Good day my good friend.
I am typing this email from a place of bliss. That bliss being a train on the East Coast Mainline. It is joyous, not least because I get to visit the Cathedral for trains that is Kings Cross Station.
Beautiful.
If you have any suggestions for interesting news items or bits of research to include in this newsletter, you can email me.
James
The life cycle impacts of e-bikes are better compared to petrol vehicles. No shock there then
Life cycle assessments are becoming all the rage when trying to compare different modes of transport. And there is no shortage of research into this. But another research article to add to the pile is comparing e-bikes and electric cars with petrol cars in the UK. As this latest research does. The research is not exactly shocking in its conclusions, which is something I have repeated in full here. In summary, the benefits of e-bikes far outweigh their size:
Results showed that BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles) and e-bikes reduce CO2, and this reduction can increase with change in electricity mix and battery recycling. Advantages of e-bikes are not proportional to the weight of the vehicle. Non-exhaust emissions are significant to respiratory effects and human toxicity, so are noise reductions due to the use of electric vehicles.
There is a lot of embedded carbon in transport infrastructure. Who knew?
Concrete has built our world. It is also a major source of carbon emissions globally, accounting for 8% of emissions on its own. It is the most consumed product in the world apart from water (apparently). When we build transport infrastructure, even if its a cycle track, we consume carbon. A major challenge is that we don’t know quite how much carbon is embedded when we build infrastructure.
A new report by Decarbon8, where good friend Greg Marsden is a co-author, touches on this, and provides a good overview of the state of the art when it comes to embedded emissions. It concludes that more work needs to be done to understand this whole issue. A finding interesting to me was the emissions from maintaining the network are likely to be as significant as those embedded when it was built. This is excellent research that you should read.
Fossil fuels isn’t just about the environment. It is a strategic defence issue.
One of the more interesting projects I have worked on was scenario planning for transport with the UK Ministry of Defence. Their observations on this came from a unique perspective: how will wider changes in transport affect the defence of a nation? This typically took on two forms: how will supply chain vulnerabilities change (e.g. will shifts in global supply chains put them through unstable regions?) and where are new attack sources likely to come from? If you want a really good, and accessible, example of this, the CIA World Factbook is a great read.
One of our conclusions was that while the vulnerabilities associated with new energy sources are uncertain, fossil fuels are a national security weak spot. The simple fact is that if you maximise the use of your own resources to meet your energy needs, you become more energy secure than with a vulnerable supply chain. But this is challenging, as it requires nations to balance their energy use with their supply potential. With current events putting energy security front and centre, maybe we need to see net zero transport as a contributor to national security as well.
Random things
These links are meant to make you think about the things that affect our world in transport, and not just think about transport itself. I hope they do just that.
The US Copyright Office says an AI can’t copyright its art (The Verge)
The Great Resignation is also the Great Retirement of the baby boomers. That’s a problem. (Washington Post)
America’s largest inland port is running out of water (Grist)
What happens when you train senior civil servants in econometrics? (World Bank)
Something interesting
If you do nothing else today, then do this
Did you know that before yesterday, there were 3 million Ukrainian refugees as a result of the internal conflicts in the country? There are likely to be more now, and many more people who need your help. Here is a list of links to causes you can donate to provided by Ukrainians themselves.
Mobility Matters 