site.

Throughout the workshop we suggested various times that if Apple really are having a hard time with their self-imposed problem of figuring out how to effectively georestrict third-party browsers and stores to the EU, they could much more easily just allow it worldwide. It's a unique, bizarre, Apple-only restriction, and I suspect it'll go down in history as the only example of an operating system with third-party apps that goes out of its way to prohibit third-party browser engines. Heck, this works fine on my watch and my TV - it's something so unheard of that it bears repeating a lot. Apple's response to this was always to say "Apple's focus is on ensuring that it complies with the law in each jurisdiction. What we will not do is take the law in one jurisdiction and export it to another". I'm not sure where the bit about exporting laws came from, but it didn't address the question. There's a deeper layer to this however: Apple know that for this kind of regulation to be successful, it needs to be easy to replicate in other places. If there's one set of browser APIs and contractual requirements in the EU, but a separate one in the UK, another in the US, a different one in India, etc, etc, it becomes all but impossible to ship an engine. Maybe the biggest vendors in the biggest markets will manage it, but it'll be a horrible experience that'll seriously frustrate them, web devs, and their users. To be successful, we need to get the same terms to apply in all jurisdictions, so that a vendor can simply ship their browser to every country who've outlawed Apple's anti-competitive practices. Apple have made it very clear here that if not, they will go right to the limits of the law (and beyond) to stop it happening.

John managed to get another couple questions in before the round finished, one asking if and when PWAs will run in third-party browser engines instead of only Safari, and why installing web apps is so difficult on iOS - with Apple repeatedly trying to make it even harder. The answers were handwaving:

"We have nothing to announce in terms of what we will do if and when a third--party browser engine comes to iOS"

Which surely cannot be legal. The fact that Apple is making it supremely difficult to ship a browser engine does not mean that they can entirely put off supporting interoperability with web apps until someone manages to.

"I do think they're going to have to operate slightly differently to make sure that users are not unintentionally installing something from the web that they simply don't understand."

Unintentionally installing something from the app store is all good though, because App Store review absolutely ensures that nothing could go wrong, that there's no scam apps, and more than makes up for the web's "orders of magnitude" stronger sandboxing, more stringent permissions model, and better phishing prevention. And so, web apps logically require a convoluted 4-step process including "share" and "add to homescreen" to locate the install button, meaning that all but the most technical users can't find it.

(Hopefully you've noted the sarcasm)

After this the day was quite relaxed. Kyle left before the last session, I guess he'd had enough, and many others in the room did as well. Kush from Mozilla asked about choice screen testing but didn't receive much of an answer, and John brought up data portability, how Apple Photos doesn't do proper photo export - except with Google Photos, and how it doesn't allow users to choose which cloud provider they want to store their data with. Afterwards we went for post-workshop drinks and food, which was great fun. It was lovely to meet lots of like-minded people and organisations, to talk about their problems and work, and to get to know Brussels a lot better. While we travel a long way for a very short amount of time on the mic, there's a lot of other opportunities throughout the events to talk to other participants who come from all sorts of backgrounds, and I would definitely recommend the experience for anyone who gets a chance - although preferably not having been paid by a gatekeeper/stakeholder to peddle their talking points. I also enjoyed the Google workshop as well. OWA wasn't as involved with that as Apple are generally the most problematic party, but we and Mozilla brought up the choice screen hotseat problem (something that Apple have already implemented), which unfortunately was all we had time for with the strict schedule that day (I did try three times to get my next question in, but was not allowed to ask it :/).

As a final thought, I called this article "Apple Vs The Law" primarily in reference to the rule of law, about how it should be applied equally and fairly against all, no matter the size and influence of your company. I think some of these gatekeepers - above all Apple, do a lot to undermine this process, in some places genuinely damaging trust in democracy. Going out of their way to paint the DMA law and the EU as overstepping and extreme hurts its reputation, as does the invented rhetoric about it being the "great risk to privacy ever imposed to government" (China?), or that they're "acting without experts in the field". Similarly for the number of covertly funded and supported lobbying groups that they bring to regulators all around the world. And the constant pressure from the US administration to not enforce the DMA - helped in no small part by these gatekeepers. These money-driven practices - which in many ways mirror the propaganda typically produced by authoritarian regimes like Russia, seriously hurt all democracies that they come into touch with, and is a kind of behaviour that should make Apple, and any other group involved, ashamed of themselves.

