Professor Jillian Anable, University of Leeds: Introduction to surface transport

Sarah: So it's now time to start with our panel of speakers and welcome to those joining us online as well.

So this panel of speakers is going to cover the topic of surface transport. So, as Jim said, that's everything on the ground. So trains, buses, walking, cycling and so on. Everything that's not flying. Essentially. We have six speakers in total, but

we're gonna hear from three at a time to break things up a little bit. The 1st 3 speakers are going to be Jillian Anable. I apologise for pronouncing your name wrong earlier, from the University of Leeds. Who is going to provide an introduction to surface transports. We're then gonna have Ellie Davis from the Committee on Climate Change, talking about reducing emissions from cars and then Lynn Sloman from transport for quality of life who is going to talk about alternatives to cars.

So, as usual, we're going to stop after each speaker for a chance for you to write down questions. You're welcome to note them down as we go along as well, if you like. You have your yellow and red cards at tables. Please do card the speakers if they're not being clear so a yellow card if they're going too quickly. A red card, if they've been unclear and you'd like them to explain themselves a little better. We are going to record what all these speakers are saying and they will be on the website afterwards. But as usual, we also have copies of their slides at tables. There's enough for one between two. So do ask your table facilitator now if you'd like a copy. And so there's just one new thing to mention, Jim did talk about it before but we have two types of speaker for you. So we have what we call informants who are here to tell you about the range of research and views that exist in the area they're speaking about but who are not going to give you their personal opinion. So it's about explaining the range of views and research that exists. And then we have speakers who are what are we call or what we call advocates who are here to give you their personal view or the view of their organisation, I will remind you which is which, as we go along. The 1st 3 speakers are all informants, so they're not going to give you a personal view. And with that I will hand over to Gillian.

Jillian Anable: Thank you very much Sarah. Hello everybody. Really, really nice to be here and everything I say as Sarah's explained, I'm an informant, everything I say is going to be absent of personal opinion. Apart from to say that Congratulations being in this panel because I think transport is a fabulous topic that I would say that because I live and breathe it on a daily basis. So I'm gonna give you an introduction to surface travel and it might seem quite obvious, it's kind of is, surface travel is everything that doesn't involve getting airborne or travelling across or through water unless something has gone terribly wrong with your surface travel, of course. But within that, there's actually a variety of different modes. So just to make sure we've got our minds thinking about all the different possibilities within surface transport, you have cars. Cars can be driven as a passenger. They can be, sorry driven or travelled in as a passenger of course. You have a variety of different public transport modes. The main ones that we think about are buses and trains. But you also have light rail, trams in local areas, Underground systems. You can even have different types of bus provision, trolley buses which are also powered by overhead electric wires. So there's a whole variety there and actually, even within that, we are increasingly seeing different ways in which buses are operated. So we think about buses often on conventional fixed routes and timetables. But there are many different places, and more and more, where those buses are provided on a, what's called an on demand system so you can dial them up and they're much more flexible in their timings. So again, there's a sort of a spectrum there of different ways of providing public transport. And then we have what we in the business, if you like, tend to lump together as active modes of travel. And these are mode of travel that had done under our own steam, largely walking, cycling increasingly things like scootering, hoverboards and they can be powered also increasingly by electric power, so electric bikes, e bikes, e scooters and then often in the statistics, the way we gather the data around how people travel, we have an other category and in the other category mainly are taxis. So taxis, mostly cars. But we count them slightly differently because it's a way of of people getting from A to B, with a certain type of providing that means of transport. The other distinction I really that's really important to make within surface travel is between surface and freight transport and although there can be some overlap. We speak about those surface modes that I've just gone through. But in freight, of course, we're talking about another set of vehicles. So vans and Lorries. Some people might use vans as as a personal form of transport, so there's a slight grey area there. But largely we think of freight and we think of vans and Lorries. Some freight also goes on the rail. So again, another bit of a grey area. The reason why I really mention it with emphasis now is because in our deliberations in this panel and also the expert advice and so on you are getting. We are going to be focusing on passenger travel, on personal travel, on the way in which we largely get around, and that's not because the freight side of things is not important, which it is, and it's not to say that we can think about it and so we don't have to do anything about that bit. We can sort of assume that there will be efforts to de carbonise that, but because our experience, our daily experience is around personal travel, we want to focus these discussions around that. And then one final thing just to say, because it will crop up here and there is there's another way of accessing things which increasingly, we think about under transport, which is virtual travel. So what we mean by that is that there are some things that we access or that we do that we can increasingly do online so we could do online banking, instead of going to the bank, we can do video conferencing at work, or even you can do video like skyping or face time for personal reasons So some of sometimes those kind of virtual means actually substitute for travel and mean that there's no physical travel involved, so that's the kind of nuts and bolts just to sort of lay the landscape out for you.

