Andrew Stott

Building a tram network doesn’t get people out of their cars. It just stops them from walking. Researchers analysed mobility data from nearly 400 European cities to understand how infrastructure changes daily commutes. They tracked three core categories: active mobility, public transport, and private cars. The goal was to isolate the exact impact of building a metro versus laying down tram tracks. The data for underground metros perfectly matches urban planning theory. Cities with metro systems see a massive boost in public transport use and a direct drop in car journeys. Metros successfully convince drivers to leave their vehicles at home. Trams show a completely different pattern. In cities that rely on trams but lack a metro, the car share remains heavily dominant. The drivers keep driving. The tram network completely fails to disrupt car dependency. A Dirichlet regression model applied to the dataset reveals exactly who is actually riding the tram. The presence of a tram system correlates with a severe reduction in active mobility. The new public transport infrastructure merely convinces pedestrians and cyclists to buy a ticket and sit down. Europe has 60 percent of the global tram network and generates 75 percent of total ridership. Governments fund these street-level programmes under the assumption they will fix traffic congestion and lower emissions. The data proves that assumption is entirely wrong. If a city wants to pull cars off the road, it has to build a metro. Funding a tram line might look like a green victory on a political brochure. The reality is that it just destroys walking and cycling rates while leaving the traffic jams completely untouched. Link to article: nature.com/articles/s4428…

@owenboswarva +1!!

@DirDigEng Definitely. My second tweet was sarcasm; removing spending controls will drastically reduce GDS's influence, and vendors will be delighted

Digital Assurance Playbook gov.uk/government/pub… (UK) This has been coming down the pipe for a while but still, a tough day for GDS true believers #govtech #spendcontrols #publicspending

Open letter: from 1 May 2026 the CMA will start enforcing against road fuel traders that aren't reporting their price changes to Fuel Finder, provided VE3 (the scheme operator) dobs them in gov.uk/government/pub… (UK) #fuelprices #govtech #opendata

@oaksandlions The Bristol Corn Exchange clock installed in 1822, still has two minute hands. One for GMT and one for local time.

@owenboswarva Seems bad for convergence/joining up and innovation and good for incumbent suppliers. Technical expertise is necessary but, as pre-Maude experience showed, not sufficient to achieve higher coherence and lower costs.

It's okay though. GDS's status as the UK's digital centre of government is based mainly on the regard that delivery departments have for its technical expertise

If you want to understand how the solar revolution is playing out across the Global South, a pretty good place to start is Agbon, Benin, where I lived for 2 yrs. It's an exceedingly unexceptional place: the reason solar is taking off there is because it's taking off everywhere🧵

#DYK #FAOSTAT provides FREE access to food & agriculture data for over 245 countries & territories from 1961 to the most recent year available? 🤔Want to explore the data, but don't know how? Watch this tutorial & dive in!👇 youtube.com/watch?v=LdF6mH… 💻#home" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">fao.org/faostat/en/#ho…

Ministers explore triggering break clause in Palantir's NHS contract ft.com/content/2d2b1a… Officials "quietly exploring the technical process" in case ministers want to take decisive action at some point FDP contract contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/0f8a65b… #NHSdata #patientdata #datasharing

