10: Movin’ on up: Transport for a net zero future

Transport makes up nearly 40% of the average UK household's carbon footprint (with wide variation between different sections of society). While other sectors have made progress on cutting carbon, the dial has barely moved on transport emissions. So is the elephant in the room actually an SUV? Joining the team this time are Professor Iain Docherty, transport policy expert at the University of Stirling, Dr Debbie Hopkins, Associate Professor in sustainable urban development at the University of Oxford, and Leo Murray, director of innovation at climate change charity Possible.

Episode transcript

[Music flourish]

Matt:  Hello, I’m Dr Matt Hannon.

Rebecca:  Hi, and I’m Dr Rebecca Ford and welcome to Local Zero.

[Sounds of traffic]

Matt:  So how we get around has an enormous impact on our health, communities and climate ambitions. Whether we jump in the car, dust off the bike or hop on the train, our transport choices and infrastructure are critical to the net zero transition. So today, we’re talking all things transport.

Rebecca:  This really is one of the biggest and most critical parts of the net zero puzzle. How do we encourage people and policymakers alike to support sustainable transport? What can be done at the local level to stimulate that change and how can we ensure that future transport systems are meeting the needs of everyone in society? These are just some of the big questions we’ll be addressing in this episode.

Matt:  So our guests today are Professor Iain Docherty, an expert in transport policy at the University of Stirling and we also have Dr Debbie Hopkins, an Associate Professor in sustainable urban development at the University of Oxford.

Debbie:  We’re not seeing any real behavioural shifts or policy shifts in any large ways, so it’s proving to be a very stubborn sector.

Iain:  It’s head-scratching time. We actually have to do something which is pretty bold in terms of a policy intervention and most people don’t like being told what to do.

Rebecca:  We’ll also hear from Leo Murray, Director of Innovation at climate change charity Possible about some of the most exciting developments in local transport action.

Leo:  Low Traffic Neighbours are an incredibly effective intervention at getting people to shift from driving cars in cities to walking and cycling. You just see very large increases in people walking and cycling.

[Music flourish]

Matt:  You’re listening to Local Zero and you can find us on social media with the hashtag #LocalZero and tweet us @EnergyREV_UK with any questions or comments you may have.

[‘Please mind the gap when alighting from this train.’]

Matt:  Okay, as ever, we’ve got our trustee producer at hand, Fraser Stewart. Fraser, how are you getting on?

Fraser:  I am getting on very, very well, Matt, thank you. How is everyone else doing?

Matt:  Yeah, I’m doing alright, yeah. I’m sitting here absolutely bathed in sunshine. I’d forgotten what the warm sensation was [laughter]. Yes, I’m glad it’s back and glad spring is here. Becky, how are you faring?

Rebecca:  Yeah, very well thanks, Matt, and like you, just absolutely loving the sunshine. It’s turned me into the most positive person in this last week [laughter]. Maybe that will shine through today whilst we’re talking.

Matt:  Absolutely and I guess, in the context of today’s episode, we’re all doing this online. In fact, this is our tenth episode and we need some kind of sound effect. I’m sure we’ll ask Dave to add in a little popper or something in the background.

[Sound of party popper]

That’s ten episodes online and working from home and so given the episode is on transport, it feels pretty relevant to how we’re living and working today.

Fraser:  It’s disappointing that we can’t record this one out in the park in the sunshine like you do at school. You could go and take your class outside [laughter].

Rebecca:  Absolutely.

Matt:  Not today. Not for a few weeks yet, Fraser. It’s almost a year today as well and in fact, I think it is longer than a year today that we’ve all been working from home.

Rebecca:  I’ve almost forgotten what transport is like...

Matt:  What is transport?

Rebecca:  ...aside from when I’m looking after my kids. We live very close to the train station and so sometimes, just to beat the boredom of the house, I take my kids out for a walk. We walk down Bin Lane Alley and weave our way around to the train station to wave to the drivers [laughter].

Matt:  That’s an inviting walk [laughter].

Rebecca:  I know [laughter].

Fraser:  Is that the proper name of the street, Becky? Is it called Bin Lane Alley? [Laughter]

Rebecca:  It’s actually lovely. The kids often pick me flowers from Bin Lane Alley. I get some beautiful wildflowers from them [laughter].

Matt:  I didn’t equate Bin Lane Alley with bouquets of flowers [laughter].

Rebecca:  In the summer, they were... I probably shouldn’t say this in case any of my neighbours are listening but they were picking fruit from the trees that sort of hang over into the alley behind people’s homes. No, absolutely lovely but that’s about as close as I’ve come to taking any form of transport in the last year which has been waving at the train drivers to entertain my children.

Matt:  I haven’t been on a train since August I think, so that’s six months and I would be on the train three or four times a week before that. There’s been a dramatic change in how we’re all living and planes... god, I don’t even know what that feels like anymore. I don’t know what the cramped, sweaty sensation of being stuck in a metal can 30,000 ft in the sky is like anymore. So today, I guess, we’re talking about transport because it is an extremely dirty sector, both in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. I’m going to put you both on the spot again, even though you haven’t seen all the reams of yellow text in the production document.

Rebecca:  I was actually wanting to complain about this because there isn’t any. I’ve come to rely on it.

Matt:  They’re in a private dossier, that’s why [laughter].

Fraser:  Oh my god [laughter]. That’s worse. That’s worse [laughter].

Matt:  You can’t even see the answers now [laughter]. So surface transport is basically everything apart from what’s in the sky. What proportion of our national emissions do we think that is?

Rebecca:  From all forms of surface transport, whether that’s people travelling for leisure or work and are we also including things like freight transport in there?

Matt:  I’ll tell you what, let’s simplify this. Let’s talk about it by household. What share of our household footprint is given over to surface transport? This is the average household.

