Travel emissions per hour

How do you think of travel distances in your head? People often think in terms of the time taken to get there rather than the actual distance. One hour (each way) is not unusual for regular commute by car and for a weekend excursion you might think three hours was reasonable. By air you can get quite a long way in three hours. Here I compare GHG emissions for various travel modes by km and by hour. 

This post was inspired by some much prettier graphics from the Visual Capitalist showing emissions per km. I have come to think that metric is positively misleading. 

A New Year wish – autonomous cars.

Driverless vehicles are in the news again. (Driverless cars: Tech possible for UK motorways by 2026, transport secretary says). 

The usual justification given for needing driverless cars is safety because most car accidents are caused by human error. I disagree because it seems unlikely driverless cars will ever be demonstrably and significantly more safe than cars driven by humans. However, that does not mean we do not need autonomous vehicles. I think the main reasons are improving equality of access and reducing GHG emissions. That may surprise you as it is often predicted autonomous vehicles will increase car use and emissions. However, driverless cars enable cheaper and more convenient public transport, and also enable policies that can discourage car use. 

Are buses doomed?

Bus use has been in decline since well before Covid - in fact since deregulation in 1986 and more recently - since about 2012 - even in London. Cycling on the other hand is on the increase. Many schemes have tried to persuade people to switch from cars to buses with limited success. More home working is likely to increase commuting distances making buses less practical. More and more people are discovering the joy (and health benefits) of electric bikes. Purchase price is a barrier for some but you can now buy an E-bike on a subscription basis for less than the price of a bus season ticket. Is there still a role for buses? - probably, but less for commuting and not the same sort of buses. (This is an opinion - tell me if you agree.)

The main driver for shifting is to save time. Low cost has a lesser role.

Environmental awareness has an impact but the main driver of mode choice is to save time - even in the context of free bus fares. This diagram illustrates the mode shifts observed in the various studies described below assuming very low cost or free bus travel. Cheap fares do increase use of buses, but a lot of this is due new travel demand or shifting from walking. On-demand buses are preferred because they are quicker to use than normal buses and more accessible to people with mobility needs. On-demand buses can also be quicker than walking or cycling in some circumstances. E-scooters and E-cycle are often quicker than the bus and sometimes quicker than a car.

Squatting on the Grid?

A friend has been complaining to me about EV charging stations being unusable for months on end - Soham and Sutton EV chargers in particular were mentioned. What is the hold-up? It could be equipment problems, or perhaps delays in getting capacity on the grid to supply - or is it unscrupulous business practice? It seems complete madness to me but Euan McTurk talked about this in an interview with Robert Llewellyn on his Fully Charged Show (12th Nov, about 4 minutes in). He seems to think large companies may be grabbing up capacity on the grid for fast chargers and not bothering to commission or maintain the equipment - but while they are there no-one else can get on without paying huge sums for a grid upgrade. 

These charging points in Soham have been 'coming soon' since December 2020

Can this be true?

Decarbonising your home or car - which saves more?

The global carbon budget is extremely tight and we all need to do what we can, as soon as we can, to reduce the carbon emissions from our home and other life choices. I was recently asked – will I save more by replacing my gas boiler with a heat pump or replacing my car with an EV? I was surprised to find the results were fairly well balanced. Which saves most depends quite a lot on how much gas you use and how much fuel you typically use in your car. Here are some typical figures and example calculations. 

Also there is at least one other factor to consider: lock-in. If you buy a new gas boiler today you probably will not want to replace it for 15 years. On the other hand you might buy a second hand car and expect to replace it in 5 years. So the decision on a new gas boiler might have more impact over the lifetime of the boiler even if the annual carbon savings are higher for the car.

Climate change stories to be cheerful about

It has been a very difficult year for several reasons. But it was not all bad. To cheer us up over the holiday, here are my favourite good news stories from 2020 - including coal consumption down, renewables up, beavers for flood management, hope for the survival of coral, help in eating more plant proteins, and changes to our travel behaviour.

What next for the 2050 Pathways calculator?

The 2050 Pathways Calculator was a tool to help us understand how to reduce our CO2 emissions by policy changes and behaviour shifts across all sectors of the economy. It was originally developed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change for the UK and launched in 2010 – and then adapted for other countries and a global one. The UK one is out of date now but new versions are in active use by policy makers in governments, by children in schools, by NGOs and individuals. Last Thursday I spent a day at a conference about them, with delegates from all over the world – Mexico and the USA, Malaysia, and Thailand, India, Nigeria and many from Europe too. There is a new UK calculator in the pipeline and one for the EU - both are bigger, better and easier to use.

