The Challenge
In 2009, about a third of our overall current consumption of energy is used on transportation that we use for personal mobility and distribution of goods and services. With around 95% of transport fuelled by oil, our systems are set to become increasingly vulnerable to the changes that the global peaking of oil production brings.
The climate change implications of our travel choices are clear. In the UK car use alone accounts for 13% of our total CO2 emissions and (even ignoring aviation) the forecast around the world is for transport emissions to continue increasing. This contrasts with the emerging scientific view that targets for safe levels of greenhouse gases should be negative – i.e. we need not only to become carbon neutral, but also to remove some of the current concentrations of those gases from the atmosphere. How should we respond? Strangely, the default assumption appears to be that our reaction must somehow enable us to keep on travelling as far, and as fast, as we want – an approach that could turn a (soluble) problem into an (insoluble) predicament.
Dramatically cutting emissions while travelling further and faster demands a technological fix, but many technical “solutions” lead straight to new, worse problems. General embrace of agro-fuels as the substitute for oil based fuels has fallen as it became understood how they compete with food production or, via the rush to plan palm oil, cause rainforest destruction. Similarly visions of fleets of “clean” electric or hydrogen or hydrogen fuel cell powered cars raise a range of questions such as just how much extra energy will be needed to construct the necessary new infrastructure. A truly clean car would require all stages of its life to have been powered by renewable energy from the mining of raw materials, through its manufacture, shipping, sale and disposal, as well as for each and every electric charge used to power it.
Around the world, on average people make about 1000 trips (e.g. from home to work – that’s one trip) per person per year. Travel behaviour research from across Europe, the United States and Australia consistently shows that 10% of people’s trips are shorter than 1km, 30% are shorter than 3km and 50% are shorter than 5km. This large number of small trips means that, even before relocalisation really starts to take hold, we have the potential to immediately intervene to support more cycling and walking trips – much more quickly than for any technological development and at a fraction of the cost.
Furthermore, if we can get people out of their cars and onto their feet or bikes, we get a long list of additional benefits. Increased health is just one of these – reduced traffic means cleaner, safer streets, more freedom for young people to roam and communities no longer divided by roads. This plan is founded on moving away from our current unsustainable patterns of mobility towards enabling more people to walk, cycle and use public transport for all of their regular journeys, applying three basic guidelines:
- Make it quicker, safer and more attractive to walk, cycle or use public transport than to use the car
- Take road space away from cars
- Spend more on walking, cycling and public transport infrastructure and promotion; you get what you pay for.
Freight transport has increased since 1980 by 44% to 2 billion tonne kilometres, with 60% of this now travelling by road, 21% by water, 9% by rail and virtually all the rest by pipeline. The opening of the M6 Preston Bypass in 1958 and the first section of the M1 in 1959 marked the beginning of the motorway era, which changed dramatically the terms of competition between rail and road for goods traffic. In 2007 as part of its White Paper ‘Delivering a Sustainable Railway,’ the Government has set aside £200M of investment for the Strategic Freight Network.
The social implications of our transport system are huge. “Injustice is experienced by millions of people in the UK who do not have a car, or struggle to afford one in the ‘must-have-car’ society which we have created. These injustices include difficulties accessing work and other opportunities; enforced indebtedness; reduced opportunity to lead an active healthy life; and ironically, proportionately greater exposure than average to pollution, road danger and noise caused by those who do have a car”
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