 So what you do is very sensible. You emphasise and up-weight those areas of the experience where you have a comparative advantage and train travel in terms of enjoyment and productivity and doubly wins. Hello intelligent beings of this marvellous planet. Welcome to the 42 Courses podcast and thanks for listening. Today, Rory Sutherland is here speaking with his co-author Pete Dyson about their new book Transport for Humans. Are we nearly there yet? The book's about how engineers plan transport systems, but it's people that use them. We might consider habit, status, comfort, variety and many other factors that engineering equations don't capture at all. Now, with climate change, the pandemic and changing work-life priorities, the time is ripe for a new way forward and this book maps out how to design transport for humans. So, his 42 courses found at Chris Rawlinson to ask the questions to Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland. Perfect. Done. Ready. Excellent. Okay, so yeah, I'll just start. Rory, Pete, so lovely to chat again. What an honour. Congratulations on the upcoming book. Very excited to talk about it. Unfortunately, it's a very problematic time to have ridden the book because shortly after the book was published, I went and bought an electric car. Since when I've become markedly more pro-car than I probably was in the book, but never mind. What was the motivation to start the book actually? Oh, I think it tracks back a long way. At the start of the book, we describe how, if anything, it were the mild frustrations that colour, inordinately a journey like the lack of ticket machines at a train station or the fiddly things at traffic lights or the experience on an airplane journey, but it kind of cleaves open a much bigger category of analysis that makes you question how transport is designed and experienced. I think it's fair to say Rory's got more years of transport experience than I have in usage of the network. Rory, you've been prolific in talking about transport alongside transport. Yeah, I think it's really interesting for two reasons. One, I'm a bit of a transport nerd. Travel, transportation, leisure, hotels, all that kind of thing. Both of us, I think people admit this, we're both nerdily obsessed. And we are, by the way, in that tiny minority of people who I think will actually almost try and game the system. We will invest literally 40 minutes of research into a 20-minute journey. And I'm always the guy, wherever they say there's a board meeting and they say the best thing to do is to get the train to Windsor and then walk from there. I go, no, that's rubbish. You actually get a train to Reading and then take a taxi because it takes half as long. Yeah, haven't you got an LED board at your house Rory? I mean, you've got like a little... Yes, I have. I've got my own little Wi-Fi connected departure board, which shows me departures from my local station. So if the trains are running late, I can go to a different station or take an earlier train. So I'm that kind of person. But then the collision with that and behavioural science becomes incredibly interesting because you realise that all the metrics that are prioritised in transport planning, investment and improvement don't really correlate very well beyond a certain point. I think both of us will caveat that. I'm not suggesting you go to kind of random airline departures where you turn up at the airport and they go, we've decided to go tomorrow, OK? We know. But beyond a certain point, chasing the same old metrics of sort of punctuality and speed is undoubtedly comes into contact with the law of diminishing returns. And what people care about, for example, might be a sense of certainty matters much more to your emotional and mental well-being than speed per se. You know, knowing you're going to be eight minutes late actually isn't much of an inconvenience. Sitting on a stationary train with no information drives you almost insane. And understanding, by the way, what drives transport choices is really, really important in terms of transport planning because transport planning involves predicting how human behaviour will change in response to transport investment. And if you think, oh, we've done a train that's faster than the car, therefore everybody will take the train. And you discover that almost nobody does because what they love about the car is not the speed but the sense of autonomy or privacy or the ability to fart or whatever it might be, OK? You can make very, very bad predictions if you assume that humans are kind of entirely rational, calculating engines. Yeah. I mean, it was just intrigue to know, are there any stories that from the book that you'd love to share or that you can share? Any favourites? I think all of them, really. I mean, I love the point about first mild bias with the car. The fact that the car sits outside your house and it's the first thing you encounter. Yeah. Undoubtedly upweights the use of the car versus other modes of transport. It's so salient and it's so close. In other words, your car is waiting for you, as Pete put it, whereas you have to wait for a bus. Right. OK. That is that, you know, regardless of the overall journey time, convenience and cost, that's a surprisingly significant factor in choice, just the order in which you have to eliminate things. An extraordinary thing happened. I'll just give you an example of this. When you arrive at Charing Cross Station, the first thing you come across is the entrance to the tube. Then you come across a taxi rank. And beyond that is actually