For a bit of context, I grew up using almost exclusively Microsoft Office. Not unusual, as back when I had my first IT classes at school and started using office software at home there weren't any well-known alternatives. Everybody used Office; nobody thought much of it. But near the end of my secondary education my school introduced us to Google Workspace. At first I was pretty skeptical. I also didn't know much about it, I don't think I even realised at that point what it really was. But after a few months of trying it out I was convinced. It wasn't perfect, it did have drawbacks, but the advantages were such that by the start of 2021 I'd moved everything over and more or less stopped using Office and OneDrive.

Fast forward to now, and PowerPoint on the web/online. First of all, it's laggy: really laggy. Undo and redo feels borderline unusable, and presenting is equally unreliable. Something which I notice a lot is that while it usually has a fast initial load time - opening the editor, starting a presentation - loading is still going on in the background and so parts are non-interactive for quite a while after. It also feels highly prone to breaking. I had some weird cases of text randomly displaying upside down before fixing itself, bullet point indenting being broken by adjusting line-spacing, text rendering incorrectly, many flashes of unstyled content, inconsistent keyboard shortcuts/inputs and text justifying, and slide previews not loading properly. Oh, and the save buttons in version history just didn't work. I should stress that most of my experience of using it is in Firefox. I'm acutely aware that Microsoft's apps tend to work significantly worse in non Chromium-browsers - quite a lot more so than Google's - and some, but not all, of these issues were better when I tried it on Vivaldi (especially the lag). But this in and of itself is another pretty major issue.

But, you might be thinking: "Why not use the desktop app? It doesn't have any of the aforementioned problems". Two reasons, two of the main ones which led me to move away from Office in the first place. Firstly, Office desktop, and more generally Office, is not universal. It only has full support on Windows and Mac, and is only available for those who pay¹ (a subscription, if you want to be on the latest version). This has caused me some serious headaches in the past with features which are partially or not at all implemented on the non-desktop versions. I primarily use desktop Linux nowadays, and a significant and growing number of people also use it, ChromeOS, or even Android or iOS instead of Windows and Mac. If you want to make a universal app (rather important for collaboration), you either need to ship fully-functioning native apps to at least all of these platforms, or (preferably) make a fully-featured web app - which has the notable advantage of working without any additional installation and set-up. Microsoft does neither. But even if you do use the desktop app, it sucks for collaboration. Changes from others are synced sporadically² (you have to manually click to download them while editing), and serious issues with conflicts and re-adding old/changed parts can occur. Web-first tools like Google Workspace are typically available everywhere (I have on occasion used the desktop web app on my phone for things not supported in the mobile apps), fully-featured (while it doesn't support absolutely everything that other office suites do, there's nothing which only works, or only works well, on some operating systems/devices), and have near-perfect frictionless collaboration.

To be fair to Office web, there are a couple things it does do well. It works properly offline, for example. Google Workspace only does if you have their Chrome web store extension installed, which only works on (some) Chromium browsers. Office online just uses standard web technologies, ironically in this case largely created by people at Google. And as mentioned, Office online is also quite a lot faster to start-up, it feels more responsive in that sense, whereas Google Workspace definitely takes a beat. And honestly, despite what it sounds like, I'm not trying to advocate for Google. They pioneered (or more accurately bought other companies who pioneered) real-time collaboration, and they make (almost) everything free and available to everyone, and that's amazing. But I don't think we should move over from one big tech monopoly to another. As with any critically-important tool, we should all try and be familiar with a few different options, and generally try to prefer those which are free/open-source and less likely to be enshittified and degraded in the future. I sometimes use LibreOffice if I don't need collaboration, and while it's got a bit of a dated UI, it does work well for offline use (and it's incredibly fast and lightweight), and at some point I'd love to try some of its collaborative Web-based derivatives such as Collabora Office³. A lot of students nowadays like Canva, which is quite good and an interesting take on presentation software. As is Prezi. Cryptee's document editor is pretty neat. Or any number of others. Go out there and give them a go: you don't have to, and probably shouldn't, stick to the same old Microsoft monopoly.

