Un-required reading?

LAST WEEK, the Department for Transport released a batch of thirty research reports in a single day. They cover a range of elements, a significant number addressing inputs and processes used in Modelling and Appraisal, plus some modal-specific topics and scheme trial evaluations. Some are recently dated, but others were obviously delivered to the DfT over a period going back well over a year.

This is the second such batch of reports to be issued in bulk within the past couple of months. LTT magazine covered the previous ones in the issue of LTT900 (2nd October 2024), and in this issue, we devote two pages to the latest ones.

The Transport Appraisal and Strategic Modelling (TASM) research reports include research and reviews looking at the Economic impacts of transport investment; the transformational impact transport investment could have on local economic development and devolution in the UK; agglomeration effects; whether well-being measures can be used to assess the impact of transport projects; the Impacts of COVID-19 on transport modelling and appraisal; multi-modal modelling; and Land Use and Transport Modelling.

Evaluation reports include findings on the implementation and impact of the national e-cycles programme; and of a pilot scheme to increase the uptake and use of e-cycles in Cornwall; evidence from initiatives that aim to increase e-cycling and e-cargo use; and the E-cargo bike grant fund national and local scheme evaluations. The previous batch included some significant appraisals of the impacts of new funding approaches for local transport.

The DfT’s statement of what these reports are all for is “to provide details of research that has been carried out to inform transport decision making.” This is, in turn, “to ensure that transport systems are effective, transport decisions and policies made by government and the transport sector, are based on economic and statistical, analysis, appraisal, evaluation, modelling, and research in order to provide the best evidence base for planning policies and schemes, mathematical models, guidelines and software used by DfT to analyse complex transport patterns.”

There has been no explanation as to why these reports have all been issued together, or why they were not issued previously individually as they were received. Perhaps they have been waiting for someone to get round to reading them - and they have just had a very busy weekend doing so. It is not even clear if they had formally been ‘released’ or ‘published’ prior to their announcement by the DfT communications machine, or if their release now is tantamount to publication. Certainly cover dates — which normally align with publication in the traditional world of publishing — stretch over a considerable period.

Aside from the matter of their release, other interesting issues are raised by their appearance now. Suspicious minds might imagine that matters in all or some of the reports are sensitive, or even controversial for Government, or that the best way to hide something is in a crowd.

But more generally, the tranche of material prompts thoughts about both the commissioning of such studies, their quality and value, their deployment and dissemination within the Department, and their benefit to the expert transport community beyond it.

Thirty years ago and more, pre-internet and pre digital, such reports were seen as a fundamental feed of knowledge into policy-making and practice, and if not voraciously devoured across the transport sector, were keenly read and noted amongst anyone with a particular professional interest and knowledge in the subject matter. Those were the days when printed matter was king and documents of this kind earned a place on office shelves and in university libraries, or were filed by individuals personally in their offices or home studies as ‘valuable reference material’.

If you had a subject agenda, you would look through these kinds of reports to see what they meant for your cause or concern.

Then there is the matter of how such material is put to best effect, and by whom.

In the modern digital world their assumed existence, somewhere in cyberspace, is taken for granted, but the absence of detailed archiving and well signposted access are arguably making awareness and use of them considerably less easy compared with their earlier predecessors.

The specification of the publications is now most likely to be as digital only documents, with an apparent growing resistance — including within the DfT — for them to be even produced as pdf file formats, which at least provide a download and print to read option.

One recognisable and memorable characteristic of traditional reports and studies has often been their distinctive cover — always a consideration in publishing a print product. Few will remember web-based written material for its distinctive look or typography. Web-documents don’t have a titled spine, and rarely a well-presented contents page, references and index. They do have the benefit of hyperlinks rather than footnotes, but that could be an additional facility rather than a replacement for having a complete reading list associated with a report in one place.

It has always been a worry that significant knowledge from the past can be ‘lost’, including the fundamental building blocks from which current assumptions and practice are based. In this digitally-dependent age we have disappearance of a different kind - but it is still an issue, for both in-house systems and the cloud, with an overload of material poorly sorted for both significance and quality.

So, are studies of the kind just published in bulk by the Department for Transport the last of a line in activity and information? If few people know about them, are able to find them on a suitable shelf, or have them in printed out form, will they be much read? And even amongst the commissioning teams at the DfT, does anybody have the job — or the time — to properly read and absorb their content, consider its relevance to decison-making, and apply any messages to policy development?

Perhaps, at least, these reports — and the subjects they are addressing - offer a good guide to understanding the mindset of the DfT and what these reports can tell us about its priorities?

Might we assume hopefully that when they were each commissioned, there was a sound and logical purpose for spending the resource to have them produced? But can we also assume, that the same enthusiasm and custody will be applied, when delivered, to considering their content and putting it to good use?

Perhaps some simple principles should be applied consistently to the publication of all such reports to ensure their purpose and deployment are properly understood. This might mean they should clearly state at the beginning, a brief answer to the following two questions:

1) Why this report has been commissioned
2) Who and how might be expected to benefit from this report’s findings

An additional requirement might be that there should be a well-publicised open professional round table discussion of each of them with the authors present. After all, public money has paid for them.

In times past, at least an investigative journalist, a PhD student or a librarian, would surely be looking through all these reports to see what they contain and any important revelations, conclusions and implications. Or at least classifying them for others to discover.

But sadly, that’s not likely to be what’s happening now.

There’s not the interest, there’s not the human resource with the time and energy — or the mindset — to consume these deep dive and detailed pieces of work as there would have been up to a few years ago.

Perhaps, in this era of obsession with AI, there will be another — non-human — brain that can play a role in extracting benefit by rapidly reading the fruits of all this endeavour. If not, the same AI that has maybe itself written them. In fact, will not AI know everything that needs to be known anyway already, by harnessing its own constant tide of information that it is being fed, or is finding by crawling all over the web. The robots will soon be very well informed indeed. But will we?

Peter Stonham is the Editorial Director of TAPAS Network

This article was first published in LTT magazine, LTT903, 13 November 2024.