Rebecca:  I want to say a third, although maybe, and this is where it gets difficult, I am sort of thinking, ‘Has that gone up in recent years as our power sector has...?’

Matt:  We’ll come on to that. Yeah, hold your horses. We’ll come on to that one. A third? Fraser, what do you reckon?

Fraser:  Instinctively, I was along the same lines. I’m going to jump on Becky’s coattails here.

Matt:  You’re both pretty much there. It’s about 27%. If I was to ask you what proportion of aviation...?

Rebecca:  Oh, well, not much in the last year.

Matt:  This was before Covid.

Rebecca:  Maybe a sixth or a fifth?

Matt:  What? Somewhere around 15-20%?

Rebecca:  Yeah.

Matt:  Fraser?

Fraser:  What proportion of aviation accounts for total emissions?

Matt:  This is of households, so as flying as a  household domestically or internationally. What do we think for accounts for in our household footprint?

Fraser:  On average? I wouldn’t say too much. Maybe 14-15%.

Matt:  Well, it’s about 12%. So actually, it’s interesting because you’ve both gone for higher on both of those but together, getting around accounts for 39% or nearly 40% of our household emissions.

Fraser:  That varies from household to household though, right?

Matt:  Yeah, and that’s where we’re getting into discussions around just transition and who racks up those air miles but Becky asked the question before about how these emissions have changed. So if we just keep on surface transport, the answer is they’ve barely changed over the last decade. Surface transport emissions have fallen by just 3% in the last ten years.

Rebecca:  Wow!

Matt:  Yeah, there are some things reducing our emissions and some things increasing our emissions from surface transport. What do you think is pushing our surface transport emissions up?

Rebecca:  Bigger cars, SUVs.

Fraser:  People buying cars.

Matt:  Yes, absolutely. So this is a really big problem.

Fraser:  They love it.

Matt:  Yeah, the SUVs and that kind of pattern have really cancelled out a lot of the gains.

Rebecca:  Yeah, so on the one hand, we’ve got cars becoming increasingly efficient. We have, in recent years, started to see a push toward electric vehicles which will have minimised emissions but it’s no good your vehicle being more efficient if it’s just bigger and using more in total.

Matt:  No, and one of the big factors is not just being more efficient but using it more or less. We can see, in terms of what they call a modal share or which mode of transport you use, 60% of trips were covered by cars. Over three-quarters of the distance was covered by cars. The really shocking thing is that 25% of those journeys were under two miles.

Rebecca:  Wow!

Fraser:  Wow!

Matt:  So these are some of the things we’re hoping to cover off today. A question to you both: what do you think are some of the big solutions then for net zero? How do we get there in terms of transport?

Fraser:  Arrest people who have cars [laughter] and put them all in prison.

Matt:  That’s not a popular policy that, Fraser [laughter].

Rebecca:  I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot because I am actually guilty of that sub-two mile journey or short journey. It might not be sub-two miles when I take my kids to nursery. I’ve thought about this quite a lot but I am not a confident enough cyclist to be willing to cycle on a road that has a ridiculous number of potholes in it, especially just coming out of the winter, alongside quite big cars and dragging my kids behind me in a trailer. For me, it just poses too much of a risk. I have also lived in cities that are fairly cycling-friendly. I lived in Oxford for quite a number of years and I would still feel too scared to cycle around Oxford. So for me, it’s about thinking much more carefully about urban planning and making sure that people have the infrastructure to feel like they can make those choices and to feel like they can get on a bike or walk and it will be safe and it will be a nice mode of transport for them. That’s a massive part of the puzzle that I just feel is missing. I think far too often, we’re looking for people to make changes and there are reasons that might have nothing to do with their personal beliefs or values as to why they’re travelling in ways that might be unsustainable or, indeed, go against what they want to do.

Matt:  Yeah, infrastructure is a massive thing for cycling. You’ll often hear suggestions that there just simply isn’t the will or the demand for cycling and hence, we can’t make massive changes to the infrastructure that would impact upon our resident car drivers. Actually, in Covid, the thing that rebounded, against all expectations and that kind of went through the roof as it were, was cycling. The numbers of people cycling last summer were double the normal number against the previous year.

Rebecca:  The shops sold out of bikes, didn’t they? All my local shops... you couldn’t buy a bike.

Matt:  You couldn’t get an inner tube for love nor money [laughter] and I should know. There were some things that rebounded quickly and, of course, we’ve had multiple lockdowns but have a guess at some of the modes of transport that rebounded quickly and some of them which are still really flagging?

Rebecca:  Well, I’ll put my money on the fact that buses are flagging.

Matt:  Oh yeah, big time. For bus, train and tube, it’s somewhere between 20-40% of levels pre-pandemic. Cars are recovering strongly. We’re at the 60-70% mark. The other thing that is really doing very well is freight, both for heavy goods and vans. I look outside the window and it’s just a sea of Amazon drivers. Anyway, today, we’re hoping to try and square this all off in terms of the national and international challenge around transport and try and add a bit of a local flavour to it. Before we move on, what are your thoughts about how we can make a difference locally?

Rebecca:  I think we can make a big difference by looking at what needs to change to enable a fairer and more sustainable transport future. Just looking at the UK, the number of local authorities that have declared climate emergencies and are now developing their strategies and plans and perhaps rethinking what transport strategy looks like in all of that, I think there is a huge opportunity to be looking at how these can be developed in more sustainable and possibly even car-free ways but also thinking more about how transport can meet the needs of everyone in society. I think we also need to be very clear that if the changes that we’re seeing are resulting in negative impacts on public transport whilst we’re seeing a rise in car journeys, we also have to recognise that not everybody has equal access to a car. That’s not just sociodemographics. That’s also within a household and cars tend to be male-dominated. They tend to be used by different sorts of demographics than, say, often people who have caring responsibilities that might be trip chaining, dropping the kids off, going on to work and doing a bit of shopping.