about four bus ranks. OK. The only bus information is by the time you've got to the bus rank. So you have to reject the tube and reject a waiting taxi before you're even aware of what buses might be leaving. Now, if you just brought the bus information, I have no idea, literally no idea, where the buses from Charing Cross go to. And part of the reason for that is if you just brought the information inside the station and said, effectively, you know, bus to Victoria via Victoria Street, four minutes, I go, sod this taxi. OK. But what seems to happen, and most bizarrely, you know, the justification for expenditure and transport investment almost has to be predicated on time saving. Right. Which is crazy, because our preferences aren't really driven by time and cost alone. Not that they're totally irrelevant, obviously. I'm going to be crazy to suggest they were. But just because something makes sense doesn't mean it's true. Remember your your favourite TED Talk, the first one where you were asking, you were saying that what was it? You were a sharp star should be slowed down and use the money to serve sort of supermodels, serving Chateau Patrice up and down the characters. Peter, is there any way that TFL are looking into that? I mean, I've got a commute from Peterborough, so I wouldn't mind that. Well, yes, funny should say, actually, I got the DLR, so Potter the London Underground sort of network just last night. And I noticed that for the first time I've seen the screens printed on the sort of the glassboards surrounding the seating area had a display of sort of Alpine Mountain scene. And rather than being given over to commercial advertising, it was communicating a app that you could use during your journey to sit there. And I think there's some mindfulness of some meditation and some special sounds that it can play, thereby turning the journey into a moment of reflection. So while it's not, while it's not fizzy grape juice, that we humans love and adore, it is a value adds that really appreciates for some people the aspect of the journey is not wasted time, but has some benefit. Yes, I know, if I'm right in saying that there was a, I remember when I was at Ogilby, there was a challenge to try and see if there was a way to get internet between the stops for some of the lines. Is that, is that anywhere closer to being sold? Well, funnily enough, they almost solved it on the underground in credit to TFL before they solved it on the Euro star, when it was an easier problem in the sense that okay, there's mobile coverage on part of the Euro star, but there should, there should have been Wi-Fi on the Euro star from if not day one, certainly from about 2004. And in the event it took them until about 2015 to install it. Now when you think about it, anything that emphasizes the usefulness and productivity of a journey is pretty decisive if you're competing with air travel. Because air travel is pretty fast objectively. It's very fast when the plane is actually moving, which is a small fraction of your overall journey time. But the extent to which you have quality time to get on with work, or for that matter, read a book or watch a film on a short haul air travel is pretty dismal. Yeah. And so, you know, the point is, you know, this is Ricardo's law of comparative advantage, planes have a comparative advantage in going fast, and no train will ever I think be able to reach airline speeds. Perhaps not safely in any case. So what you do is very sensible. You emphasize and upwait those areas of the experience where you have a comparative advantage and train travel in terms of enjoyment and productivity, undoubtedly wins. Yeah, I mean, I think more TFL have been really good at removing uncertainty over the years. I mean, I remember growing up in London, you never used to have those nice boards that told you that the train is arriving in two minutes. The odd thing is that they have great difficulty funding those boards, because they don't, in fact, change the objective characteristics of the journey. Right. So you there's a metric if you like for time of journey. And time can be translated into money through a kind of slightly ludicrous assertion that all time spent in transit is entirely economically useless. That's the model they used to justify HS2 to a large extent. Not exclusively. But in truth, the truth of the matter is that journey time can be a very, very high quality indeed. You know, nobody ever advertises how fast their cruise ship is, do they? You know, the whole purpose is what's the onboard experience like. Yeah. And, you know, I think what's quite strange about the travel industry is even in very closely related fields of travel, people don't really borrow ideas and insights from each other very much. Right. Makes sense. It reminded me of you won't want to be your other things worry that you said. I think you said the worst phrase in the English language is bus replacement service. It's amazing how much we hate that. And whether you could do whether you could rethink that in a way that we tolerated it is a really fascinating question. Part of it's unavoidable. It's just the annoyance of intermodality. And Pete Pete's wonderful on this. There are several things that Pete from his transport and social geography experience knows, you know, one of which is changing from one mode to another is disproportionately stressful, regardless of the duration or the time it takes. It's disproportionately annoying. You also have that brilliant three way model, didn't you, which I found really useful, which I think comes