As for me, I'll probably come back to Office again in a few years to see if it's improved, but I'm doubtful it'll have changed much. Until such a point that it does, I'll be returning to my previous stance of strongly encouraging group collaborative projects to use other tools.

It's a bit of an odd time to be writing this in early March, but since I started planning this blog near the end of last year I thought I'd like to do a reading list. It's something I've seen many other people do, and I find it always gives me lots of ideas to add to my ever-expanding "to read" list. I also think it's a nice thing to be able to look back on and remember. The plan is to go through chronologically and give a short commentary and personal background to each book.

Ultra-Processed People - Chris Van Tulleken

Arguably this book doesn't really belong here given I first read it in the final week of 2023. I liked it so much though that I then re-read it a few months later, and re-read parts of it again shortly after. I've long been a fan of the Van Tullekens, of their easy and accessible manner of presenting science and research to the public, and their programs have always been a family favourite. I heard about this book a few times during the year and subsequently put it on my Christmas list, reading it thereafter, and it's without a doubt one of my favourite books I've read.

Like the rest of his works, it's easy to go through, and does a very good job of explaining lots of different concepts. But above all I found it changed my relationship with and understanding of food and food systems, and subsequently that of many of those around me. Except on special occasions (when others have taken the time to cook or have invited me out to eat, gifts, and other situations where politeness comes first), I no longer eat UPFs, and more importantly no longer wish to, with the understanding of the effects they can have, and especially of how they're designed and created. The book talks through all of this, citing many fascinating and concerning examples, interviews, and research, as well as exploring what we can do to change these systems at a structural level. Of all the books on this list, this is definitely the one I would recommend most, to anyone who's interested in food and food cultures, industry, science, and change.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs - Steve Brusatte

This was a fun read. I love dinosaurs and their period of evolutionary history, but I've never known as much about it as I'd like. This was one of those books that I happened to find in a Waterstones, started reading (for probably a bit too long), and then came back to buy a few days later. Brusatte has a clear love for palaeontology which comes across really well, he makes you feel like you're somehow a part of it and it's exciting and it's just nice to read about a new topic from someone who writes in this kind of style.

The book gives some context for the discovery of various of the things we now know about this era, the things we're still not completely sure about (did most of the dinosaurs have feathers?), and of course the various inaccuracies of the Jurassic Park films, all through a compelling timeline and story of the evolution of the dinosaurs from their ancestors until now, where they still make up a sizeable chunk of life on Earth! As often happens with books that I've just read through once, while I've internalised the general ideas, I've since forgotten a lot of the details, so I'll definitely need to give this a re-read at some point.

The Last Devil to Die (The Thursday Murder Club #4) - Richard Osman

I remember when the first Thursday Murder Club book was published in late 2020. It was the best-selling book of that Christmas, bought (alongside Barack Obama's runner-up A Promised Land) like many others by my family, with the subsequent entries in the series being bought every Christmas since. I can't remember who's gifted which ones to whom, but the tradition is that someone will announce when they're planning to gift it to avoid multiple copies, and then we'll take turns reading it after. Last Christmas was a departure from the usual as Osman didn't release one. And neither was I with my family, instead opting to stay here in Madrid for the holidays. Fitting, if a little sad.

It's a bit hard to remember what's happened in each of these books - in a way they feel like a continuation of the same story, which I can keep coming back to find out what's been happening in Cooper's Chase. Having just read the synopsis to jog my memory a bit, I think this was a particularly good entry. Lots of relatable and modern topics - technology problems, family relationships, social changes, and some travelling and history to tie it all up. It's surprising sometimes how a series which is so mainstream and aimed at the general public is able to layer these extra meanings onto its murder mysteries, but I'm a big fan of it. And the short chapters. Coupled with the style of writing it makes them near-impossible to put down once you've started reading one.

