Transportation

Driving Down Car Use in Great Britain

- Dan Harrison

A recent article in The Independent highlights how car use in England is on the decline. A combination of factors (including high gas prices, poor congestion, and general disdain for internal combustion engines) has lead to fewer people getting their licenses, and fewer people using their cars.

[Steve] Goodwin [professor of transport policy at the University of the West of England] has been building his argument for peak car in a series of articles in Local Transport Today. His evidence includes that fewer young people are learning to drive. Between 1992 and 2007, the number of 17- to 20-year-olds who held licences fell from 48 per cent to 38 per cent, and for 21- to 29-year-olds, the number fell from 75 per cent to 66 per cent. Also, there has been a decline in private transport’s share of trips from 50 per cent in 1993 to 41 per cent in 2008. And, according to Lynn Sloman, director of Transport for Quality of Life, between 2004 and 2008, car trips per person went down by 9 per cent and car distance per person by 5 per cent.

Of course, this doesn’t amount to incontrovertible evidence of the beginning of the end for cars – it could be a momentary blip, an aberration – but it would be foolish not to have this debate now, given the paucity of Government funds, and given the long planning horizon of most public works.

Have a look at the rest of the article here.

Mobile Phones for Better Public Transit

- Adam Clare

For reasons that I don’t fully understand people equate car ownership with freedom (I primarily see it as an increase in transportation costs). As a result a lot of people are hesitant to give up the cars as they perceive their supposed freedom of mobility as a necessity.

Thankfully some new research has come out from Latitude Research that shows how the use of mobile phones combined with transit can get people out of their cars and onto the streets.

The results of the study indicate that, while users value the freedom and control a car provides, mobile information solutions could replicate this sense of autonomy without needing to own a car—primarily by helping users to make informed, in-the-moment decisions about what’s available near them and the best ways to get around. “Real-time and personalized transit information has the ability to make public transit a more flexible, equitable, and enjoyable experience, thus minimizing the perceived experience gap between car ownership and other modes of transit typically thought less convenient or accessible by would-be users,” explains Marina Miloslavsky, study lead and Senior Research Analyst at Latitude.

Study participants—18 regular car users who agreed to go car-free for one week—experienced unexpected benefits as a result of re-thinking their daily transit. Two-thirds reported that the car-free week exposed them to new things, and twice as many participants felt more integrated into their communities than had expected to before the study week, with the majority also citing health and money-saving reasons to reduce their reliance on driving.

The full study can be found here.

Bixi Launches in Toronto!

- Dan Harrison 1 Comment

This morning, the bike sharing program Bixi officially launched in Toronto! Toronto joins Montreal, London, Melbourne, Washington, Minneapolis (the most bicycle friendly city in America) and others with bike sharing programmes.

Bixi is still in its infancy, but the principle of economical short-term bicycle sharing (anything 30 minutes or less is free if you have a subscription!) has been wildly successful around the globe. The relatively small service area and number of stations will likely grow as subscriptions and corporate sponsorship increase.

Read more at The Toronto Star, or get yourself a membership at Bixi Toronto!

SkySails Signs a Deal

- Adam Clare

In 2007 we looked at SkySails when they were still in the startup phase of their company and today they have signed a large deal with Cargill, a large shipping company. Cargill will use SkySails starting later this year to save up to 30% of their fuel costs.

SkySails are a sails that attach to the front of the boat to help tow a boat along in open seas. The use of a rather large sail helps lower transportation costs while lowering the shipping industry’s impact on the environment.

Plans are in place next December to install one of these giant kites on a handysize vessel of between 25,000 and 30,000 deadweight tonnes, which the company has on long-term charter, making it the largest vessel propelled by a kite in the world. It is hoped to have this system fully operational in the first quarter of 2012.

G.J. van den Akker, head of Cargill’s ocean transportation business, said that “the shipping industry currently supports 90 percent of the world’s international physical trade. In a world of finite resources, environmental stewardship makes good business sense.” A recent United Nations study cited by Cargill says that up to 100 million tons of carbon dioxide could be saved every year by the broad application of the SkySails’ technology on the world merchant fleet.

Read some more here.

More Cyclists = Safer Cyclists

- Dan Harrison

In a recent report from the City of Minneapolis (recently voted the best city in the US to ride), data shows that the more cyclists are on the roads, the fewer the collisions there are between cars and bikes.

For 2008, the most recent year for which complete data were available, the crash rate was one-quarter that of 10 years earlier. Moreover, a trend line shows a steady decrease in the crash rate even as the number of commuting cyclists more than doubled.

These findings are consistent with other cities too!

It squares with a 2003 analysis on biking and walking in two California cities. “A person is less likely to collide with a person walking or biking if more people walk or bicycle,” public health consultant Peter Jacobsen wrote in the journal Injury Prevention.

So if you want to feel safer on your bike, get your friends on the road too!

Read the whole article at The Star Tribune.

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