Matt:  It’s deeply embedded with social practices and economic practices. Before we hear from our guests, Fraser, a final word?

Fraser:  I’m glad you raised that point, Becky. I think that’s a really important thing and that when we talk about transport, we’re not just talking about journeys, trips, wheels, feet and wings. You’re talking about a hugely complex socio-economic policy system as well where you have to consider not just reducing emissions but also, I would argue, that we agree now that we need to do something formative on transport. We need to reimagine transport and I think why not try and use that opportunity to right some of these wrongs and right some of those injustices that are inherent in our transport system as it is today.

Matt:  Yeah, and ban all the cars, Fraser.

Fraser:  Ban all the cars. Arrest all the drivers.

Matt:  [Laughter].

Fraser:  Cyclists are quite annoying as well. I consider myself in that [laughter]. I don’t know what to do about them.

Matt:  Well, at least you’ve got a bit of self-awareness [laughter].

Rebecca:  Oh dear [laughter]. So get along and join our discussion on social media. Find us @EnergyREV_UK. Use our hashtag #LocalZero. Ping us any questions or things you’d like us to address or look at in future episodes and we’ll do our best to get back to you.

Matt:  Without further ado, we’re going to hear from our experts on the issues of transport, net zero and local solutions.

[Music flourish]

Iain:  I’m Iain Docherty. I have been a transport researcher for the last 20+ years now and I’m at the University of Stirling where I’m a Professor of Public Policy and Governance and the Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Debbie:  My name is Debbie Hopkins. I’m an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford and I work between the Sustainable Urban Development Programme and the School of Geography and the Environment.

Matt:  Welcome, Iain and Debbie, to Local Zero. Many thanks for coming along today. It’s really great for us to be able to focus in on transport as a real key issue for net zero and to explore a bit more about the local solutions. For our listeners, I just wanted to really uncover the scale of the net zero decarbonisation challenge for transport. How big is it and what are the biggest challenges please?

Iain:  Yeah, thanks, Matt, and thanks for the invitation to come on. I suppose there are two things really which are most important in my mind. One of them is the scale of the emissions profile of the transport sector. It depends how you count it and whether you include international travel, aviation and shipping, for example, but it’s something like 35-40% of all our emissions, so it’s a big sector. It’s also stubbornly refusing to decarbonise or to have its overall emissions profile fall. It’s probably the only major sector that’s still getting worse in the economy now and so that’s a big deal. The second thing is that part of the reason behind that is that people really don’t want to change how they travel around and what they do. Despite some of the efforts that there have been to try and get people to change their travel behaviours, and we’ve seen some of those during the pandemic, there’s lots of resistance to it. Just this morning on the news, you’ll probably have seen the latest backlash to the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in London. Whenever governments or public authorities try to intervene to make this better, there’s an awful lot of opposition to it.

Debbie:  Yeah, I absolutely agree and it seems to happen on a national scale. We can see it in many different countries as well. It’s not just happening here in the UK and it’s certainly not just a global issue but it really does go across geographical scales. We know that road-based transport is around 72% of all transport-related emissions. We know that cars are very, very important. In the UK, we’ve seen a stabilisation of emissions and a slight decline in the latest figures. That’s on the back of increasing car use and increasing VKT (Vehicle Kilometres Travelled). We’re still seeing people wanting to be in cars and being in cars. We’re seeing small gains or stabilisation because of vehicle efficiency but we’re not seeing any real behavioural shifts or policy shifts in any large ways. Yeah, it’s proving to be a very stubborn sector compared to other sectors which are declining their emissions or decreasing their emissions far easier.

Matt:  Brilliant and just on the acronym VKT, just for the listeners?

Debbie:  Yeah, that’s Vehicle Kilometres Travelled.

Matt:  Brilliant. Thanks.

Rebecca:  You’ve both referred to this sector as stubborn and for me, that’s almost like giving the sector a persona but, of course, the sector doesn’t have a persona. It’s due to the actions of the many, many different people that make that up. Why is this so hard? Why are we not seeing action? Is it just that we’re all championing Jeremy Clarkson and we want to stay in our big, gas-guzzling cars or is there something else that’s going on here that is just stopping progress?

Iain:  There’s a whole bunch of answers to that, Becky, and some of them are short-term ones and some of them are long-term, so let’s take the historical perspective first. It’s probably more or less true that we spend the same time every day travelling around (non-pandemic times obviously) as we did more than 100 years ago and we do the same things. We still go to work, or we go to education, or we go to healthcare, or we go to visit other people and have our leisure activities. What we do is we travel further to get to them because that century’s investment in transport has made it possible for us to travel further to do the same things. We’ve got this long-run economic history that’s going on and by the same token, we only rebuild about 1% of the environment every year. So if you’ve got an imperative like climate change and decarbonisation that you want to do something about quickly, you kind of look around and go, ‘Even if we reverse what we’re doing, our normal incremental change rate is about 1% per annum.’ So it’s head-scratching time. We actually have to do something which is pretty bold in terms of a policy intervention and most people don’t like bold policies. They don’t like being told what to do.

Debbie:  I mean, to be honest, there are so many things that are part of this, like our identities and how we behave as people but I think it’s really important that we don’t look at this as ‘people want to drive to the shops’ because actually, a lot of the out-of-town shops have now been built in places that people physically can’t walk to. They actually can’t get there by bike. If I think of Oxford and where the big supermarkets are, they are really hard to access if you don’t have a car. They don’t have bus links. They don’t have all of these things. With the school issue, people are performing a certain character. Being a good parent is choosing the best school for your child often and some of the conversations I’ve had with parents in work around transport to school have been exactly that, like ‘I feel like I need to.’ So there is this broader system of issues that I think come together in how people make these kinds of decisions.