How, why and how far we travel: trends since 2002

The National Travel Survey for 2018 has been published - you may have noticed the reporting on aircraft travel. I have been looking at other aspects of our travel patterns: why we travel, how and how far. There are some interesting changes since 2002:

• Walking distance has hardly changed but we are cycling more
• All other modes of transport are down except for rail travel
• Business related travel, shopping and visiting friends all substantially down

The survey allows us to see more detail than this. For example, between 2005 and 2015 we walked less and less. In 2015 we took 15% less trips than in 2002 (though on average they were longer then now). Then we reversed those changes in the last three years. In contrast, for cycling we make no more trips now than before but we go 60% further each time and this trend has been fairly steady through the whole period.

If I was on the citizen's assembly for Cambridge transport ...

The Greater Cambridge Partnership did not get a clear message from the survey they ran earlier this year so now they are running a citizen's assembly. I thoroughly approve - if done well a citizen's assembly allows for a representative panel of ordinary people to hear evidence from a range of experts and consider a topic in depth. Transport is a complex problem because different people have different needs and it is hard to satisfy everyone. Using your own car is always going to be more convenient if you have one - as long as the traffic is actually flowing rather than in gridlock. I would want to see evidence for solutions that will bring benefits to most people at least some of the time.

I believe the invites have gone out and I have not got one so I won't be able to take part. However, if I were, this is what I would like to discuss while on the panel.

Hiring an electric bike

Last week I had my first experience of an electric bike, which I hired for travelling to and from a business meeting. It was not an unqualified success. I wonder if anyone has any thoughts around this. The problem was not the electric bit, it was the hiring bit.

The situation was that I needed to go to a business meeting in Hardwick. This is a little outside my comfort range for a bike ride. I generally reckon up to 4 miles OK but this was 6 miles and up a hill. (Yes I know other people consider that normal but I am not very fit. I don’t like to arrive for a business meeting with people I do not know well dripping with sweat.)

I know there is a bus but I wanted to try an electric bike, and also to test - is it sensible to hire an electric bike for those occasions when I want to go a little further afield? (One risk is that I would like the electric bike so much I would want to buy my own and use it all the time. This would not be good for my fitness).

Electric Blue - a new kind of sustainable investment?

Community energy schemes used to be the no-brainer sustainable investment, for people with moderate levels of spare cash that could be tied up for a few years. I personally have investments in one community solar farm, two wind turbines and two renewable energy suppliers. But this year I have added a new string to my sustainable portfolio that does not generate any energy at all: Electric Blue is in the business of installing and managing EV charging facilities in our city streets. This particular bond issue is for a project in Cambridge.

One third of microplastic in the oceans comes from washing clothes - really?

I recently heard a claim that a third of microplastic in the ocean comes from laundry, as synthetic clothes shed fibres in the wash. (This was on a radio program called New Year Solutions: clothes, on radio 4.) This struck me as unlikely so I checked and I believe I found the source: a report from the IUCN in 2017[1]. They do indeed estimate that a third of primary microplastics come from laundry – averaged over the world. However this varies hugely in different regions. I found estimates specific to the UK in a report by Eunomia for Friends of the Earth [2]. They found that only 8% of UK primary microplastic is from laundry. The bulk is actually from tyre wear from cars and lorries.

Where does air pollution in Cambridge come from?

Air pollution is a big problem for our health, especially very small particles known as PM2.5 (less than 2.5 micrometres in size) that penetrate deep into our lungs. PM2.5 is more closely linked to death rates than the other pollutants [1]. Diesel cars are blamed for a large proportion of air pollution in our cities. But are they the only problem or even the main problem? Traffic is the main source of nitrogen oxides (NOx) in our cities but for particulates the story is more complicated.

• Most NOx pollution in cities comes from traffic, mainly from burning petrol or diesel (especially diesel).
• NOx dissipates fairly quickly.
• Particulates (especially PM2.5) are partly related to traffic (including chemical reactions with NOx) but there are other sources.
• Particulates can waft around and travel for long distances. Most of the particulates pollution in Cambridge comes from outside the city.

What this means is that while reducing traffic in the city, especially diesel cars, will reduce NOx levels, they will have less of an impact on particulates. Tackling that requires action across the region, not just the city.

Does ordering stuff online increase carbon emissions?