The History of Russia - Orlando Figes

Despite the quite generic title, this is a pretty recent book (September 2022), written by one of the most well-known historians in the field, as a sort of collection of his research and of the key parts of Russia's past 1000 years of history. Not that I knew that when I bought or started reading it. I got it at the same time as The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, also finding it by chance in the Waterstones and thinking it was something that I'd like to learn more about. And likewise, the details are hazy now, but I learnt a lot reading it, and came away especially with a much better understanding of how Russia has turned into the country and political regime it has today, and of the world in which Putin and his supporters are steeped in and indeed trying to recreate. I would definitely recommend if those are topics that interest you, especially given their (unfortunate) relevance in the return to Russian expansionism we're currently experiencing throughout our continent.

We Can Do Better Than This - Amelia Abraham and contributors

I picked this up at Exeter's pride fair last year. I was wandering around the stalls with some friends, shortly after (or before?) taking part in the group dance event, and we came across a few local booksellers. I can't remember the name of this one, but she was friendly and the book caught my eye. It's compilation of essays from a large range of backgrounds (35 to be specific), and so there's a lot going on for such a short book. I liked the variety of experiences and opinions. While I can't say I'd considered all of them before, and there were definitely some which resonated with me more or which I felt were more similar to my own views, all were nonetheless interesting and enlightening. It's good for understanding and immersing yourself in all these different people's lives, struggles, and hopes, and it was a nice departure from my typical reading.

Death Comes to Marlow (The Marlow Murder Club #2) - Robert Thorogood

For those who don't know, Robert Thorogood is the creator of the BBC show Death In Paradise, indisputably my family's favourite program, which we would ritually watch every Thursday night when it airs at 9pm. (Although it's now moved to Fridays - which I'm sure is a good thing for the show, but does feel slightly off). While since departed from this show, Thorogood has kept up his murder-mystery craftsmanship. First with Death In Paradise books, and more recently with his Marlow Murder Club series.

As has been pointed out before, the series has some things in common with The Thursday Murder Club (cover designs, title, some of the character ideas), but I believe this to be mostly coincidence, especially given the nearby release dates (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here). Despite this, the series are actually quite different, with their own unique ideas, settings and humour. I think if I had to say, I'd put the Thursday Murder Club slightly ahead, but I'm a big fan of both, and of the Death In Paradise novels too, and the third and fourth entries in this series are on my to-read list. I'd also like to finish watching the TV adaption at some point as well, it was off to a good start. Speaking of which, Death In Paradise has just started airing, and it's shaping up to be a very good series, so I'll have to get back to this afterwards.

(Update: it was a great episode, although judging by the preview I think next week is going to be even better).

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins can be quite a polarising figure. There's a saying which goes something along the lines of "just because you trust someone's expertise and opinions in one field, doesn't mean you necessarily should in others". I think this applies here. I have a lot of respect for Dawkins' writing on evolutionary biology (The Greatest Show on Earth and The Ancestor's Tale are also very good), and religion, but there's definitely topics where I think he's, at least partially, in the wrong (see for example his recent comments on Elon Musk, or language/thinking around gender). I also think that some of the polarisation comes from his approach to treating difficult topics, which is very much scientific debate style, often without donning the expected "kid gloves". This works well from books and universities, although somewhat less so for social media.

Nonetheless, his writing is excellent, it explains all sorts of difficult and complex topics in clear, straightforward and always well-reasoned ways, and does so with mostly-appreciated touches of irony, humour, and tangential thoughts. The Selfish Gene (1976) is the first book he published, and the version I read was the 30th anniversary edition. In the many forewords (it's quite amusing reading them one after another), he mentions that despite (or perhaps more accurately because of) the age, he left the original text mostly untouched, and instead added a lot of footnotes. And as also mentioned, the text does definitely show its age, with a lot of older language, which was interesting, if not exactly my cup of tea. Nonetheless, I could follow it well, and it was as always a highly thought-provoking and good read, which I think anyone interested in biology and the natural-world would enjoy.

Walkable City - Jeff Speck

This book had been on my wish list for quite a long time, originating I believe from a Thomas Frank video or podcast. My parents, being town planners, couldn't understand why I'd want to read a "town planning" book, but last year they got a free Audible trial so I finally decided to download and listen to it. Contrary to town planning, I think it's more accurately described as an urban design book, and I find the topic fascinating.