from the University of Leeds. Is that right? Which is connectivity and its place. Oh, okay. Yes. So this is worth knowing, everybody. While while University of Leeds, certainly our leaders in transport studies, the University of West England Oh, you're right. Lions wrote a very nice piece five years ago or so that we found really helped frame transport in its proper course in the sort of behavioral and psychological and social setting, which is to say, let's think of what problem transport is solving. It's solving an access to people and services and opportunities problem. It does so by moving a body a human from A to B, give by in large. But there's other ways people can overcome their problems, their transport problems through digital connectivity and through local proximity. And we've seen, in many ways, the coronavirus pandemic has showed what's happened when you cut out one of those three nodes on our triangle, you reduce people's ability to travel by saying essential travel only or by reducing it even more dramatically. And people find ways to solve their sort of travel needs by other means. So by connecting like we are on video, but it goes deeper on online shopping and it clearly involves using local services, which is a small amount of transport, let's say, but very local things make a big difference. So this is where some of the big transport solutions that are coming in coming years aren't necessarily transport. But they're the things around transport. So video conferencing patently and the normalisation of video conferencing reduces a large part of our need to travel, certainly for commercial purposes and sometimes for social purposes. It's worth noting, by the way, the book contains, thanks to Pete, rather than me, some pretty interesting statistics and the fact that the UK has already reached peak car. I mean, nearly all projections are based on the assumption that car use will increase. Car use and ownership, I think, has been declining in the UK for some years. One reason, obviously, you can say, well, there's the internet, there's Amazon. But there's also actually the fact, which I think probably doesn't get factored into models nearly as much as you're no living in Stanford, which is that provincial towns actually aren't that crap anymore. Okay, I mean, this is one of the things, one of the things I think is really important is having the courage to say things that are seemingly banal, but which are nevertheless important in the sense that, you know, I grew up in, I mean, Monmouth, lovely town, okay, local town, no complaints about growing up in Monmouth. But if you wanted to buy an interesting piece of high-five equipment or you wanted to buy strange coffee or exotic foods, you had to go somewhere else. And actually, what we've got now seems to be a retail ecosystem and a coffee shop ecosystem, where once you reach a reasonable critical mass in a town, then by the Pareto principle, 95% of your daily quotidian wants and needs are fairly well sorted. You know, it's rather like that finding, if you think about it, which is that in a Tesco metro, you actually have 90% of the shit you need, okay? Okay, you can make the Tesco into a Tesco extra, in which case it's the size of a Hindenburg hangar, and it will end up with something like 50,000 SKUs rather than 5,000. But since most people are mostly buying the same kind of stuff most of the time, you know, a Tesco metro will actually do you're proud, you know, eight shops out of nine. And so what I think has happened in the sort of both small cities have become much, much better. But I went to Manchester in 1989, it was a complete waste of time to be able to do that. I wasn't into the music scene, admittedly. But I mean, you know, I mean, if you went to Manchester in 1989, you couldn't wait to get back to London. If you go to Manchester now, you're slightly envious of the inhabitants. And so, you know, those factors to which people respond are worth bearing in mind. And this wonderful University of the West of England model basically includes them. It says, you know, transport isn't necessarily an end in itself, it's a means to an end. And actually, there are alternative substitute goods that can satisfy for that need. I mean, it's going to be fascinating. You wrote this book at a really interesting times. I mean, you know, we've moved out from London into the countryside purely because the transport link from here luckily is relatively good into London. You can be in London, Kings Cross and sort of. Why did you go from Peter Brinot Stamford? I had to ask that because that's going to question Peter and I asked. So from, so I'm in Stamford, but literally about two minutes down the road is a train that takes 12 minutes to get to Peter Borough. And then from Peter Borough, I can get a fast train, which is about 45 minutes to Kings Cross. And apparently, they're making a fast station that's going to be half an hour, which would be sort of a parkway station. Are they? I don't know what it is, but they're interesting. It should be interesting. They're all those sort of new LNER Zoomer trains as well. So they're all very nice. So the issue that is frustrating, I guess, is the cost. It's it sort of costs way less to drive down to London still than it does to get on the train, which is mildly annoying. So it's sort of I would imagine that if particularly in the UK, where you have got it seems like you've got more people who have moved outside of the UK during Covid, it'd be interesting to see how that how that works with the economic exchange. Of course, what