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Emissions

The Hard Truth About Transport Decarbonisation

Many governments have transport decarbonisation plans. They mostly involve electrifying vehicles and nice words about investing in public and active transport.

The UK published its plan five years ago. This report examines its progress and provides valuable insights for decarbonisation plans everywhere.

Key Takeaways

• The current plans and progress are not reducing carbon emissions fast enough, leading to an overshoot of the carbon budget.
• Size and Age of the Fleet:
  • An additional 10m vehicles are forecast in the fleet by 2050.
  • The embodied emissions of this are significant relative to in-use emissions.
  • The recent ageing of the existing fleet and the continued suppressed sales of new cars make it difficult to achieve the required electrification rates.
• Efficiency of the Fleet:
  • New fossil fuel vehicle sales are anticipated to drive a 6% to 12% reduction in CO2 per km travelled.
  • This represents a significant portion of early-period carbon reduction.
• Road Traffic Levels:
  • Aims to cut the overall distance travelled have been abandoned.
  • The assumed growth rates for car traffic and overall traffic are far higher than the rates observed since the turn of the century.
  • An independent review of the credibility of the road traffic forecasts should be conducted.
  • Road traffic reduction remains the main tool in the box to bridge the gap between the plan and the Carbon Budget expectations.
• Carbon Reduction
  • The anticipated carbon reductions from surface transport have been cut by around 15%.
  • There is an urgent need for a shift to a lower-carbon, more pro-growth strategy.
  • The worst-case scenario suggests an overshoot equivalent to the entire carbon budget for surface transport from 2031 to 2050.
• Scenario Analysis
  • The overshoot can be almost halved by a radical reduction in traffic.
  • Advancing EV uptake for cars, vans and HGVs by around 2 years before the mid-2030s could almost halve the overshoot.
  • Vehicle efficiency measures in the remaining fossil-fuel fleet sold matter but could perhaps only tackle 10% of the overshoot.
  • The only scenario that meets the expectations of the 7th Carbon Budget requires radical reductions in traffic, accelerated EV adoption, and improvements in fossil fuel efficiency. That is not the current plan.
• There remain opportunities for a more radical and exciting rethink of how we access and use vehicles and move around. The report calls for the establishment of a national Task Force to explore this potential.

Comment

Whilst this report is based on the UK, I am confident that the analysis and findings would apply to many countries.

We are simply not decarbonising transport fast enough; we are still investing far too much in improving conditions for moving cars rather than people.

The political challenge is in flux, with the current oil crisis making electric vehicles more attractive, whilst politicians are downplaying their support for net zero.

Unless we get serious about mode shift, we will massively exceed carbon budgets.

What Next?

Do you have the policies in place, and are you making the right investments to decarbonise transport at the pace required?

Walking

Pedestrian Safety in the US: Progress, Promise, and a Funding Gap

Pedestrian safety has become a greater concern in the United States (and elsewhere) because of significant increases in pedestrian fatalities and injuries.

​This publication from the National Academies in the United States looks at the state of practice of state departments of transportation (DOTs) on pedestrian safety enhancement activities, strategies, and initiatives.

Key Takeaways

• The findings indicate that state DOTs recognise the benefits of active transportation.
• State DOTs have highly integrated pedestrian safety into their policies and processes, utilising both systemic and project-level approaches.
• State DOTs utilise a wide range of strategies and initiatives, including the Safe System Approach, to enhance pedestrian safety.
• Speed management and Vision Zero programs have the highest overall level of current or planned future adaptation for pedestrian safety.
• Engineering countermeasures and strategies for speed management are widely used.
• Technologies that are being piloted or explored by state DOTs include:
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) (e.g., investigating the use of near-miss datasets from connected vehicles, studying pedestrian activity, enhancing data reliability from crash narratives, and collecting data for asset inventory and condition)
  • Light detection and ranging (lidar) and/or radar to extend the pedestrian walk interval and analyse sidewalk condition
  • Near-miss cameras to help identify potential pedestrian crash concerns.
• Responding state DOTs perceive funding constraints and data availability as the biggest challenges to their efforts to enhance pedestrian safety.

Comment

There are lots of positives to take away from this research in terms of state DOTs' will, processes and practices to improve pedestrian safety.

However, it is unlikely to see the step change in road safety that the United States needs to bring it into line with other OECD countries, unless it tackles the lack of funding by reprioritising funds away from road expansions.

What Next?

Do you have a comprehensive strategy to improve pedestrian safety, including adequate funding?

Strategy

Can We Measure Car Dependency and Use It to Drive Change?

To achieve a mode shift away from motor vehicles, we must reduce 'car dependency'. But how can we measure it? This research developed a car dependency index and used it to examine car dependency across cities in Europe and North America.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding the spatial patterns of access that generate car dependency is essential for designing effective and equitable transport policies.
• The Car Dependency Index (CDI) quantifies the accessibility gap between private and public transport across 18 cities in Europe and North America:

• They develop a fine-grained index based solely on potential access to essential services and leisure activities, capturing each area’s capacity to support car-free living.
• The research used high-resolution geospatial data and numerical simulations.
• The results show that car dependency remains a primary driver of car ownership even when accounting for income.
• Systemic, network-level transit expansions are essential to dismantle car-based systems and foster equitable, sustainable urban mobility.
• This index can be easily adapted to evaluate the feasibility of implementing strategies to reduce car usage by identifying areas where car removal is viable without significantly reducing residents’ and commuters’ mobility.
• The framework provides policymakers with an objective, scalable tool to identify viable areas for car-free zones and target infrastructure investments effectively.
• Greater proximity to amenities, more easily achieved in denser areas, is associated with lower levels of car ownership
• Examining Vienna, districts with similar mean income have very different motorisation rates, linked to residents’ differing needs to own a car to access opportunities in the city.
• Looking at Rome's metro expansions, they show that achieving a meaningful, city-wide decrease in car dependency would likely require a coordinated expansion of the metro network rather than isolated interventions.

Comment

The CDI provides a useful way to quickly visualise where access to amenities needs improvement in a city.

Even in a city like Vienna, which has a strong reputation for cheap public transport, there are very high levels of car dependency, questioning whether they should have focused on expanding public transport rather than providing it cheaply.

Building public transport infrastructure to achieve a mode shift away from cars is not sufficient. The new infrastructure must offer a more desirable alternative to driving a car. This is why achieving mode shift often needs both the carrot of new infrastructure and services and the stick of making driving less desirable, such as through a congestion charge.

It is also unclear how closely the CDI aligns with equity considerations. Are the highest car-dependent areas also those with the highest levels of transport inequity? This feels likely, but it would be good to see it analysed.

What Next?

Do you have a way of visualising car dependency across your city?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​Will 2026 be the year of the gondola in Queenstown? - A blog looking at a gondola project being developed in New Zealand.
• ​How Copenhagen built a metro for free - A YouTube video explaining the history of how Copenhagen built its metro.
• ​Anne Hidalgo and Norman Foster Have Lessons on Designing Public Space - A Bloomberg article summarising a conference forum with the former mayor of Paris and the world-renowned architect.

Podcast

Road Safety - Today's Challenges

The latest Transport Leaders podcast is the second part of our road safety series. In this episode, we discuss the challenges in our existing approaches to road safety.

You can listen here​

You can watch here​