Having grown up in a village and area with relatively poor walkability and transport links, and subsequently very high car-dependency, I've long been interested in different development patterns. Ironically I read this just after arriving in Alcalá de Henares, which is probably the most walkable place I've lived in. Unlike a lot of cities I'd experienced, the most affordables places to live here are actually more or less in the centre, and almost everything there is mixed-use zoning. Supermarket? 30 seconds away. Hairdressers? My street-level neighbour. Bus into Madrid? Just outside the supermarket. Train line going through the middle of the city, lovely traditional pedestrian centre, parks and pubs directly opposite my flat. Not to mention the dirt-cheap public transport (8-20€ a month for everything in the Community of Madrid. You can quite easily pay as much in a day in London). I'd hasten to add that there's issues too, but they're not really related to this topic.

Walkable City is an exploration of the many different development patterns you find, focused on the US, although taking examples from other parts of the world. It talks about what works, when and why. How to design public transport and bike infrastructure so that they're actually useful and used. How to go about choosing and creating walkable districts in cities and linking them up. And all the little things too: pedestrian crossings and safe street design (probably quite different to what you'd expect - always the human/psychological factors to consider), speed limits and dealing with traffic engineers (vs planners). Coming from a lifetime of experience working in the field, it offers insights into almost everything and makes you think a lot more about the places we make and live in. On a related note, I'd also recommend taking a look at the Strong Towns movement and the Not Just Bikes videos/podcasts if you're interested in the topic.

Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker

Also obtained during that Audible trial and read shortly after my arrival in Spain, Why We Sleep is another fascinating book. Sleep science is a topic I've long been interested in - I remember giving a (short) speech on it at 13 years old, but this book really provides all the information you could want, accurate as of 2017. There was so much useful information that I wanted to remember that I decided to make some notes on the book while listening, which you can find here.

While some parts are relatively common knowledge nowadays, there's a lot which is new and surprising, at least in the extent to which it's true. Some highlights include the fact that seemingly all unicellular life that lives more than a few days experiences some kind of active and passive stage - sleep is a necessity and perhaps pre-requisite of sorts to advanced life forms, and without it we can't live for very long. There's practically no organ, body system, or living process which is unaffected by sleep, including such parts as our immune system (prevention and recovery), reproductive systems, physical appearance, pain reception, and mental health/conditions, as well as all the more well-known ones. Another surprising finding was the effects of alcohol and of (current, with melatonin being an exception) sleeping pills. While both can stop the body from being in an awake state (acting as depressants), they do not induce a natural sleep and do not produce many of the benefits that doing so provides, especially in relation to REM sleep and memory.

I did sometimes find that the tone of the book could come off as a bit unrealistic, with Walker's head more in the science than in the real world, but the breadth and depth of the research and data is amazing, covering pretty much everything you could think of; from how our bodies naturally choose to sleep and how we can use that to help us, to the changes in sleep throughout our lives, to the similarities and differences we have other animals and species, and to how our evolutionary past has shaped our current sleep patterns.

La España de Altamira (Historia de España #1) - María L. Cerdeño & Gerardo Vega

I took this out from the uni library shortly after arriving, and I'm happy to report that it's the first foreign language book which I've read all the way through. I don't think it was actually a very good choice for this; the book is quite old, uses some complex and very specific language, and overall I didn't enjoy it loads. But nor was it bad, I found the various prehistoric periods, changes, burials and the accompanying images interesting enough, and I did learn some history and some new language from it.

To start with I made the mistake of trying to understand every word and phrase, spending far too long looking up everything I didn't know. I really don't recommend this. To be clear, it's useful to look something up if you can't figure it out and it's really bugging you and stopping you understanding, but I think it's actually a lot more helpful to go in with the mindset of just reading. Once you get into the flow of this you'll quickly realise that a lot of the words which you're not so familiar with often just fit into place in context, and so you can largely work out their meanings. And I find this is a great way of learning because instead of directly associating them with something you already know in another language, you get to properly learn about this word or phrase - which likely won't have exactly the same meaning as another you already know. Languages are messy, and to learn one well you need to use it in the same way you'd use your own, and this is a really good way of doing that. Although (as I later ended up doing), I would definitely recommend choosing something that interests you more, with language on the slightly easier and less-specific side.