How much of your shopping do you do online? Are you worried about the climate change impacts of online shopping? A recent study of parcel delivery in Central London [1] gives some insights into how this compares with shopping on the high street. London is a bit different from the rest of the country: I have extrapolated these results to Cambridge, with plausible assumptions.

Delivery in Central London is equivalent to driving about 1km in a car, for Cambridge it is nearer 3km. If the parcel is plastic wrapped the carbon emissions for packaging are small but for a medium sized box you need to add another 1.3 km. There are a number of ways in which these emissions could be reduced.

Being together without travelling

Christmas is a time for being together, with family or with friends. But it is not a good time to travel, with bad weather often disrupting trains and planes and the roads clogged with extra traffic even when there hasn’t been an accident bringing progress to a standstill. Fortunately, there are other ways to contact family without actually being there, and they have come a long way from my childhood when there was only a phone with a huge handset and only one of us could talk at a time. These days:

• You can put the phone to speaker mode, so groups can take part at either end.
• You can wear a head set, and talk while moving around (exercising, cooking…)
• You can use a phone with a camera (or a web cam) and have video as well as audio.
• You can use a tele-presence robot which gives you freedom to move and look around at the other end.

The future of Transport

Will we have self driving cars or not? 'Travel in Britain in 2035' describes three plausible(ish) scenarios and only in one of them do self driving cars play a major role. They do make a big difference though. I heard about this report at 'The Future of Transport' organised by Cambridge Network. There were 6 presentations in total of which three involved driverless vehicles: one on self driving cars, one on self driving delivery drones and one on self driving mass transit vehicles. (Actually this was mostly about tunnels; the self driving bit was only incidental; driverless transit vehicles are common enough to be uninteresting, for example the London DLR). The other three presentations were the one on the future scenarios report, one on local transport plans (from the council) and last, but perhaps most interesting, one on local transport from the consumer side: Andy Williams from Astra Zenica discussing how their staff will get to and from work.

What difference will electric cars make to our electricity demand

Our UK electricity generation capacity margin is getting thinner and thinner and I frequently hear of PV projects cancelled or curtailed for lack of grid capacity. Will electric cars, promoted as being kind to the planet, tip us over the edge? In this post I have done some simple calculation as to the impact on electricity demand as we progressively switch over to electric cars.

Sustainable travel for Cambridge - we have the technology, not so sure about the will

Cambridge has a massive problem with traffic congestion and it is going to get worse as more houses are built - another 20,000 more homes in the area are planned [1]. Persuading more people to use public transport instead of cars would relieve congestion and lower carbon emissions too. Currently our public transport is unreliable, slow and expensive but it does not have to be like this. Other cities have much better public transport than we do - with sensible routing, integrated electronic ticketing, real time updates, wide and/or multiple doors for fast boarding, real time updates on schedules. Above all we need to make sure buses have priority on the road so they can sail past the fuming car drivers! The new devolved administration for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough will have the powers to make this happen - but we have to ensure they are used.

Bicycles, buses and taxis on a busy street in Cambridge

If we had infrastructure like the Dutch, how many of us would be cycling?

I have been having fun with the PCT (Propensity to Cycle Tool) which estimates how many commuters would cycle, based on a different scenarios. Cambridge has a high proportion of cyclists already but there is still scope for improvement.

Looking at Cambridgeshire as a whole, as of the 2011 census 9.7% of commuters cycle but if we behaved more like the Dutch it would be 23.7%. You can use the map view to drill down into specific routes. In the snapshot below I have activated the popup on a section of the Madingley Road. In the Go Dutch scenario we could have 80% more cyclists.

Screenshot of the PCT showing potential for increased cycling on the Madingley Road in the Go Dutch scenario

Our personal energy use matters

A friend recently complained to me that it was pointless trying to save energy at home because our domestic energy use is a tiny proportion of the overall impact from business and industry - whatever we could do personally would not make any difference. This post refutes her statement, at least for the UK. Depending on how you count things, between 25% and 33% of greenhouse gas emissions are due to our activities at home and for personal travel.

The first figure is based on statistics recently released by DEFRA on greenhouse gas emissions by final consumption - this includes emissions due to imported goods and excludes emissions due to imports. The second figure is based on emissions generated within the UK. The chart below shows my best estimates for emissions on personal consumption in 2014. It shows a fairly even split between heating, electricity use, car travel and air travel. Together these add up to 3.7 t COe.