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podcast episode12 image credit - Mike Malone, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia CommonsAre world leaders "delusional" when it comes to active travel? COP26 discussed, plus how to layer up for winter riding on episode 12 of the road.cc Podcast
“Out of the galaxy delusional”… that’s a flavour of what Bike Biz founder and current Forbes and Guardian contributor Carlton Reid thought of the conversations being had at COP26 about eco-friendly transport. So just why were so many electric car brands allowed to flaunt their wares and “openly tout for business” at the world’s biggest climate summit, when the CEO of Britain’s foremost folding bike brand was reportedly refused a pass to even attend the event?
We already knew there was a fair bit of perceived hypocrisy happening outside COP26, held in Glasgow earlier this month. Who can forget the sight of the US president's gas-guzzling motorcade arriving, or the story of the cycling advocate who wasn't allowed to cycle through a barrier on a permitted route near the COP26 site? It turns out things were not much better, if not worse, on the inside, as Carlton Reid explained.
"Cycling advocates were lining the streets saying "car, car car", and that was incredibly accurate," he said.
"Once you got past the barriers... and certainly on the transport day... there was a little bit of aviation, a little bit of shipping in the morning, but the rest of the day was just cars.
"The UCI had an event there, but it was all fringe. It was not an agenda item.
"Considering we have a transport cyclist as a prime minister, it just beggars belief that cycling was missed off.
"If this event was in Amsterdam then cycling would have been top of the agenda.
"Heaven help us when it's in Egypt next year."
Even more remarkably, Carlton claims that Will Butler-Adams, the CEO of Britain's biggest folding bike brand Brompton, was actually refused a pass to get into the main event at COP26, making way for numerous car manufacturers to exhibit and discuss money-making schemes for the future.
"Not only were bike executives not invited to be on the same top table as auto car industry executives; bike industry executives were actually physically shunned, which I find completely shocking.
"That focus on electric cars being the saviour of everything is just so delusional. It's out of the galaxy delusional that electric cars are going to save us.
"If that's genuinely what they [world leaders] are thinking, they've got no idea."
We also have cycling apparel experts Altura on board for the next four episodes, and to welcome them George caught up with the brand's head of design and development Amy Spencer. How do you layer up properly for winter riding, and what materials are best for keeping you warm and dry without getting that boil in the bag feeling? Amy tells you everything you need to know.
The road.cc Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music, and if you have an Alexa you can just tell it to play the road.cc Podcast – it's also embedded further up the page, so you can just press play.
What do you think of the road.cc Podcast so far, and what would you like us to discuss in future episodes? Comment below and/or drop us a line at podcast [at] road.cc
Jack has been writing about cycling and multisport for over a decade, arriving at road.cc via 220 Triathlon Magazine in 2017. He worked across all areas of the website including tech, news and video, and also contributed to eBikeTips before being named Editor of road.cc in 2021 (much to his surprise). Jack has been hooked on cycling since his student days, and currently has a Trek 1.2 for winter riding, a beloved Bickerton folding bike for getting around town and an extra beloved custom Ridley Helium SLX for fantasising about going fast in his stable. Jack has never won a bike race, but does have a master's degree in print journalism and two Guinness World Records for pogo sticking (it's a long story).
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World leaders, even those who recognise climate change as an existential threat, have a tricky job convincing their own populations to make changes to their lifestyles. Especially when so many of those changes involve extra cost or simply being restricted from doing things we previously could. Meaningful change has to come from the bottom up as it were. That's you and me making decisions about how we spend our money and who we vote for.
I have a cousin in Australia. For the last couple of summers Australia has literally been on fire, clearly linked to climate change. She posted video of the woodland at the end of her road blazing. Her latest FacePlant posting?
Greta thunberg already pinned the tail on these donkeys...
Actually, it isn't world leaders who are delusional, but the car buying public, who happily believe that buying an EV will give them a free pass in the environmental game of Russian roulette the present climate proposals have set us on.
However, what Carlton Reid failed to pick up on is that the motoring industry has moved away from it's previous business model of 'piling them high, selling them cheap' which worked well with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles where money can be made to keep the dealer network in place with servicing costs, but is almost negligible in a vehicle with only one moving part in its electric motor.
A new direct sales model is very much coming to the fore where higher prices are charged upfront for the purchase of a vehicle but what would be typically covered by either warranties or additional servicing costs is inclusive from day one. Therefore, the days of cheap cars is very much coming to an end and those who live in larger towns and cities will find that their unfettered access to the 'open road' will be curtailed over the next decade and beyond.
Governments around the world are pinning their hopes on autonomous vehicles to provide a cheap, reliable means of transport, but the technology is still a decade, or more likely two away yet, so there is a huge hole in the transport sector looming by 2030, where active travel, certainly in larger urban areas could become the norm.
