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Interesting discussion of a contentious issue (although a little light on evidence!!) Tallinn, known for its digital government and successful tech startups, is often referred to as Europe's innovation capital. Now celebrating five years of free public transport for all citizens, the government is planning to make Estonia the first free public transport nation. Allan Alaküla, Head of Tallinn European Union Office, shares some valuable insights for other cities.

Australia should revamp how it selects major transport projects, so that governments can better know which new roads and railways are worth building and avoid squandering billions of dollars of public money on the wrong projects. The 'discount rate' Australian governments have applied to assess the value of proposed projects has been stuck at 7 per cent since at least 1989, even though the price of money has fallen from about 8 per cent to 1 per cent since then.

It is vital that public policy be driven by rigorous research. In the last decade key policy changes have had profound impacts on nightlife in Sydney's inner city and suburbs. The most significant and controversial of these has been the 2014 "lockout laws".

For AT2 we're asking you to analyse one of the datasets https://tinyurl.com/AEIDatasets . This piece provides some nice examples of how people are using data to do deep exploration of a topic (bike sharing) and its impact for particular stakeholders. If you were doing something on road safety/bikes, then these kinds of resources are good examples of other research you could draw on to support your own analysis of the data and to tell your data story.

When Uber and Lyft first entered the market, offering a ride-hailing service that would come to include tens of thousands of amateur drivers, most major American cities had been tightly controlling the competition. New York City allowed exactly 13,637 licenses for taxicabs. Chicago permitted 6,904, Boston 1,825 and Philadelphia 1,600. These numbers weren't entirely arbitrary. Cities had spent decades trying to set numbers that would keep drivers and passengers satisfied and streets safe. But the exercise was always a fraught one. And New York City now faces an even more complex version of it, after the passage of legislation this week that will temporarily cap services like Uber and Lyft. The city plans to halt new licenses for a year while it studies the impact of ride-hailing and establishes new rules for driver pay. In doing so, it renews an old question: What's the right number of vehicles anyway? The answer isn't easy because it depends largely on which problem officials are trying to solve. Do they want to minimize wait times for passengers or maximize wages for drivers? Do they want the best experience for individual users, or the best outcome for the city - including for residents who use city streets but never ride taxis or Uber at all?

There's a form of casual violence that kills 1.25 million people a year (3 times more than malaria) and injures up to 50ODI roads cover million more. 90% of the deaths are of poor people (usually men) in poor countries. No guns are involved and there's lots of things governments can do to fix it. But you'll hardly ever read about it in the development literature, although road safety did make it into the Sustainable Development Goals (as did everything else, it has to be said) - targets 3.6 and 11.2 for SDG geeks. So hats off to ODI (again) for not only painstakingly building the case for taking action on a major cause of death and misery in poor countries (see below), but also exploring the politics and institutions that so far have prevented governments from taking action.