will need to happen is that the season ticket will need to be replaced with more alternatives. And I personally favour a kind of Amazon Prime arrangement, because I think that would guarantee reasonably regular use. In other words, you pay an annual or six monthly or three monthly lump sum, and then you get discounts on all the tickets so that regular users end up being quits in. Right. And I think I think what's interesting, of course, is that the equation for moving out of London changes quite a bit if it's a three day commute rather than five, because you if you like you get four days of countryside rather than two at the cost of three commutes rather than five. So both both the benefit and the cost shifts to moving out. And so you do get two forces in a sense operating in the same direction. That is if you want to move out. I'm not suggesting that large cities will lose their appeal. Young people particularly seem to like them. Very obvious Darwinian reasons, I suspect. But it might be a case and some people have said this would be desirable that London becomes slightly scousier, slightly younger and quite a bit cheaper. Yeah, you know, you might argue that there are a lot of people that living there who, you know, frankly, you know, would be possibly happier living outside thereby freeing up affordable property for the people who needs to be there or actively want to be there. No, I was I was trying to Pete earlier, actually, about the book and he was saying that there was some within the book, there was some sort of quite good call to actions for you know, there's some call to actions for the behavioral science community looking at transport. There's some call to actions for the transport industry themselves. And there's some call to actions for the commuters themselves. I wondered if any of you wanted to talk to any of those points. I'm starting to agonize that maybe we always worry about the extent to which fashion has on belief. And there tends to be an assumption, one, that futurism and urbanism are the same thing and that the future will always consist of people living in high density housing in mega cities. And I'm just uncomfortable about that. My argument for that is that there's a big difference between a city and a mega city in that in a city, let's say you work in the middle of New Castle, you can be as urban or as rural as you like, you know, you could you could go and live in Northumbria and still commute in feasibly. When you reach mega city levels, you become so goddamn big that actually urban areas encompass your effective radius of operations to some extent. And you're almost forced to live in a city even if you don't want to. And I think you get a level of unwieldiness that you simply don't have in a Bristol or a Newcastle or a Liverpool or even a Manchester or Birmingham to some extent. And the other thing I'm uncomfortable about is the assumption, not necessarily that public or shared transport is going to be big. But the assumption that necessarily the future of transport is effectively some form of mass transportation. I'm unsure. The only point I make is there's no form of mass transportation where you can sit on the seafront in the rain and have a thermos full of coffee while looking at the waves. Okay, that to some extent, whatever you think about the car, it's kind of like an extension of your house, which is able to move. And that my interesting question is, I think young people will will delay getting cars much later. My only problem is that once you have a car, it's quite difficult to go back because it resets your expectations. Which electric car did he get quickly? I got the Mustang Mach-E, actually. But I was hugely, I borrowed it, I borrowed one for four days and was just absolutely captivated. I didn't quite want to get a Tesla because I don't want Californians deciding every single aspect of my life. You know what I mean? I don't want sort of effectively 30,000 people in Palo Alto designing the world for me. So a little bit of Detroit comes in welcome there, I think. Look how far we've come that buying a Ford is an act of rebellion. I know. Isn't that extraordinary? Yeah, I know. I was thinking that. Chris, you asked the question, quite a direct question there about there addressing the sort of three audiences, if you like. And yeah, taking them in turn. The book is tries to set out a really neat argument for an optimistic case for transport planners to look carefully at their own think of themselves as human and all the decision making biases you might have as you think about problems to really encompass all the humanity in the heuristics and biases and principles. I think a lot of the lessons of this podcast will be well versed in. But there's a there's a challenge for behavioral scientists really to be to be ready and waiting on the journey to make research really accessible and really usable and to step up to the plate and say, OK, what's it worth to have a better table on the seat? What's it worth to have cleaner windows? What's it worth to have abundant charge points for your EVs? Because these things can't just be invested in under the hopes of their user centric. They say some of these are it's this or this and how much shall we invest in it and how much do we need to reach certain tipping points and behavioral scientists need to step up and do that. And the final audience of which everyone that reads the book is ultimately engages in transport themselves and we hope it just allows people to think differently. And the course of writing this book has really