Iain:  To me, this is one of the really interesting impacts of the pandemic because we’ve had to do that and everybody has kind of signed up to the public health imperative, so we’ve changed what we’re doing. It’s a really open question I think now about whether we’ll all decide to do the same to try and meet the challenges of the climate emergency in the same way.

Rebecca:  Just unpicking some of that, is a big part of this that it comes down to how we live our lives and if we live in the city, how are cities are structured? Is urban development a massive part of this and are we relying on the way in which our cities or towns are developed to effectively govern the way we travel?

Iain:  Yes, in one word. I mean a slightly longer answer to that question would be that we’ve got hooked on a particular kind of consumption society which is built around the car and build around this idea that we want more choice and we need to exercise that over greater distances. You look at how everyone’s everyday lives have changed over the last few decades and some of the obvious examples are, again pre-pandemic, where we shop with the rise of the supermarket as opposed to the corner shop. Most people drive to them and they don’t walk to them. There’s other stuff that happens in society. In the 1980s and ever since we had parental choice in the state school sector, it’s led to this massive explosion of this thing called the ‘school run’ which is about a quarter of traffic and a third of all congestion on normal school days. I’ve got my son’s primary school that I can see out the window from the room that I’m in and that’s just, literally and metaphorically, horrible every day when you see people that could quite easily walk or cycle to that school but choose not to. You then, of course, get into these vicious cycles where people think it’s not safe to do that, so they better get in their car and run their kids to school as well. There are these kinds of incremental and long-run trends that we’ve built up over not just years but over decades. People like the lifestyle that they’re able to afford and they’re able to consume. Most households spend something like 15% of household income on transport. For a lot of people, that’s their shiny car in the driveway and once they’ve bought it, they want to use it.

[Music flourish]

Fraser:  We’ll get back to the chat with Iain and Debbie shortly but what tried and tested methods are there to encourage people in our communities to choose more sustainable modes of transport? It can feel big, amorphous and difficult but if you break it down and localise it, practical solutions present themselves. I’ve been chatting with Leo Murray, Head of Innovation at climate change and transport campaigners Possible.

Leo:  The obvious thing for communities to do is to work to change the built environment where they live so that it is more conducive to more sustainable forms of transport. Support cycle lanes. Most people do support cycle lanes but in a very shallow way. That is if you survey people, most people will say, ‘Yeah, I support cycle lanes.’ The problem is that when an actual cycle lane is proposed in a specific place, what happens is the minority of people who hate cycle lanes and don’t want them to be built are mobilised by the threat of a cycle lane and will throw everything they’ve got at stopping it from being built. Whereas, the people who are broadly in favour are just not motivated in that same way to fight for it. These are fights that are playing out up and down the country at the moment and people just need to get involved in those. At the neighbourhood-level stuff like Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, and I know we’re going to talk more about that, what the literature shows is that they are an incredibly effective intervention at getting people to shift from driving cars in cities to walking and cycling. That’s because so many of these journeys are short journeys. By the combination of making driving that journey slightly less convenient but walking or cycling much safer and more appealing, the combination of those two things, you just see very large increases within these areas in people walking and cycling. Actually, data is showing that you start to see a fall in car ownership within Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. After a few years, you just start to get attrition. Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are not actually a new idea. The phrase is new but they’ve been around for a long time and although they are being proposed and led by local authorities, actually, there’s nothing to stop people who live on a road that is blighted by rat-run traffic from saying to the council, ‘We don’t want this through traffic anymore. This is making our lives worse.’ It is. The thing about needing to move away from cars, which I find hopeful and encouraging, is that it’s something that we would want to do anyway even if climate change wasn’t a thing. That imperative that we know we need to move away from a car-dominated transport system and actually, a car-dominated society is brilliant. It comes with all these other socioeconomic co-benefits. It’s just basically really good for society because you’ll have fewer people killed or seriously injured. It’s going to reduce toxic air pollution. It’s going to mean community severance and kids being able to play out in the street again. That is what you see in Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. You see children chalking on the road and skateboarding which you just can’t do these days on an ordinary residential street.

That’s a really basic thing to do and actually, even if we zoom in another level right down to the micro neighbourhood level, there are parklets. We’re massive fans of parklets at Possible and we’re just working up a big campaign to do it. A parklet is a community garden installed on an on-street parking space. It’s where you convert an on-street parking space into a little garden that is available for anybody to use. They typically have a couple of benches and a few pot plants. One of the types of infrastructure intervention that is most effective is just reducing parking provision. By reducing traffic and car use, you can achieve that just by taking away parking spaces.

Fraser:  Yeah, we’re in the Southside of Glasgow and I know of friends of mine who live on busy tenement streets and they’ve given up their cars because it’s just easier than trying to find a parking space.

Leo:  Yes, this is it. For the most part, our cities were never built to accommodate this much traffic and so lots of people in UK cities live in park deserts where they might not have any access to a private garden of their own and the nearest park is just not actually within walking distance. A lot of places don’t even have street trees which is really bleak. In that scenario, like the neighbour you’ve just described in Glasgow and much of London, particularly the poorest communities in London, the majority of households are living car-free and yet, you step out of the door and the street is still full of cars. It’s full of cars all over the pavement as well as cars speeding down the road. That is iniquitous. 70% of people in Hackney have no cars. Getting rid of cars from the street benefits everybody who lives in the area up to and including the people who previously owned that car because it’s not good for you anyway being behind the wheel of a car. It’s not good for the soul. Air pollution inside a car can be much worse than it is outside the car because the air intake sucks in the exhaust from the car in front. Yeah, parklets are a really brilliant thing to do and in the UK, there’s a bit of a sort of nascent movement for parklets which has begun in Hackney with a woman called Brenda Puech who didn’t have a garden, didn’t own a car and applied to the council for a parking permit for a garden. They said, ‘What’s the registration number?’ She said, ‘No, no, it’s not a vehicle. It’s just a garden.’ They said, ‘No, you can only put cars in the street.’ She said, ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Here are all your policies saying that you’re trying to get people to use cars less.’ To cut a long story short, she just did it, guerrilla style, rolled out some Astroturf and put up a couple of parasols. People loved it and then Hackney introduced an official parklet scheme whereby communities can apply to convert on-street parking spaces to parklets. There are eight or ten of these things in Hackney now and are very well-loved by the communities that they’re in. We need to just see that up and down the country. Anyone who’s listening, you could start right away and if you don’t own a car, and particularly if you don’t own a garden, just apply to the council for a resident’s parking permit for a bench and a few plant pots. See what happens.