Don't hold your breath.....
Just about every industry now has a "tech" dimension and they've all realised that the banks were right all along - get people onboard then regularly suck small amounts of money from them and you come out ahead compared to emptying as much of their pockets as possible at once.
Cycling isn't the answer either, what we need is a fundamental return to how society was pre-car. Less travel, make more of your local area. Travel is still far too cheap because it doesn't price in the full costs at point of use. Current levels of personal transport use are unsustainable. Best way to change it is to ban storage of personal vehicles on-road, or make it prohibitively expensive to do so. Make driving the preserve of those who can afford it.
At least with Covid, people are now more likely to be able to work remotely and not need to commute as much.
What's also needed is to stop designing homes/shops/villages around car use and instead bake in useful footpaths/cyclepaths so that residents can visit shops easily without wanting to drive.
Although we don't all live near to the shops. A town trip for me is 4-5 miles there which is easy for a regular cyclist and would be easy for anyone who has an ebike. And dare I say, for those dreaded escooters. Trips of up to 2 miles are quite high and up to 5 is about 60-65% of journeys, so it is those that cycling can target.
I agree with most of this including "less travel" but surely - unless we're going all the way back to the horse (or squirrel?) in that it's better stated as something like:
"Trying to replace how we use cars now with bikes (cf "electric motorbikes") isn't the answer. Cycling is however ideal for efficient (possibly load-carrying) shorter distance travel - which is the kind we will need to be doing"?
Why is cycling for journeys within towns not the answer? I don't think anyone is suggesting replacing cars with bikes entirely, but by following the dutch model you can rapidly reduce short journeys by making them difficult. Of course whenever this is tried some shouty drivers throw their toys out of the pram and start breaking things.
As a well-known badger of the faith, if I may, I'd like to invoke St Augustine to shed some light.
" Lord make me chaste...... just not yet"
We still all want to kick the can down the road, for our children to save the day. after all we've got Christmas coming up, next years holiday to plan etc etc. We just haven't got time to think about Saving the Planet™.....
The youngest cub only last week ended up with a consequence at school. Her crime? tearing her teacher off a strip, who'd stated grandly that it was her generation's task to sort out the mess.
We've fucked it up. And we continue to fuck it up. We'll keep fucking it up. We earnestly all say we want to "do our bit for the environment", but I still need my Rangerover. Maybe I'll sell it (2 years old, so still some value) and buy a Tesla Truck. I'll consume my way to helping the environment. Yes that's it....
Due to our decades of inertia, fecklessness, laziness and crass irresponsibility (carrying on as before , voting in Tories or Tory Lites, cos they say we can all get richer and richer, and isolate ourselves from the rest of the world and reality itself) we now, to have any hope, need to change our society and our lives on a similar scale that the Greatest Generation were forced to in the late 30s. Until we realise as a society it starts with us, now, we are winding down the clock so our kids have to deal with the mayhem that is already starting.
It makes me facking larf that the same bunch of goons who pretend to hold that generation up as gods, are the same sugar snowflakes that cant' abide the thought of cycling or walking a couple of miles in the wet.
Well fecklessness sounds like the result of chaseness...
Dammit, I'm being serious for once🤬😠
WTF, I'd speak to the head, the teacher needs a consequence for that statement. How can anyone still in school now be sorting out achieveing ero carbon by 2030?
This is the attitude of someone who knows what they are doing is destroying the only planet we have, but doesn't care enough to change their actions.
I shit you not. But the attitude is common
We've already seen a rapid rise in the convenience of internet shopping and the devastating effect that is having, coniciding with the current pandemic, on the high street and retailers in general. That fundamental shift will determine what shape town and city centres will take in the future. Councils need to recognise this and lower rents to attract new business. Shops may play a part in the future but there will have to be something else to attract people away from their screens and keyboards
Councils own very few investment properties, so that would be tricky. Although some can focus on small business units as start ups
I think there are various reinforcing loops here e.g. our governments encouraged (they still do!) car use. That facilitated a whole bunch of changes (living further from resources, not using local shops so much, reduction in rail connectivity and other public transport, the dwindling of cycling for short journeys to nothing etc.) which mean that "the high street" was already wobbly as the internet started to undercut their prices in the late nineties into the noughties.
Certainly internet shopping has changed the landscape but I think the effect of transport choices - albeit that's a longer term trend - is significant. On the positive side people are still quite keep travel somewhere to meet up with others and actually get their hands on goods before buying some of them. Now if only there was a way we could facilitate that on a local scale...? Or a way we could have the convenience of home delivery without all the extra motor vehicles?
I think we should see electric cars as a transition technology.
