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Michael Dnes

@roadscholar.bsky.social

1.7K followers 170 following 460 posts

Head of transport policy at Stonehaven consulting. Ex-civil servant who used to play with roads, trains, e-scooters, parking apps and a lot of government plumbing. May have made your driving test harder, and threw some cones in your way at least once

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · Nov 23

Having used the Sky-Bridge, I realise how helpful it is to have a post here to say - 'yes, this is me'. If you're here for stories of how transport winds and unwinds, you're in the right place.

Intention is for threads to be up here and in the Old Country at the same time.

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

Going faster, higher and further in greater comfort feels like a core mission for abundance.

So yes to the trains; but it’s time to start talking seriously about the other stuff too.

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

These things can make tangible improvements to peoples’ lives, and can demonstrate the value of progress in real terms.

Just the way other improvements in transport used to do for hundreds of years.

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

Autonomous vehicles could spare Americans from 93 billion hours of drudgery a year.

E-bikes, with the right infrastructure, could turn summertime commutes into joy rides.

Planes that can outrun Concorde would halve the size of oceans.

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

Because that compelling urban vision only applies to one part of the world. An important once; but if abundance is going to reach further, it should be able to offer far more.

Here in the UK, an electric car done right can cut fuel bills by 80-90%.

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

So yes, abundance does need trains, for sure.

BUT – the question isn’t why are we talking about trains. It’s why aren’t we talking about anything else?

This feels like one of those areas where @mattyglesias.bsky.social is inviting us to ‘finish the horse’

www.slowboring.com/p/the-half-d...

The half-drawn horse of abundance

Plus: Weezer, Harvard dorms, social mobility, and the first female president

www.slowboring.com

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

In his original tweet, Eli suggested that this job could be done better by autonomous buses and fast planes

FWIW, I think this will prove true (when I was the UK’s main road strategist, I had a plan for the buses). But until we prove it, there’s still a job for trains

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

And if you’re stuck using trains, you also need to understand that trains are hard to build.

So if you believe in cities that depend on them, you’re going to need to give a disproportionate amount of attention to making them run.

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

So that leaves us with the railway. Which, for all its limitations, is a powerful people mover. 60 years on, the same area of London is served by Crossrail, which tied together two existing railways to provide it with a 32-train-per-hour rail superhighway.

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

But they really did try.
- Add six 5-lane motorways
- Convert the whole ground level to a hexagonal road network
- Move the humans and their buildings 20ft in the air
- Dig two floors of parking underneath with 60,000 spaces

It still wasn’t enough

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

They looked at an area of central London called Fitzrovia, and tried to work out how it would need to change to deal with the expected traffic. A rise from 3,000 vehicles/hr to 40,000.

It was immediately clear that this was impossible.

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

To explain why, I need the help of the best transport report ever written – the 1963 Traffic in Towns report.

Written when British civil servants were just realising that the future was universal car ownership, it’s an unmatched examination of just what that was going to mean.

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

Well, no. There’s a really good reason abundance likes trains. But it has little to do with transport, and everything to do with cities

Abundance really, really loves cities. And in cities, transport gets weird

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

For you, this may not need explaining. But trains are niche. They were mostly built to enable journeys we can now do in better ways. They need their own network of tracks, so they don’t scale easily. They aren’t cheap.

Is this just an unhealthy obsession let loose?

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

This is definitely a thing. The #1 transport story of abundance is the failure of Californian high speed rail. The top asks are usually cheap metro systems, light rail networks and high speed railways.

The subtext is good trains = civilisation

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

All that would seem to point to 1. leveraging new tech like modern batteries, autonomous control, drone flight etc and 2. rationalising rulebooks – so billions of people save time and money.

So why is so much abundance transport chat about trains?

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

Second: transport is the area where degrowth – the arch-enemy of abundance – holds the most power.

We think it normal to e.g. limit road traffic to deliver environmental goals. There are good reasons for that, but they’re the opposite of the abundance mindset.

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

Then came the omnibus, the railway, the tram, the automobile. 1m became normal. 10m stopped being incredible.

Not only that, cities and nations did things they never thought of before – national newspapers; sports leagues, etc.

A perfect demonstration of the power of abundance.

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

You should expect abundance to care about transport.

First, abundant transport transformed what cities could do: before c.1800 city size was capped at 1m people, and the distances people could walk in c. 1 hour.

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

This is definitely an essay question – you can read a fuller answer over on the s*st*k

michaeldnes1.substack.com/p/the-abunda...

But here’s the summary

Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · 24d

Earlier this week, there was a big twitter debate started by @elidourado.com – are trains part of Abundance or not?

And that prompts a much bigger question: why is abundance so loud about trains, and so quiet about everything else?

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · Aug 23

Very sorry to have to do this - usually I post threads in more than one place. Today, however, my partner is telling me to get in the car or find a divorce lawyer.

So with apologies - here's a Substack link instead

michaeldnes1.substack.com/p/what-reall...

What really ate Ebbsfleet?

And do spiders have jetpacks?

michaeldnes1.substack.com

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · Jul 27

Whatever the reason, we go into the holidays no clearer than before; possibly just as confused inside of government as outside.

The one thing we can say for sure is that government is planning _something_ on the western leg. It’s just finding it hard to tell us what…

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · Jul 27

(There’s a third, even gloomier possibility over on the substack, if you fancy it)

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · Jul 27

If so, you’ll be gloomy at how the language has gone from ‘ambitions in the North’ to the narrower ‘northern powerhouse rail’.

That may be over-reading things, though.

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Michael Dnes @roadscholar.bsky.social · Jul 27

That doesn’t mean they’re keeping all of it.

So it might be that at the time of the SR everyone had agreed they’d retain _something_, but had yet to agree what it was.

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