Insight

It’s the economy everything, stupid How much transport is in your sandwich? All transport planners are taught on the first day of transport planning school that ‘transport is a derived demand’ and the public debate is beginning to recognise that our personal travel patterns are, to a large extent, designed into our built environments: famously…

Can we really decarbonise aviation by 2050? The Government’s Jet Zero consultation thinks not, but we should be able to offset the residual emissions. Aviation is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise: the expected lifetime of aircraft is over 25 years, new aircraft designs take around 10 years and the potential range of low…

Any discussion about transport and decarbonisation provokes a common response: that while it might be possible to decarbonise transport in cities, outside these there is no alternative to cars for any of the journeys people make and that any attempts to reduce car use outside cities are unrealistic and doomed to failure. This is not…

The transport sector is the most significant contributor towards the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, while other sectors such as energy generation have drastically reduced their emissions over the last 30 years, the transport sector has made little progress towards decarbonisation. So what more needs to be done? Significant behavioural shift The RTPI believes that…

BBC online has recently released a series of short video think pieces under the topic ‘How easy is it to predict the future?’ It asks some very pertinent questions such as: ‘Is trying to predict the future a waste of time?’ or ‘Are artists or scientists better at future predictions’ and, my particular favourite, ‘Are…

Is this government serious about decarbonising transport, or is their Decarbonisation Plan just political hype? I was reflecting on that as I prepared to give evidence to the planning inquiry into North Somerset Council’s refusal to allow Bristol Airport to expand.  Ironically, their attempts to fudge the issues around aviation may have inadvertently strengthened the…

Pressure is rightly placed on the transport sector to eliminate the large volumes of carbon dioxide it emits annually, from vehicle emissions, carbon released during vehicle construction and that embedded in the supporting infrastructure. We recognise, on the supply side, that meeting this zero-carbon challenge requires close collaboration with a wide range of industrial partners…

This article is about the IPCC’s new report on climate change, the UK’s Transport Decarbonisation Plan and Ultravox. Anxiety and the state of science In the arms of my wife and with my six year-old son down the hallway, I eventually slipped into sleep on Sunday 8 August 2021 wrestling with climate anxiety as I…

When Coronavirus forced us all to stay in our homes and the world ground to a halt in March 2020, like so many of us, I watched with fascination as nature appeared to heal itself before our eyes. Cars stayed on their drives and train timetables were reduced down to the bare minimum, as offices…

The growth of zero emission vehicles on our roads is going to lead to a £40 billion hole in tax revenues from lost fuel duty and vehicle excise duty. Replacing petrol and diesel vehicles with electric vehicles does not fully answer the emissions problem.  The real (but difficult to confront) solution is: fewer trips by…

I saw a mention on Twitter that there are now two tribes when it comes to climate change: doomers and deniers. How can people’s views of reality be so different? Do the doomers need a reality check or the deniers, or both? A reality check, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is “an occasion that causes…

At 220 pages in length the Transport Decarbonisation Plan (TDP from here!) is a reflection of the huge scale of the challenge facing the sector to decarbonise both quickly and completely. So why, when we have just seen the launch of such a critical plan, do we need a Greener Transport Council and why did…