Nowadays, when data is sent over the internet or stored on a server, it’s almost always encrypted beforehand. This scrambles the data into seemingly random combinations of characters, using an encryption key. Using this same encryption key¹ however, the data can be unscrambled back into its original form. This means that private information is kept private; nobody who gains access to and reads the encrypted information is able to make sense of it. With the number of possibilities that the standard 256 bit encryption entails, using brute force to unscramble this data (that is, to try out every combination of decryption keys to find the right one) using current computers would take roughly 200000000000000000000000x as long as the universe has existed. Quantum computers might one day pose a threat to some of our current encryption algorithms², although there are already approaches to defend against this, but for the time being, encryption simply cannot be broken.

Most of the time, data is first encrypted during transit (eg using TLS) between your device and an app’s servers, using a temporary, randomly generated encryption key to do so. It’s then typically encrypted by and stored on these servers, which is referred to as server-side encryption. This means that said servers are able to decrypt and read this data, which for a lot of use cases makes sense. You’d expect your banking website to be able to read your requested transactions and update their records, for example. But sometimes, the data you're sending is not intended for the service you’re using, but just for yourself - such as note taking, or for another person that you're communicating with - such as messaging. Using server-side encryption, this data can be read by whatever service you’re using. They can choose to do whatever they like with your information: sell it to advertisers, use it to build up a profile of you, and perhaps use it to target other products and services at you. But even if you trust this service not to misuse your private information, you can’t trust that others won’t. If a 3rd party is able to get into their systems somehow (through illegal or legal means) and access the stored encryption keys alongside your data, then they’ll be able to decrypt and read it. Data leaks like this are hardly uncommon, whether through state-sponsored/political attacks, criminals in search of money, human error, or simply people with too much free time on their hands.

The obvious solution to this is a system where encryption keys are not known by the service you’re using, but just by you. This means that it is physically, mathematically impossible that anyone else is able to access your data unless you choose to share it with them, or unless you or your own device are compromised. The technical term for this is zero-trust, as you don’t need to trust the service you’re using to safeguard your data given that they are unable to access it. Unfortunately this term is rarely used outside of the industry. I assume that when launching the first mainstream zero-trust services somebody from the marketing team went ‘look, I’m really sorry but we just can’t call our secure messaging app “zero-trust”, that’s going to put everyone right off’, and instead they co-opted the term end-to-end encryption³, as well as the more sensible but less common client-side encryption.

Let’s start with client-side encryption. Client-side encryption means that data is encrypted by the client (your device), using a key which is not known to the server. A great example of this is the note-taking and photo-storage app Cryptee⁴. When creating an account, you also create an encryption key, which is used to encrypt your data. This encrypted data is then sent to and stored on their servers⁵. Cryptee never has access to the encryption key and cannot read your data. Likewise, the modern definition of end-to-end encryption is a closely related concept, as data is similarly encrypted on-device and inaccessible to the server. The difference is that it’s used for communication services. End-to-end encryption nowadays means that only you and other participant(s) have the decryption key to be able to read your messages or listen in on your calls. A well-known example of this is Signal, who’s open-source protocol is now used by many other services as well⁶.

On the surface of it, zero-trust encryption is great! Nobody except you and other users you communicate with can access your data. Even if the service you’re using experiences a data leak, third parties will only be able to view encrypted meaningless data. However, these systems do come with some drawbacks. From a technical perspective, it is a bit harder to implement. As well as needing your login details/phone number to sign in, you also need your encryption key to access your data. Encryption keys are typically 256 bits long. There are methods to securely derive this key from a password-length key that the user remembers^{5, 6}, but this still effectively means that two passwords need to be remembered or saved. Passwords, and more generally human error, are famously one of the weakest links in security - the average person at any one time has 0.8 correct passwords in their memory. Solutions to this can involve password managers, which I’d strongly recommend everyone use⁷, or passkeys, which are in principle a great idea but currently a bit of a mess. However, many zero-trust services instead assume that users do not want to manage their encryption key, and indeed do not let them do so. Signal and WhatsApp for example store your encryption key on-device, and if you wish to use them on another device you need to first link that device to your “primary device”, such as by scanning a QR code. This does manage to hide the complexity of zero-trust encryption but it also significantly reduces the flexibility of them. Should you wish to access your data/account but not have access to the primary device it can be near-impossible to do so⁸.