How long did it take the Netherlands to move from a car centric society to its current situation?
Decades I believe.
We are much further down the road of car dependency than they were when they started the transition to active travel.
It will take a long time to wean society off cars and some degree of car dependency is now likely permanent.
This is even more true in the US.
As we begin the transition away from cars we need to rapidly minimise the carbon intensity of car use in the interim. Electrification is one part of that.
My main issue with electric cars is that they do nothing to move society away from car dependency and in some respects they reinforce the car culture. It's particularly bad when new homes are required to have electric car charging points built in, but no requirement for secure cycle storage. Also, electric cars are well suited for short journeys so they reinforce the attitude of "popping down the nearby shops, but I've paid loads for that car so I may as well use that even though it's only a five minute walk".
I agree.
The electrification of cars is merely mitigating the environmental damage caused by car dependency.
Steps to reduce car dependency should occur simultaneously but will inevitably take a long time.
There will be a long period of continued high car use and some car dependency is probably permanent now so our only option is to produce cars that are less environmentally damaging. Electrification is one part of that.
If we consider that a car will last 15 years, and that 15% of all new sales are electric cars. Then we see a whopping 1% of petrol cars replaced per year, extending this to 2030 sees 9% of petrol cars replaced in that time.
Relying only on swapping ICE cars for electric cars is never going to get us close to meeting emissions reductions.
especially when 40% of our electrcity still comes from gas. There cannot be continued high car usage for a long period.
I'm afraid car dependency is pretty much baked in for the foreseeable future.
There have been so many houses built whose occupants genuinely need a car to get anywhere.
That's even more true in the US.
EVs will make up an ever growing percentage of car sales and UK electricity generation will get less and less carbon intensive so the overall effect is likely to be greater than you suggest.
There was a survey done locally to me recently among both businesses & individuals. Both groups identified as among their top priorities cheaper or even free car parking as being vital to the success of town centres.
And a significant number in the individuals group, strongly agreed with the statement that nothing could be done to get them out of their cars to visit those town centres, it was cheaper parking or they'd just visit the out of town shopping estates in their cars instead, where parking was free.
On the flip side of the UK and US, other countries on the continent have managed to boost the percentage of other modes of transport while people still have access to cars and indeed still own lots of them. These places also had car dependency. There may be differences in how far down that road (ha) they were.
The UK aped the US in many ways - including some urban design patterns - but hasn't had quite the level of suburban sprawl that the US has. What has happened is we did not build - or even reduced accessibility for - other forms of transport at the same time as local amenities were centralising (e.g. small towns losing their shops to bigger stores in a neighbouring town as well as just "out of town shopping centres"). This was at least in part due to political choices - again all governments here.
Much as I dislike it something there is in UK politics and culture that doesn't love a bike. Or rather which completely swoons at a motor.
I don't quite share your optimism over autonomous cars but they would help in reducing journeys.
I would like to see some legislation on the size of cars. There is no need for the huge cars we have nor for a default need for 4 seater cars. Having a small 2 seater car would make congestion and parking easier and require less energy to run. Then there would be a neighbourhood hire car of 5 seats for any family trips.
I agree 100%.
VED needs to be replaced with a tax based on size, weight and emissions.
That would encourage smaller cars and therefore reduce road wear and tear and congestion whilst increasing parking capacity.
Neighbourhood hire cars are a great system. The Enterprise car club has a years membership for £10 at the moment if anyone fancies it.
VED needs to be replaced by a tax on fuel used which should also include an element for third party insurance. If the cost of a short journey was not heavily subsidised by people who use their cars little but still have to pay VED and insurance for NOT using their cars may be some journeys would be avoided. If the fuel tax also included an element to subside public transport that would be even better. In my situation the car parking charge and fuel cost for a trip to town is cheaper than the equivalent bus journey. That's just stupid. Doesn't affect me much as I cycle most journeys.
I agree with this, but if people are driving circa 10,000 miles a year, using 1000 litres each. moving £200 VED onto fuel will increase the cost of journeys by less than 15% it will still be cheaper than public transport.
There is also a huge admin advantage to this, the cost of collecting revenue on fuel sold does not change as the rate goes up, while there is significant cost in administering and enforcing VED payments.
Additionally it removes the ridiculous incentive to drive old cars which are VED exempt. If they really are classic cars that rarely see theroad the amount they will be charged is negligable, while it someone is using the car all the time, it will be taxed accordingly
And what should we do about electric cars?
Ideally tax the electricity used to charge the battery. Obviously difficult so the best I can come up with is tax the battery to reflect the environmental damage caused by it's production and it's disposal and increase tax on tyres and brakes to reflect the fact that these produce as much pollution as the fuel used. Electric cars have increased tyre and brake wear due to their weight.
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