City intersections generate 29 times more pollution than open roads. Half of those toxic emissions come from cars doing absolutely nothing but stopping and accelerating at traffic lights. In 2020, a Google software engineer was brainstorming massive climate mitigation ideas at his family dinner table. His wife told him they should just fix the annoyance of waiting at red lights for no reason. He assumed the problem was unsolvable. Then he looked at the mechanics of urban traffic engineering. Cities traditionally try to optimise traffic lights by installing incredibly expensive hardware sensors or paying people to manually count vehicles. The infrastructure is usually outdated. The data is almost always incomplete. The Google Research team realised they possessed a massive structural advantage. They had over a decade of Google Maps driving trends from billions of journeys across the globe. They built an AI model called Project Green Light. The system measures exactly how traffic flows through an intersection. It tracks the precise patterns of starting, stopping, and average wait times. Then it calculates exactly how to coordinate adjacent intersections to create continuous waves of green lights. City traffic engineers receive a simple dashboard with actionable recommendations. They review the AI's suggestions and implement the timing changes in about five minutes. They don't need to buy new software. They don't need to dig up roads to install new hardware integrations. They just adjust the dial on the infrastructure they already own. The scale of the impact is massive. The model is currently live in 12 cities, from Manchester to Bangalore to Seattle. It analyses thousands of intersections simultaneously. Early data shows a 30% reduction in vehicle stops and a 10% drop in total emissions at those junctions. That single AI model is already saving fuel and lowering emissions for 30 million car rides every single month. A casual complaint about a frustrating daily commute revealed a massive blind spot in urban design. Fixing the climate crisis involves deploying solar panels and scaling electric vehicles. It also involves using artificial intelligence to shave three seconds off a red light so millions of engines don't have to idle.

I hear you all, but part of the problem with "just use WinUI, WPF, MAUI, XAML, or whatever" is that there are so many multiple abstractions of Win32. If two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong, so the fact that we've had a half-dozen "canonical" ways to write Windows apps means we have zero good ones.

Just discovered that Berlin has a publicly accessible tree database for all trees within the city. There are 839,693 trees in the database. You can view the trees on a map with details of every single tree, like the species & dimensions.

Studying the Earth involves more time downloading files than analysing them. The European Space Agency holds 90 petabytes of planetary data, and they just fundamentally changed how anyone interacts with it. For years, working with Copernicus Sentinel data meant pulling massive files from SAFE archives. You had to store them locally, install mission-specific software, and navigate formats built before cloud computing existed. If you wanted to check a single scene for cloud cover, you couldn't just glance at it. You paid a massive upfront cost in time and hard drive space. That era is now over. ESA's transitioning Sentinel data to Zarr, a cloud-native format that treats data as an API instead of a static file. So ESA has now launched the EOPF Sentinel Zarr Explorer. Everything happens directly from cloud storage. You don't download a single megabyte of raw data to your machine. The workflow starts with discovery. The platform uses STAC, meaning you browse the massive catalogue using open community standards. You locate the exact coordinates and timeframes you need instantly. Then you look at the data. You can load a Sentinel-1 radar or Sentinel-2 optical scene right in your web browser. Analysis happens in the exact same environment through openEO Studio. You write Python code in your browser, define a processing graph, and execute it. A researcher can track algal blooms in the Venice Lagoon by computing a Normalised Difference Chlorophyll Index, and the result appears instantly as an interactive map. The barrier between a hypothesis and a working environmental analysis is now just a few lines of code. The developers actively avoided building a walled garden. They collaborated directly with the wider community to establish modular geospatial conventions. Because they built on open standards, desktop tools like QGIS and libraries like GDAL can read the exact same data without any proprietary plugins. Anyone with a web browser can now run analyses that used to require a dedicated computational lab.

@owenboswarva Good spot, thanks. Reminds me of the internal debate in summer 2009 on whether data.gov.uk should be a repository or a directory!

Just noticed data.gov.uk was renamed "Data directory" some time last month (though the <title> tag still says "Find open data")

How Far From London Can You Get By Train In 12 Hours Full article: brilliantmaps.com/london-train-1…

Notable Passwords from 2025 Credential Exposures The following passwords appeared most frequently across credentials indexed by Recorded Future in 2025. Their prevalence reflects the continued gap between password policies and actual user behavior — and the reason why credential monitoring cannot rely on password complexity alone as a proxy for risk.

Most companies do value your privacy! As a product they can sell.

Companies House has put out a statement confirming that, for five months, every company in the UK was vulnerable to the simple exploit we identified on Friday. It enabled anyone in the world to view and change their company details.

The most widely adopted computer language in history, COBOL is now causing a host of problems. It's also dangerously difficult to remove. wired.com/story/cobol-is…