[Music flourish]

You can catalyse a change. Just literally, Brenda as an individual did that and it sparked all these other communities that said, ‘Yeah, we want one of those.’ This was in really bleak corners of Hackney with no parks in sight. I love that because it’s catalysing change from the bottom up.

Fraser:  I’d never actually heard of on-street parklets before and honestly, I just love the idea. Thanks to Leo Murray. Anyway, just to say as well, we’ll be hearing more from Leo in the next episode in a couple of weeks’ time but for now, back to the rest of the chat with Iain and Debbie. The conversation has moved on to freight and delivery vehicles.

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  Matt, Fraser and I were talking earlier about how, when we look outside our windows now, we’re just gobsmacked at the number of Amazon deliveries coming by and the fact that freight has changed so much. It’s not just about how we’re travelling in our homes but about how things around us might be changing as well. Debbie, I know you’ve done quite a lot of research in this area. Maybe can you tell us a bit more about how that’s changing?

Debbie:  Covid has just been fascinating to see how people have shifted into what was already a growing trend around parcel delivery and around getting things to home but we need to think very carefully about whether that’s substituting travel or whether it’s additional mobility and whether it’s additional things moving. Very often, we notice it’s the latter and that people are consuming more and actually returning a lot as well. We’re seeing lots of duplicated trips and so it might not always be as sustainable or as beneficial as it might.

Matt:  I just want to touch upon something very interesting that you said a moment ago around infrastructure. In the previous two episodes to this, we’ve talked a lot about heat, buildings and supply chains around that and how we can make the change there. I’m aware that big infrastructural changes will have to happen to decarbonise heat in the home and electrify it and we need to see the bolstering of the grid. In many ways, if you were to ask your average citizen whether they are more or less empowered to make choices around transport versus heat, you would have a variety of responses and some would point to the fact that their choices around transport are really very much tied to the infrastructure available to them. Is there a road outside their house? Is there a train station? Are they able to connect with an airport? I just wanted to ask about the importance of the decision-making around infrastructure and how much we, as consumers, must rely on the state and industry to make decisions first.

Iain:  That’s another one of your small questions, Matt, isn’t it? [Laughter] First of all, I want to furiously agree with something that Debbie said a minute ago about understanding the variation in individuals’ motivations to do things and how they aggregate up at the population level. Transport is a fabulous example, I think, of what’s sometimes called the Tragedy of the Commons. So you’ve got everybody making what they think are absolutely perfectly rational or responsible decisions for them, their family and their situation but at an aggregate population level, it’s a disaster. That disaster is congestion, lack of safety, emissions and all the negative externalities and other things that go wrong with a transport network as well as right with it. I tend to take a bit of a minority view here actually and I think that there is more scope for behaviour change than is commonly assumed or commonly admitted. I think there’s enough evidence out there, particularly from times a bit like this but also other work that I’ve been involved with in the past looking at times of disruption, whether that be severe weather, strikes or other events and that actually, there’s more potential for people to change what they do than we automatically say. The last thing that most people want to do in their daily lives is to have to think about any of these problems because they’re hard and change is difficult for people, particularly change in everyday routines that are normal and familiar. I know people say, ‘It would be hard for me to change because...’ but a) a lot of the time, that’s not true because – you know what? – you could get out on your bike or walk to the local shop and a lot of times, instead of going to the supermarket again but b) it doesn’t take that many of us to make those choices collectively for the balance of what makes sense in infrastructure to change quite a bit.

Matt:  If I can reflect that back to Debbie about Iain’s point that actually, maybe there’s more scope for us to make choices and some of the positive net zero ones. Is that fair, particularly when we consider the inequalities of what people can and can’t do and what means and resources they have at their disposal?

Debbie:  Often, we fall into a trap of talking in very ableist terms and that people can walk and can cycle. Pedestrianisation is always that really exciting, lovely thing to talk about because we all enjoy drinking coffee at tables outside and walking around when there aren’t cars and trucks about but we always need to remember that there’s always going to be a certain proportion of people who require cars and who require alternative forms of mobility for whom buses are incredibly problematic. Coming to the infrastructure issue, there’s research that shows that it doesn’t matter if there’s a bus stop that’s near you if it’s in the wrong direction. It can be ridiculously close to your house but actually, if it’s not the way you’re travelling or if it’s slightly out of your sphere of knowledge in your home area, it’s absolutely pointless. I think that these types of things become very important. With what’s going on at the moment actually with women and safety, there’s lots of thought about where you feel safe being. Do you feel safe standing at a bus stop at night? Would you think it was appropriate for your child to be stood at a bus stop in the dark at 5 o’clock in winter? There are places around my home area that I don’t walk to because I don’t feel safe. I could walk there geographically, physically and in every context, I could but I don’t want to because I don’t feel safe. I think that this is where transport becomes really, really tricky because the car has become synonymous with ideas of safety when we know that cars aren’t particularly safe. Car parks are not safe spaces. Cars themselves are not safe things to be in but they have been marketed in such a way and we have seen this continuation of these ideas around cars being cocoons or being all sorts of spaces that are good for us, despite the fact we know they’re really not.