Still, while more complicated, zero-trust encryption can be used in place of traditional server-side encryption, and already is in many places. The other side of the equation is the ethical side of things. As with many tools, this kind of privacy can be used for good, or for bad. It can be used for example for organising protest and resistance under authoritarian regimes, or it can be used for planning and carrying out crimes. It can be used to protect those who are in danger due to their sexuality, religious beliefs, or political views, or it can be used for child sexual abuse material. And so on and so forth. The problem is that it’s not possible to separate out these use cases. Many governments and organisations have proposed doing so, introducing so called backdoors to allow them access to people’s data, but nobody else. But any kind of backdoor - any kind of security hole - is a security hole that will eventually be exploited by others. And even if you trust your government to always do the “right thing”⁹, there’s many which surely cannot be trusted. Even the UN states that privacy is a human right. This is not to say that you can’t report things to law enforcement and provide evidence to them or to others if you so wish. You still have access to your data of course, so if you want to share it as part of this process you can. “Report” buttons can still work under these systems, sending the data which you have access to to the relevant agencies. But this should be something which you have control over, rather than something which has the potential to be exploited and accessed by anyone with the technical means to do so.

Left to right: USB-C, microUSB, Lightning

The Lightning port when introduced on the 2012 iPhone 5 was years ahead of its main competitor microUSB (2007). Reversible, more durable, capable of faster data speeds and more power delivery, there was no competition. But times have changed and I think it’s time for Lightning to go: in fact, I think it’s long overdue.

Despite its many downsides, everyone except Apple stuck with microUSB. Why? Because of Lightning’s closed nature. No-one else was allowed to use it. Had they been, maybe we would all be using Lightning on our phones now and this conversation wouldn’t even be happening. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the rest of the industry moved to USB-C, starting the transition in 2015.

Strangely enough Apple played an instrumental role in the development of USB-C, and led the adoption of it in the laptop space. Recently they’ve been using it on iPads as well. Why? Because it’s far more capable than Lightning (power, data, video, etc), and due to its openness has a bigger accessory market. So where does this leave iPhones and Airpods¹? Stuck in the past. Especially because while USB-C keeps getting better and better, Lightning has hardly changed since it was first unveiled. I'm sympathetic to Apple's position; by the time USB-C came to market there'd already been 3 generations of very successful Lightning-equipped iPhones, not to mention iPads, iPods and accessories built for them. On top of that consumers generally quite liked the port and they made a lot of licensing money from it. But considering they had the “courage” to remove the headphone jack², a port which has been in use far longer, they should have also had the courage to drop the Lightning one. In stubbornly sticking with it they've dug themselves a hole, one it seemed they would never get out of... until now.

On the 23 September this year, the EU proposed legislation around charging ports which includes³ mandating USB-C charging⁴ on all phones, tablets, over-ear headphones, cameras & handheld consoles, as well as laptops over a longer timeframe. It’s likely to come into effect in 2024, and while we’re no longer part of the EU, this change would almost certainly affect us as tech products shipped to the EU are generally also shipped to the UK⁵.

While I’ve outlined the technical reasons why I think USB-C should be used everywhere, the EU's reasons for the proposal are different, though related: convenience, and the environment.

Imagine a world where your phone, tablet, headphones, laptop, bluetooth speaker, and everything else charged over the same port. And not only that, but everyone's did. No more asking “Do you have an iPhone charger?” only to hear “No I’ve got a Samsung” or “The Android one”⁶ (the confusion is clear). Just “Can I borrow a charger?”. Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds like convenience to me.

The environmental argument is similarly straightforward; more sharing and reusing cables and accessories, both between your own devices and others', leads to less buying new unnecessary ones and therefore less e-waste.