been instructive that you can take different mental models to different journeys. Sometimes it's about making it speed. Sometimes it's about hassle free. Sometimes it's about looking out the window. So being dogmatic about any one model doesn't work for any given individually. So I think there's also a further benefit to acknowledging human diversity there, which is that one of the dangers of designing for the average is first of all, it contains the assumption that kind of if you imagine an average person and you optimize it for them, then the solution will be optimal. But there are lots of transport networks where actually appealing to diverse people in diverse ways would wait the network much more effective, for example, the tube, because you wouldn't get everybody trying to make the same journey in the same way. And therefore the use of the network would be more diverse and hence the network overall would be more efficient. So the classic case we give is the central line is overused because it's red on the tube map and it's a straight line going from right to left, east to west or west to east. And so it's immediately salient and obvious as a way of getting from west to east. Now, if you could actually nudge 20 percent of people into going actually, as Pete says, you know, the circle line, it's slower, it's 12 minutes slower, but it's air conditioned and, you know, it's not so deep down or whatever. OK, then actually, rather than building another east-west railway to cope with demand, what you'd simply do is disperse demand. And it's something I think I think we need to understand much better in terms of both complexity, thinking and network theory, which is actually to make a whole efficient. You don't want everybody doing this, optimising for everybody in the same way does not lead to an efficient use of a transport network. It'd be interesting to have different versions of the London tube map, depending on what you wanted to do. Very, that's very quick, because this is one of one of the suggestions in the book is exactly. But also you could just randomise the tube map. I mean, that's another perfectly reasonable argument. But you certainly could have a tube map, which is a tube map for the claustrophobic. Yeah. For example, you could certainly have a tube map for people who want air conditioning. But you can also I mean, if you think about the Victoria line, I think probably the best line on the whole network is because it was the last to be added to the map, it goes in a stupid curve. OK. And so it's not very salient what the Victoria line does. And so I'll give you an example. I used to take taxis from Victoria to Houston. OK, which take bloody ages. All right. Because I'd actually effectively lived in and around London for about 16 years before I realised there was a tube line directly from Victoria to Houston. It's on the Goddard map. I mean, you know, I have to take some blame myself. But if you're looking for a direct path from Victoria to Houston, no one's looking to do a really circuitous route, arcing round to the West, which is what the line on the map. It's actually a straight line in reality. It's complete. I think it's a pretty straight tube line, certainly very, very fast. But the map completely distorts human preference. So how you present information affects what people do, regardless of what else is going on. And there's a nice thing to build on there, I suppose would be that. I mean, some transport planners might say, oh, that sounds like a great utopian future where everybody is dispersed. But really, people ultimately care about speed and cost, don't they? And we say, well, there is some interesting data when you look at something, in this case, TFL did, where the Wi-Fi routers they installed along platforms inadvertently allow them for the first time to see how people moved within the network, where the data previously just showed where people tapped in and tapped down. It turns out when you map it out, actually, a minority of people take in an example they gave from Liverpool Street to Victoria. There's several options you could take of different lines, and this would be true in lots of cities. Not even a majority of people actually chose the fastest route. Some of them did take the circle lines, some of them did take the quick central and Victoria line. Some of them went the wrong direction and would love to know why. So people are already dispersing. We just don't know enough about why they're dispersing. So we're quite open to the times where show us the research that says cutting the journey time would would increase ridership and preference. And we're we're quite agnostic to that. It's just in the absence of that research, we say, shouldn't we be creative and a bit imaginative about I think, interestingly, the centre of economic and business research have reliable data that shows that people don't try and live as close to the offices or their workplaces they can. That there is actually if you if you factor in everything else, you realise that there's a weird preference for having a kind of distance between where you work and where you live. Yeah, makes sense. I know I know that we're almost out of time. So I mean, the book launches on the 18th and it's called Transport for Humans. Are we nearly there? Yeah. I love the byline, by the way. And it's available on Amazon or any good bookstore you go to. I think you can actually pre-order it pre-order it. Absolutely. Get in there and just to finish off, what's your favourite commute, Rory and Pete? What? The favourite journey or