Our Transportation-Focused Substack Newsletter

It is called "Ride On" and we invite you to subscribe to it if you are interested in these kinds of articles.

Photo Source: My father, Ray Atkinson, who took this picture in Acton, Ontario back in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Some of my fondest memories as a child were walking down these train tracks with him.

I do not write much on transportation in this newsletter because I have another one which I write with my wife and partner in everything, Michaelle Tuz-Atkinson called Ride On: The Drive for Better Transportation Systems. We have been neglecting that one over the last year or so, but we intend to get back to it regularly again, starting tomorrow. Therefore, if you are interested in reading these types of articles, we invite you to subscribe to it, too.

What follows provides my personal motivations for creating this newsletter.

I fondly remember getting my first driver’s license when I was a teen, followed by my first car: a brown 1986 Mercury Marquis. This car was the absolute embodiment of freedom to me, as I no longer had to ride the bus to and from school every day: I could drive myself at my leisure while blasting Mötley Crüe through the car’s tape deck!

And on Friday nights when I went on my weekly mission to rent videos and buy Coke and munchies, I could quickly drive to my destinations while listening to Nirvana’s new single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio. It felt so amazing to be able to blast music without my father complaining it was too loud!

A couple years later when that car bit the dust, but before I could afford another one, I rode the train to and from Ottawa where I was a university undergrad studying Economics. I felt so relaxed staring out the window while the train clickity-clacked down the tracks and the theme to Littlest Hobo ran through my head, and I imagined what was out there beyond the fields. There was a whole world out there to discover, and my imagination ran wild with the possibilities!

When I then graduated with my Master’s degree and got a job at the Canadian Competition Bureau, I started studying airline markets for a case in which Air Canada was accused of predation against two of its young competitors: CanJet and WestJet. It was for this case that I traveled on an airplane for the first time: a turbo-prop from Ottawa to Toronto — certainly not the smoothest ride for a first-timer, and also not a long trip to any kind of exotic destination, but it was still exciting to imagine where a big metal bird could take someone.*

* This was also before 2001, so traveling by air was a lot less stressful, but I digress.

Over the years since then, when we moved to Edmonton and then to Calgary, the importance of well-functioning transportation markets has been front-and-centre in our minds, not only professionally but also personally. We now both travel strictly on public transportation for many reasons, including financial and environmental; doing so has highlighted once again the importance of well-functioning transportation markets to personal freedoms.

For example, if one does not have access to an automobile for whatever reason, then they are effectively held captive to how frequently bus routes operate, how well connections are timed, how accessible they are to persons with disabilities, or whether a bus will show up late (or not at all) due to weather or mechanical issues. Recent stories such as this one in The Sprawl demonstrate that when a person can lose their job due to problems with public transit, they are motivated to leave much earlier than otherwise necessary for their bus/train to work, so their personal and economic freedoms are diminished.

All of this is to demonstrate transportation markets are vital to economies, cultures and their citizens. Well-organized transportation systems help connect us all with each other as well as with the goods and services we need to live, work and play. When supply chains are effected by a pandemic, grocery prices can rise significantly as supplies of groceries on store shelves can also be significantly reduced. Even in the absence of a pandemic, people in remote communities — such as in northern Canada — have problems accessing quality food in sufficient quantities due to sub-par transportation systems for those supplies.

It is therefore our mission to conduct research into different transportation systems of all kinds, whether by geography (i.e., local, regional, national, international), mode of travel (e..g, car, bus, train, airplane, boat), what is being transported (e.g., people vs. cargo), or level of government involvement (i.e., public, private, or mixed). We conduct case studies and comparative analyses to understand what creates an optimal transit system under various conditions, both theoretically and practically, with due consideration for political factors that come into play.

Thank you for reading this post, and we hope you subscribe to our Ride On newsletter. We also invite you to suggest transport-related topics which interest you.