The caveat to both those is what will happen to existing cables and accessories. As mentioned before, a big part of Apple’s reason for not switching is the large userbase of Lightning users. Because for someone who uses Lightning everywhere, switching to USB-C and making all their cables and accessories useless is neither convenient nor environmentally friendly⁷. But while that’s a pain, I think it’s best to fix the problem now rather than ignoring it longer, even if fixing it 6 years ago would have certainly been preferable. In the long term switching will be a net positive.

So what about the political implications of this legislation? Well I think they boil down to one thing: should this kind of market be regulated? Most people agree standardising wall sockets and EV chargers were good ideas, but is standardising charging ports going too far? I would say no. I don’t have a problem with it; I think sometimes regulation is necessary or at least beneficial, and that it would be in this case. But I think it’s a very understandable view to think otherwise. One of the most compelling arguments I’ve heard is ”What if microUSB was standardised like this?” That would not be good, at all. Now the EU says “Any technological developments in wired charging can be reflected in a timely adjustment of technical requirements/specific standards under the Radio Equipment Directive”, but I’m not sure how likely that is to happen. What I do find more reassuring though, is the argument that there probably isn’t any more innovation to be had in this. As we’ve discussed, changing ports and really any standards (think how we still sometimes use the Imperial measuring system) is a massive undertaking and needs a big reward to be worth it. And what reward could that be? The USB Implementation Forum (yes that’s a thing) doesn’t plan to make a new physical design for a USB port ever again, USB-C is supposed to replace all existing USB (and Lightning) ports. And there really isn’t any innovation happening in other comparable port designs, as we’ve seen. All the work is going into USB-C, it’s the port of the future, and I think beyond USB-C wireless is where the innovation will be happening⁸ (don’t get me started on wireless charging and data standards). So for all the reasons above I believe this is a good change and I hope it passes into law. The sooner microUSB and Lightning go, the better.

Recently I changed my Instagram bio. I did something that’s becoming increasingly common: I added my pronouns. Shortly after though my (observant) friend asked me, “why did you put ‘he/they’, most people put their preferred one ... do you prefer they?” “Well” I said, “it’s a bit complicated…”

Everyone uses they as a singular pronoun sometimes. It’s usually used to refer to someone of unknown gender, especially when talking about a generic type of person or job. Eg 'I heard we have a supply teacher next lesson, I hope they're nice.' So part of me saying '/they' is just acknowledging that people probably refer to me like that often, and that’s perfectly fine. But of course that’s only one use of singular they. The newer and increasingly common use is as a gender-neutral pronoun for people of a known sex.

Here, I’m going to make the distinction between ‘sex‘ and ‘gender’. When I think about this topic, I use sex to refer to your biological sex - your body - which can be male, female, or (very rarely) intersex¹, and gender to refer to how you think of yourself, and by extension what pronouns you use.

My belief is that how you think of yourself, how you act, who you speak to and what you do shouldn’t really be affected by your sex. Obviously there are some physical differences: sexual organs, hormones, voice pitch, body shape etc. But putting those aside, I don’t see that being male should mean you think about yourself differently from being female. I don't think the differences in bodies is anywhere near enough of a difference to warrant a different pronoun. Because what pronoun you use really can change people’s preconception of you - often in ways you don’t want.

So ideally I would like to use a gender-neutral pronoun, I would like everyone to use one by default. And this is the other part of the reason why I added ‘/they’. But the reason I put ‘/’ is because they isn’t a very good singular pronoun. Mainly because it’s also a plural pronoun, and because of that it can get pretty confusing to use. There’s also the more short-term problem that because it’s relatively uncommon, it can still sound sort of strange in conversation - and using it requires you to actively ask everyone else to use it. Unfortunately it’s so common for people to use the pronoun assumed of their sex that it takes quite a lot of effort not to. So right now, there’s not really a “perfect” solution. Using they has its issues, as do gendered pronouns. I realise that when most people refer to me as ‘he’ they’re probably not intending to treat me differently than if I were using another pronoun (even if - subconsciously - they may be). I know they’re just doing what (almost) everyone else does. So until a better and more widely used gender-neutral pronoun comes along, I’m okay sticking with ‘he/they’ - and letting people call me whichever they prefer.