Time to Act: Episode 2 (Stop the bus! Let’s talk travel)

Travel. Sun, sea, new experiences. Few will forget seeing that first perfect sunset as it dips below the horizon, glints off the pristine water and reflects off your pina colada. Bliss.

Sadly, few of us will feel this way about most travelling we do – the daily commute! Unfortunately, this is not an episode where we share tales of our best adventure, but rather how we reduce the impact of one of the things we do most – getting around.

How we get around presents a number of problems, so let’s explore those before talking about what we can do to minimise our own impact.

Emissions

From an emissions standpoint, transport accounts for 16% of all emissions globally. In the UK, it is 26% (a similar story across the EU). As the graphic below sets out, the vast majority of this comes from road vehicles (nearly 75%). For individuals, how we get around therefore accounts for a significant chunk of our ‘personal footprint’.

Not all vehicles have the same emissions profile as the graph below sets out. Therefore we can make a big difference by making small changes to how we travel.

NOTE – the graph below sets out the CO2 emitted per passenger per km. Which is helpful when considering your own impact when using different vehicles, but can be a little misleading. For a start, assumptions are made around “average capacity”. For reference, it assumes there will be 1.6 people in a car. If there is only you, then the emissions profile is more like 273g. For a bus, they’ve assumed ~10 people. So the number would be significantly lower if the bus was full.

Pollution

We can get a little hung up on emissions and forget the equally large issue of pollution. Noise and light obviously cause problems – as those who live next to a motorway will surely attest. But equally impact wildlife. Being a bat anywhere near a city must really suck.

But air pollution takes the biscuit for me. Vehicle exhausts pump out a cocktail of poisonous gasses and the particles thrown out from wearing tyres are even more hazardous (the Guardian has an interesting article on this here). ?A lot of this pollution is being delivered in densely populated places. As a result, towns and cities across the world have breached safe air pollution limits set by the World Health Organisation. The impact of this is catastrophically bad and often under reported (you can read the story of a family who fought to get air pollution recognised as their child’s cause of death here). 1 in 8 deaths globally are attributed to air pollution, putting it as the second leading risk factor for death (according to the latest State of Global Air report). But of course, it also causes other health problems – asthma, COPD, strokes, lung cancer to name a few. Children are particularly vulnerable due, surprisingly, to their height. They are closer to vehicle tailpipes/wheels so feel the brunt of the pollution as it makes its way into the atmosphere. It isn’t all about the health impacts though, there is a huge financial cost. It is estimated that air pollution costs the UK economy ￡20bn a year.

Mental health and broader wellbeing

I was listening to a podcast the other day which talked to a study on mental health impacts of commuting by car. The researchers found that the ‘stress’ of a bad commute can stay with you for 2 hours and is a contributing factor to developing depression and anxiety. The ‘unpredictability’ of the journey is a key trigger for this – with variations in the state of traffic, or incidents on the road, being the big contributor. But equally, it is others driving behaviour. Being cut up, beeped at, having someone sitting on your bumper, all cause significant impacts on our wellbeing.

As does the lack of movement associated with driving. Typically, it provides a means to get door-to-door. If you then go and do a desk job, chances are that you have been incredibly inactive across a huge amount of your waking day. If you track your steps, you might be lucky to even break into 4 figures. Inactivity causes so many problems – increasing risks of a variety of physical and mental illness.

Congestion

And there is the obvious problem of congestion. The more vehicles on the road, the slower they go. This impacts productivity and causes a whole raft of social issues.

You can probably already get the thrust of where I am going with this. Cars are bad. I mean, they are obviously great too – they provide incredible convenience and make certain travel feasible. As someone who is now having to drive to work for the first time in 20 odd years, I totally understand that getting rid of them is not a viable option. But, for many, we’ve become so utterly dependent on them that we don’t even think about the alternative means of getting around. And they are literally killing us. So let’s talk about how to wean ourselves off them, where we can!

What we can do

1.????? Choose a lower impact option – easy to say, though in practice appreciate it can be hard! Whenever you travel, if you can pick a lower impact option then the potential benefit is huge. This isn’t about going from all journeys by car, to all journeys by train – while this would be great, it is probably unrealistic. Rather, can you switch out a proportion of your journeys? This simplified list below gives you a hierarchy to think about:

Walk / cycle (or other active travel) – best

Public transport

Electric car

‘ICE’ car

Plane - worst

The National Travel Survey in the UK showed that 17% of car journeys are under 1 mile, and 67% are between 1 and 5 miles. So the potential disruption by simple behavioural change here is significant. And I think a big part of unlocking that is breaking ingrained habits and actively thinking about this.