Iain:  It’s not just about physical impairment or disability or that whole set of issues which is really, really tricky for a lot of people but simple to explain social and economic exclusion and the number of people that simply don’t have access to a car, except are expected to try and cope with getting to work, getting to school or college or to fulfil their caring responsibilities in a society which, as Debbie says, is increasingly designed around somebody that can afford to buy a new SUV every three years. To me, that says that, sooner or later, we’re going to have to look at these people for whom we’ve spent lots and lots of money making their life easy over the last few decades by building them more roads or, indeed, very expensive railways to help you do that commute to work and say, ‘Sorry, folks, it’s time to change what you do.’

Rebecca:  I want to pick up on that. What I’m hearing and certainly, what I’ve experienced in my own life is that the choice might not be because I want to drive but because, for whatever reason, it feels like the better choice and either I can get there faster or I feel safer or for whatever reason that is. Can you envisage a transport future where the low-carbon option is simply the better option, the faster option, the cleaner option and the option where you can sit and work whilst you’re doing it rather than be stuck in a traffic jam?

Is that a possibility?

Debbie:  I feel like it absolutely is a possibility but I get very nervous about moving into Utopian futures. It’s never going to be perfect for everybody. Cars are going to exist. There’s going to be a certain need for cars to still be around. So if we block cars out of areas, it becomes very tricky for some people, particularly in an ageing population, unless we have a complete overhaul of our public transport system. If that happens alongside it, that would be marvellous too. Thinking about freight and how stuff gets places brings us back to thinking about the high street and thinking about the built environment. What happens to the high street in a post-Covid world I think is really significant for then what becomes the hubs of our towns and cities where things need to go. Are we going to get fewer heavy goods vehicles going into city centres and town centres because we don’t have shops there anymore? Actually, our shops are in different places. I do a lot of work with freight drivers and I’m yet to meet one who enjoys driving into towns and cities. The other day, somebody described an urban consolidation centre to me without actually knowing that an urban consolidation centre was something that people talk about or have trialled even. They said, ‘Actually, what I want to do is drop the freight at the edge of the town or city and then people in little electric vehicles can come and pick it up and take it in.’ Nobody actually enjoys being in these environments, so thinking about how our cities are configured, where shops are and how people are going to them and what travel people need to do will become part of this.

Matt:  Trying to unpick that, are we going to have to recalibrate our destination, where we go to work and live, for transport to follow suit? My feeling is that we can’t tinker with transport unless we fundamentally transform where we consume, live and work.

Iain:  Again, my take on this is that there’s a bit of a fallacy that goes around. Well, there are two fallacies. One is that if my next BMW is an electric one, then I’ve done my bit. Secondly, there’s the fallacy which is that if only we were a bit more like the Netherlands, we’ll all be fine. Well, the problem, of course, with the Netherlands is that they might have about a quarter of all trips done by bike but their carbon emissions from the transport system are even worse than ours because they’ve just got more of everything. So, at some point, we have to do exactly what you’ve just said, Matt, and take a stand back and say, ‘Woah! Hold on! Is this really what we want?’ Pre-pandemic, despite what governments have said, nobody really knew how we were going to decarbonise transport. I think the great opportunity of the pandemic is we need to ask ourselves the question of what we want in the future. We probably have tilted the scales a bit to wanting to travel less, particularly on a crowded train in the morning. We probably want to be able to walk to the local shops, have cleaner air and these kinds of things. I think there is, perhaps, an opportunity to capture some of that for the long-term but the problem is, over the summer, if there’s a great euphoric reaction to the end of restrictions, the completion of the vaccination programme and we’ve got an extreme version of last year which was, ‘Hurrah! Let’s go back to normal,’ it might all be lost.

Debbie:  Yeah, I think that rebound is really worrying and that sort of behavioural rebound after Covid. The money that the government keep saying that we’ve all saved and that we’re going to go and spend it all is hypothetical money because I’m yet to meet anybody that’s saved a lot of money through this period. I think that that’s a fear for me around us actually falling back into old patterns but in terms of where we live, work, consume and what happens after this period, I think, for me, some of this is about the connectedness between transport and everything else. I keep reflecting back on where we’re building new houses, for example. We and the government keep putting money into housing developments that are outside of towns and cities that demand cars. As a first-time buyer, you are only really given support to buy brand new houses. There’s very little support to buy houses within towns and cities that already exist. We then buy houses outside of towns that always have a driveway. They often have a garage and often you’re required to get into that car to go to the local shops because, at the moment, there’s not a community but they insist it will become a community at some point. You get all of these things that further perpetuate the transport system and reliance on cars. At the same time, the government is saying how proud we should be that we’re hosting COP and that we’re going to be doing everything in our power to be the world leaders in responding to climate change. It’s a constant contradiction where the transport system is never really brought whole-heartedly into the conversation of how we’re going to do anything about climate change.

Rebecca:  So what needs to change? Do we need to be thinking better, when these housing estates are built, about what those transport links look like and not just the transport links to get you into the city centre to go to work? If it’s first-time buyers, they’re probably going to be younger families and there are probably going to be kids there. There’s probably going to be trip chaining. There are probably going to be people at home that are not going into the city centre. If I think about my journey here, I could get into the city centre in 15 minutes but the park that is a lot closer to me that’s just too far to walk to, especially with my kids, there’s no bus route there. I have no option to get there other than to jump in a car. So the sort of infrastructure is a massive thing. Is it about embedding that infrastructure as these things are being built or is there something even more complicated that we need to address around, for example, the way in which we perhaps zone our cities or even more fundamentally, the nature of sprawl?