favourite regular journey? Probably your favourite regular journey, I think fits probably more with it. I've got a wonderful example of this actually, which I take about half the time, which is I travel into work from near Seven Oaks to Blackfriars by going to Oxford and deliberately taking a very slow stopping train. And the reason I do that is if I don't have to be there sooner than an hour, I have about 58 minutes. I can do the journey in about 35, but I have 58 minutes on a less crowded train where I can always work for the whole duration and I have a better Wi-Fi signal. And I also have time to get shit done, which I don't have if I take the faster route where I have to take train trains. And it's a bit more scenic in addition. Oh, nice. That's an absolutely classic example where a bunch of other preferences, not all the time, but some of the time, I'm very willing to sacrifice speed just for bizarrely a slower journey, but one that's slightly more convenient and productive. Right. Interestingly, I don't so often go home that way. Which is possibly revealing, which is that I, you know, maybe on the way home, I just want to get home. But on the way to work, my argument is I'm going to be working anyway. So it does make much difference whether I'm working on a train or, fun enough, until I mentioned this, it never occurred to me that I make that journey much more frequently in one direction than I do in the other. I'm sure there's some psychiatry, some psycho-hydrists would have some words about that. No, no, it kind of does make sense when I think about it, which is there's a gain to getting to, there's a gain to getting home sooner, whereas there isn't a gain to getting to work sooner if you're working anyway. So I suppose that logic kind of makes sense in a way. I think also it's you've got your your own me time to actually not surrounded by other people that are going to distract you. So it's handy to do that in the morning and also the parking is a bit easier there and a bit cheaper. So it's a whole, it's a whole concatenation of factors. And this fact that actually, you know, what's what people are trying to do is create this model of human mobility as pizzas, which is predicated on the movement of goods. Where no emotional factors obviously pertain, you know, as we said, you know, you don't get a chair that has a fit of peak because it's sent by FedEx, not UPS. OK. You know, goods are not fundamentally emotional things. Their perception of time is well, nil. But I mean, our perception of time with the arrival of goods is fairly predicated on speed. Although even there you could argue that online package tracking. Provide certainty which compensates for slower speed, I would argue. Yeah. You ask Chris favorite journeys I've had a good time and yeah, taking the train just out of London and cycling the rest of the way to visit my family and my parents who live a bit further out in a perfect mix of well, for the Geeks C2C service that comes very regularly, you can tap in and tap out. You don't plan that train journey. You can take your bike on it and then you cycle another, in my case, an hour. So a fair way. But through some journey for about four pounds, you get a fitness workout, you get 20 minutes on the train and you get to your destination. It never really felt like travel or it felt like a chore. For those of you who haven't met Pete before, you're a sort of semi professional Ironman. So I'm guessing now that's that's me. That's me. You've got to right. You've got to muddle up and confuse. Is that is that your next elaboration, Rory, with Pete is a book on the triathlon. Yeah, I think you Pete, you were saying that you you also you break the record. Didn't you from sort of lands and some cycles from lands and the tip of Cornwall of England back to London, which is an established sort of national point to point record distance that 290 miles and did so in in one fell swoop in 11 hours and 50 minutes. I think I was stationary for about 12 minutes. My GPS says so it was it was quick. It still wasn't quicker than the train or even the sleeper train. I took a lot of planning either side, so it's not really a mode of transport. I hope you took a pee when you were stationary, didn't you? Yes, yeah, I was. But otherwise it's an iron bladder competition. It does go to show the yeah, the wonderful efficiency and effectiveness of this bicycle, which amazes me and many others that was actually invented after the train is only 130 odd years old, came only just before the car. And yet it's still it's having a resurgence, not least because a little bit of extra technology in the case of an electric battery, electric motor transforms its efficiency such that in the future, perhaps even Rory could could break the record. That is actually the electric bike is highly interesting, I think, as one of the new technologies we'll have to explore. And I think I think also electric vehicles are kind of interesting because one of the things I've discovered having one is it changes the way you drive and it makes you much more zen because if someone slows down in front of you, they haven't actually robbed you of your kinetic energy because of regenerative braking. And so surprisingly, it makes you a remarkably chill driver. Thank you so, so much for your time. I know you've got to go. So I'll leave you to it. Huge pleasure. Yeah, please, please do everyone go out and buy the book and looking forward to reading it myself. So bravo again. Congratulations to you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chris, very kind.