To give a sense of my thought process, it generally looks like this (assuming I’m not having to carry heavy stuff):

Walk if <2 miles

Cycle if <5 miles (though I’d cycle further for a commute)

Use public transport beyond that unless completely impractical

Setting personal targets can help to make this a reality. For example, I’ve been doing 10,000 steps a day for over a year now and hope to keep it going. Achieving this each day is difficult – as I am sure many will know! It therefore forces me to make the vast majority of my journeys by foot (recreational walking and running sees to the rest). You could, for example, park a mile or two short of your office and walk – which would reduce your driven miles.

2.????? Lift share – where this is possible for commuting, it should definitely be encouraged. Perhaps ask your employer to facilitate? Or just broach it with people you know at work. As you’d probably expect, there are now technological solutions looking to enable this too. Like LiftShare.

But beyond the commute, I see so many opportunities for this. Particularly for people with kids. Ferrying them around to various activities pretty much dominates a parent’s life. So can you take it in turns to get kids (or kids + a parent) where they need to be (assuming you can’t implement a change as per step 1)? This could halve (or better) the number of cars on the road / miles driven.

3.????? Drive efficiently – perhaps many of us dream of being Colin McCrae, Lewis Hamilton or any other racing idol. You don’t get there by driving like a d*** though. Excessive acceleration and braking makes vehicles far more inefficient. They throw out more pollution and ultimately cost more money. Living in a city, I’m always flabbergasted to see people driving up to a red light at full speed and then hammering on the brakes at the last minute. Seriously? Just lift and coast…. And idling… don’t get me started. Stop your car, switch off the engine. Done. I’ve run past an idling car and then still seen it idling on my way back an hour later. It is so wasteful and destructive.

4.????? Pick a sensible car for what you need – in short, EV’s are ultimately the answer although perhaps not feasible for all yet (I’ll do a separate piece on this next week). So if this isn’t possible for you, then think about the most efficient vehicle for your needs. Safe to say, unless you are a farmer, live on top of a mountain or regularly tow heavy stuff, then the answer is not “Land Rover” (or any other monstrous 4x4 / SUV). These cars have no place on our busy roads. People talk about how they make you feel safer and give you greater visibility. Good for you. Do you know who it isn’t good for? Everyone else. Children are 8 times more likely to die if they are hit by an SUV (as was tragically the case in London). They block your view which increases the likelihood of accidents in the first place. And they are heavy – so pump out way more pollution than other vehicles. ‘Choose Land Rover, choose death’. Pick something else.

5.????? Don’t fly domestically – obviously depends on the country. Flying within the UK mainland is barbaric though (with some minor exceptions – like Inverness to Cornwall). If I had my way, these flights would be banned. We can make that a reality by simply not using them.

6.????? Get your groceries delivered – I expect that doing the food shop accounts for a lot of peoples low distance car journeys. Having a food delivery vehicle making multiple drops is more efficient. Especially if the vehicle is electrified.

7.????? Take off roof boxes / bars when not in use – these make your car far more inefficient – typically to the tune of 15% - 35%. As you’d expect, it varies substantially by vehicle and speed (higher speeds, higher impact). Generally, people do not need to use bars / boxes all the time and taking them on and off takes about 10 minutes. Removing these when not in use can greatly help your pocket and the environment.

And those are my key suggestions for this week. Hopefully some food for thought and things we can all do that don’t necessarily have a financial cost (often, the opposite). Though appreciate that it may have another cost – in time. Which many people will immediately use as an excuse not to change. But it is an easy excuse. We all make time for things that matter to us and we all waste a lot of time every day on things that we either think are important (and aren’t), or just aren’t. We sometimes fail to embrace that just taking time to be – enjoying the journey, not just the destination – can bring so many benefits.

Anyhoo, that’s it for now. Next time I am going to talk EV’s and debunk a few myths. But also talk to the benefits of them and the obstacles – and how we might overcome the latter.