Debbie:  Yeah, goodness. All of the above [laughter]. That’s the problem is that none of it is thought of in a joined-up way. Coming back to Iain’s great point about electric vehicles not being the solution but many people think they are. In new builds, what they’ve now done is put in electric charging points. You can buy a starter home, a two-up two-down, that will cost you a fortune anyway and it’s got an electric charging point because that’s how they’re going to solve it and that’s the solution.

Rebecca:  For the electric vehicle you can’t afford, right?

Debbie:  For the electric vehicle you can’t afford and then there’ll be two Car Club cars and maybe somewhere to park your bike. It’s really tricky because it’s not joined up and I don’t think that there is a  huge desire to join it up. Coming back to your point about the buses as well, even if there is a bus, then very often they are so expensive. If you already own a car and you have children, you think, ‘Right, am I going to sort them out, on my own put them on the bus and pay for all the tickets? What a trauma when I can actually pop them in the car and we could be there in two minutes.’ This comes back to the driveways and if you have a driveway, you’re far more likely to have a car. Your car will sit on that driveway a lot of the time. You will then use it for trips that you might not quite need to use it for because it’s there already. We then get into this cycle of repeated behaviour and before you know it, your children all have cars.

Rebecca:  Iain, you talked before about behaviour change and about how people could probably be doing a bit more and we shouldn’t be forgetting about that but who else needs to make the change as well? What do we need to see local government doing? What do we need to see national government to bring about this future where transport becomes a much more integrated part of society?

Iain:  I’m probably in danger of straying into outright prejudices rather than any research-informed opinion here, so take that as read. I’m a big believer in the old adage that we get the politicians we deserve actually as a collective and as a society. I look around and I think about the state of modern Britain and I look at how poor the housing is. I look at how poor the labour market is in a lot of places in terms of its opportunities. I look at how mediocre a lot of our education is. The real giveaway for me is that I look at how much really bad food costs us in the supermarket and I think that’s the case because we’ve been prepared to put up with this for so long. I think our transport system looks as it does because people put up with stuff that just isn’t very good. Of course, the flip side of that is that the easiest way out of that is to opt-out and privatise it for yourself by buying a better car. I don’t think until we have a different kind of political economy or ‘politics of transport’ (to use that phrase) that we are going to see much change. The optimistic version of that is that I do think we can see the beginnings of it in a lot of places. You can certainly see the beginnings of that in towns and cities that have younger populations where people are less likely to acquire a driving licence in their 20s and 30s than there used to be. They’re much less likely to use a car than people in previous cohorts and where they’re much more likely to cycle. They have different consumption habits. They shop in different places and they travel around in different ways. So I think that’s happening and I think that’s all positive. The problem, of course, is, as it always is, it’s not happening fast enough and there’s a whole bunch of political inertia built into the system where the people that turn out to vote more often are, of course, likely to be precisely the kind of people for whom the transport status quo suits best.

Debbie:  I mean it’s not really answering the question but it made me reflect on some of the truck drivers that I do work with, like long-haul truckers from the UK that go into Europe. At the moment, they’re sending me photographs of them at work and the thing I keep getting are photos of food because they point out how poor the food is on the motorways here; the sorts of food that truckers put up with and that travellers put up with that we’ve completely normalised in this country and the fact that our truck drivers sleep in lay-bys because it’s safer than paying £40 to go and sleep in a service station. On the Continent, it’s free, and secure and the food is great. They’ll say, ‘Why are we treated like people on the Continent but we’re not treated like people in the UK?’ Why do we have this so wrong? It is really interesting to me how much it just comes out in all of these different ways that we seem to have this system that serves nobody, yet everybody is so hell-bent on protecting [laughter] and refusing to see an alternative.

Iain:  Somebody mentioned fares and the cost of travelling earlier on. A great example of that for me is our complete and utter inability to have the same kind of standard ticket that works in any one of the hundreds of European cities that you could all go to and travel around. We’ve created this system that costs so much to run. Again, a pre-pandemic factoid, a Glasgow to Edinburgh season ticket on the railway costs more than an entire season ticket for the whole of the German network or the 365-Euro city movement which is about an annual season ticket for your city that costs you a euro a day. It started in Vienna and has spread to Berlin and various other places. This is lightyears different from what we experience here every day.

Matt:  We’re going to have to wrap up but I just want to ask one last question of you both. This is Local Zero and so we’re all interested in local action to tackle this and this can involve councils, communities and individuals. In a few words, 20-30 words, what can we do as neighbourhoods and communities to drive forward this net zero transition?

Iain:  I’m only going to use two words. Is that okay?

Matt:  Perfect, yeah. Even better.

Iain:  Walk more [laughter].

Matt:  Excellent. Debbie, can you expand? [Laughter]

Debbie:  Absolutely [laughter]. I think local action is just so important. What Iain was saying before about some of the pushback there has been to these Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, it’s happening here at the moment. We’ve just had infrastructure put in and there are people all over the newspapers complaining about it. However, actually, I think that they’re the minority and they are being the noisiest. I think that it’s that issue. I think it’s people thinking about what they want from their futures. When Covid first started, people were talking about the fact that the roads were quieter, children were learning to ride their bikes and people were out on the streets and within a year, people have forgotten that that first lockdown, their children learned to ride bikes on the road because it was safe.

[Music flourish]

So actually, it’s about getting back to that and thinking about what sort of communities we want and those are communities, in my mind, that we’re able to move around in and that children can play outside without being worried about their safety and vocalising that and not allowing those people who are complaining about these infrastructures and these different changes to have the last word.

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  I have a really important question for Debbie which is...

Debbie:  Oh god! [Laughter]

Rebecca:  ...why are truck drivers sending you photos of themselves? [Laughter]

Debbie:  I know! Honestly, my phone is just photos of truckers, honestly, all day and all night.