Now just to remind us so if we take all transport that is surface plus air and sea. It's 1/3 of greenhouse gas emissions. If we just take all surface transport, so that's including the freight freight plus passenger that's around 1/4 or just under 1/4 of our greenhouse gas emissions. But just thinking about what we're dealing with this afternoon, this afternoon bits bit, which is personal surface travel, it's around 15% off greenhouse gas emissions. Now within that, on this slide, I have both passenger and freight just so you can see the relative difference. I know you've had lots and lots of pie charts, okay, but on this the important thing to say is that cars make up the vast majority of surface transport even when you include freight and public transport at the moment is only around 5% of emissions. Now, when we think about the relative contributions of different modes of transport to greenhouse gas emissions, we have to think about not just how often a mode of transport is used, but also how much distance it travels overall. So I have here is this this column here or well, here are the modes of transport. This column here is the proportion of trips that each mode of transport is responsible for. On average, for the average person and this is the percentage of distance that it accounts for. So just pointing out some examples. The car is responsible for 61% of the journeys that we make, so 61% of the times that we go out it tends to be in the car, but it's responsible for 77% of distance and that's because, even though it does lots and lots of short journeys in the car, it also does a few very long journeys, which actually account for lots and lots of distance. In fact, only 3% of the journeys that undertaken in a car actually account for 30% of the distance travelled. Then we have things like walking. So walking is a hugely popular mode 27% of trips, but actually only accounts for 3% of distance. So relatively speaking, it's not as important at the moment in terms of consuming the distance that we travel and then we can go down those various different modes and it's really important when we think about this, not just how many trips the each mode of transport can replace or undertake but how much distance they can actually account for. Just a couple of points on cars. One of the main things I want to say is actually the figure right the line right at the bottom of this slide, which is just to remember that 24% of households don't have a car at all, and that's either because they can't afford it or they've chosen not to own one, so we can't, although the car is incredibly important in society, it's not everyone that has a car. The other thing to say is, although I'm not here to say the car isn't good, it's a very efficient in many ways or efficient for our lifestyle in many ways, there's also a lot of inefficiencies built in with the car, so there's many, many journeys whereby it's only one person in that car. The car is parked for 98% of its time, somewhere or other, mostly at home. 1/3 of all cars don't go out on any given day at all, so we do have to think about whether or not that is a resource that we as a society, which many of us pay a lot of money to have can maybe be used a little bit more efficiently for the good of us as individuals, but also as the good of society. And the other thing is that understandably in the media, there's a lot of attention paid to commute, commuting, getting to work, but also a lot of attention often paid to the journey to school. You hear a lot kind of anecdotally, you know, if only we could have not so many children taken to school by car, we might solve a lot of problems. It is important to note that commuting only takes up 20% of all the distance that's travelled and school journeys only around 2% and it's actually all the other things we do in cars, personal business, that's things like caring or going to the health appointments and all the leisure activities and in their different forms that where we really are taking up a lot of time and distance and energy in our transport system. And then we as this is the real meat of things and you have this to refer to. I think it might be useful to refer to it several times. There is a way of trying to think about, okay, what are the solutions? And this is just 1 sort of way. We've classified various things. In the waste industry, you've probably heard of the hierarchy, which is to reduce the amount of waste, the amount of product, when we can't do that, to recycle the rest of it and to remove the rest of it. It is a similar kind of thing, avoiding, shifting and improving. So avoiding is organising the services that we have to get to the things that we want to access organise organising them in such a way that perhaps we don't have to travel so far to get to them. Shifting is about making sure that each time a journey is undertaken, it's done on the most efficient mode, the cleanest mode if you like, that it possibly can be. So that's about having lots of choice for the different journeys, not just the car being the only thing that people can use, which is often the case and the final thing is about improving on this, essentially, it is most of the technical options. So making the emission's performance of vehicles better so that might be things like efficiency improvements, better engines. But it might be making them very clean in terms of having electric powertrains or hydrogen. And it could also be the making the performance better by things like lowering speed limits because any form of transport uses less fuel, less energy at certain optimum speeds. So within, within these different categories, there are a lot of different types of things you could do and avoid. You can plan and we'll hear about land use planning in one of the talks coming up about planning where our housing is and our services, are about shifting, which is all about our public transport options and our walking and cycling options, investing in them, subsidising in them may be closing road capacity, maybe charging for roads. A whole suite of different things and improving is mainly about the technical options and the fuels, and I've got I've got to wrap up. But on this slide, there's more examples of what the different sort of elements and types of policies are. This's not by any means, a clean slate. You will have your own ideas as there are very many of those different ideas for informing people, for regulating, subsidising, for pricing, taxing these are all different levers in, policy levers that we can use. And then the final thing just to say is that we're all here to think about reaching the net zero target. But transport, I think, is one of the areas in particular, in fact, all areas are really but in particular where you can really think about all kinds of other reasons, not just for climate change, where we might want to do all exactly the same things that we're gonna be talking about, making our streets better our towns and cities, better places to live, clean air, getting people out, exercising, less sedentary lifestyles, more safe environments and so on so its. And most of the things almost without exclusion that we're going to be talking about for mitigating, reducing climate emissions are also going to be working towards some of these other wider objectives and benefits as well. So thank you.

Sarah: So as usual, we're gonna pause for you to write down questions you'd like to ask Jillian. You can write down each up to two questions that you'd like to ask her. Please one question per post-it.