Fraser:  It’s research [laughter].

Debbie:  I get these text messages because they obviously stop driving at about 5 or 6 o’clock and so suddenly, at night time, I’m just getting photos and I’m having phone calls with truckers.

Rebecca:  This is for research, right, and not just because... [laughter]

Debbie:  It’s 100% research. It’s not weird. Well, it is a bit weird. It’s basically like a mobile method approach. It’s supposed to be a week but the vast majority have just carried on doing it because I think they’re quite bored in the evenings.

Fraser:  Yeah, yeah [laughter].

Debbie:  They send me photos of where they are and what they’re up to. The vast majority of the time, it’s photos of the views that they’re seeing as they drive around Europe. They’re just basically trolling me because they get to go out and see the world and I don’t right now.

Matt:  Debbie, there’s definitely a coffee table book here I think [laughter]. I’d buy it [laughter]. Okay, so I hope you can both stick around now for our favourite bit of the show which is Future or Fiction? Without further ado, I’ll hand over to our compere and mastermind, Fraser.

[Music flourish]

Fraser:  Thanks very much, Matt. Future or Fiction? is a game that we play at the end of every show where I present our guests and the panel with a fancy new technology or new innovation and you have to decide if you think it’s the future, i.e. it’s a real technological development, or if you think it’s fiction, i.e. I’ve pulled it out of my backside. So given that we’re talking transport this week, I’ve done my level best here. This technology is called...

Matt:  Suspense.

Fraser:  Are you ready for this biggie?

Rebecca:  I’m so ready. Wow me, Fraser [laughter].

Fraser:  This technology (drum roll) is called Unleaded Zeppelin. That’s Unleaded Zeppelin.

Rebecca:  Oh, I appreciate that so much [laughter].

Matt:  It’s so bad, it’s possibly true [laughter].

Fraser:  So Unleaded Zeppelin, the greatest name for anything ever. Zeppelins have been historically plagued with issues of safety and reliability. However, developers have begun testing a new solar-powered, wind-resistant Zeppelin designed as a greener alternative to cargo and freight transportation. Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?

Matt:  Mmm, it’s a goodie. Iain?

Iain:  I’m immediately drawn to all those solar-powered, interstellar, science fiction freight things shuttling between different planets, Fraser, rather than something more prosaic. I’ve got a feeling that might just about be true actually because I’m sure there will be examples of freight flows where the routes would probably work for that and if the logistics were clever enough, the absolute journey time wouldn’t really matter that much. It’s more about reliability and so I’m going to go with fact I think.

Fraser:  I’m quite into these interstellar ideas as well, Iain. Make of that what you will.

Matt:  [Laughter].

Fraser:  Debbie, what do you think?

Debbie:  Well, I’ve seen some images. Was it Amazon that patented some delivery thing that is along these lines, although I’m not convinced it exists or will exist? Yeah, I feel like it might be real.

Matt:  I’m sure I have seen a few different companies trying to develop these blimps, as you say, as an alternative to air freight. Again, I’m not the engineer and I will defer to those who are but I think it’s a much more energy-efficient way of transporting freight. What I didn’t see was that they were powered directly by solar. You may be able to power them up and I think some of them were electrically powered. So I’m going to put it to you, Fraser, the weasel words here. Is it carrying solar panels or is it just booted up on the ground with solar power?

Fraser:  It is carrying solar panels.

Matt:  Carrying solar panels, right. I think I’m out then on that basis.

Fraser:  There’s still a gas element to it. It doesn’t float on account of solar panels.

Rebecca:  Yeah, that was going to be my question. What is it filled with?

Fraser:  Er, fluff, goodies and nice things [laughter]. It still requires some kind of gas to get it up and off the ground and to actually elevate it.

Iain:  There’s got to be a hot air joke in here somewhere [laughter] with Fraser’s terribly bad description of what the thing was. Would it have some kind of electric propulsion that was more about steering at either end of the journey rather than about absolute speed or direction or am I getting too sci-fi?

Fraser:  Yes, that’s how I imagine it.

Matt:  We’re going to have to go round with a quick yes, it’s real or no, it isn’t. We’ll begin in the order we had before. Iain?

[Music flourish with low, steady beat)

Iain:  I want it to be real and so I’ll stick with fact.

Matt:  Debbie?

Debbie:  I kind of want it to be real too, so I’m going to say yes.

Matt:  Becky?

Rebecca:  Total fiction. Total fiction.

Matt:  Total fiction [laughter]. I’m so on the fence here. I’m going to say it’s not true because I don’t see it actually having solar panels on it but I know they’re developing these things.

Fraser:  You’re such a centrist, Matt. The answer is... it is the future. Solar-powered Zeppelins are the future. California-based company, Varialift, have been working on a prototype Zeppelin powered by solar while still using gas for elevation. They estimate that shipping cargo by airship could use as little as 8% of the fuel of typical air freight.

Matt:  Wow! Amazing.

Rebecca:  Wow!

Fraser:  Becky.

Rebecca:  Yes?

Fraser:  I am so glad to have finally caught you out. It feels like it’s been so long.

Rebecca:  What? Because I got one right? [Laughter]. I know, Matt, why didn’t we go with our great experts? We should have trusted the experts [laughter].

Matt:  I’m on a rotten losing streak.

[Music flourish]

Brilliant. Well, thank you very much for coming along this week, guys. It’s been a pleasure having you.

Iain:  Thanks a lot, Matt.

Debbie:  Thanks very much. It’s been great.

Matt:  So you’ve been listening to Local Zero. If you want to connect with us and ask any questions, please find us on social media using the hashtag #LocalZero and tweet us @EnergyREV_UK. Until then, thanks for listening. See you soon. Bye bye.

Rebecca:  Bye.

Fraser:  Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.

[Music flourish]

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