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news
Cyclists and pedestrians in Castle Park, Bristol (image: Adwitiya Pal)Cycling short distances instead of driving could save million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year, transport charity says
At a time when average cycling distances are falling to their lowest levels in a decade, one million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions could be saved every year if people who currently travel short distances by car cycled instead, a transport charity has claimed.
New research undertaken by shared transport charity Collaborative Mobility UK (CoMoUK) has found that millions of daily commutes by car owners in England and Wales could be easily completed by bike or e-bike.
At the moment these short car journeys amount to one per cent of the emissions caused by domestic UK travel, prompting CoMoUK to point out the potential for shared transport initiatives, such as cycle hire schemes, to make a “significant contribution to the drive for net zero”.
As well as encouraging people to swap their car for a bike for everyday trips, the charity called for “urgent action” in the wake of new Department for Transport statistics which revealed this week that greenhouse gas emissions from transport are rising steadily.
The DfT’s data, which was released on Thursday, confirmed that UK domestic transport emissions were on the rise again in 2021 and 2022, following a huge reduction caused by Covid pandemic-era lockdowns.
In 2022, domestic transport accounted for 28 per cent of the country’s total domestic emissions, making it the largest emitting sector of the economy by a considerable margin.
Meanwhile, domestic transport emissions have fallen by a paltry 12 per cent since 1990, compared to 50 per cent for the UK’s total domestic emissions over the same period.
And in 2022 alone, domestic transport was responsible for 113.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent being released into the atmosphere, a two per cent rise compared to 2021.
Faced with these alarming figures, CoMoUK’s chief executive Richard Dilks said that the transition to, and government backing for, active travel and shared transport is crucial to “drive down emissions”.
“These figures are clearly worrying, as they show that with the exception of the pandemic years, emissions from domestic transport have stayed stubbornly high for 30 years,” Dilks said.
“If we are to have any hope of reaching net zero, it is imperative that domestic transport emissions fall sharply, but instead they are rising. This simply has to change.
“Our research has shown that a national expansion of shared transport provision could help governments and local authorities across the country drive down emissions.
“There is enormous and unrealised potential for this innovative sector to take more cars off our roads, cut traffic congestion further, improve our air quality and help us reach net zero.
“It was heartening to hear transport minister Simon Lightwood say at the CoMoUK conference last week that shared transport is ‘central’ to the government achieving its aims – we now need to see firm action to back that sentiment up.”
While cycling has been viewed as pivotal to the fight against climate change, this recent rise in emissions has also coincided with a fall in cycling levels in the UK.
In August, think tanks and campaigners urged the Labour government to act quickly on their active travel promises after official figures revealed that distances cycled annually in England have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade, while car journeys continue to rise.
According to figures released by the Department for Transport as part of its annual National Travel Survey, cycling accounted for two per cent of all trips made in England in 2023, and one per cent of distance travelled on average.
The average person made 15 cycling trips throughout the year, the same number as 2022, but down from the high of 20 annual trips in 2020.
Cycling’s decline in England since its pandemic-related boom four years ago was also strikingly evident in the average cycling miles travelled, which fell to levels last seen in 2013. According to the DfT’s figures, the average person in England cycled 47 miles during 2023, just over half of the high-water mark of 2020, which saw 88 miles travelled on average by bike.
However, 2023’s average distance was also 17 per cent down on the previous year’s figure of 57 miles per person, and below the pre-pandemic average of 54 miles in 2019.
Meanwhile, the distance travelled by car, while still lower than 2019, continued to climb in the post-lockdown era, according to the DfT’s stats. Car trips, either as a driver or passenger, made up 78 per cent of the average distance travelled in 2023, an increase of almost 500 miles per person since 2022.
Responding to the survey’s findings, Catherine Woodhead, the chief executive of active travel group Living Streets, said at the time: “It’s clear there’s work needed to help get more of us walking and wheeling. The government needs to invest in making streets both safer and more welcoming for everyone, and that includes an end to pavement parking.”
“It’s great to see more people embracing walking as transport, but the plateau of cycling figures suggests more needs to be done to improve our cycle network, improving health, and reducing the burden on NHS,” added the Campaign for Better Transport’s Michael Solomon Williams.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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If ever there was an argument for restricting driving in the UK it's this. The lazy, selfish petrolheads won't listen to reason, so compulsion is the only way. Unfortunately no politician will have the guts to do it.
I think this is a useful argument for a tiny fraction of the population.
Like our relatives, human primates are intensely sensitive to others getting things that they are not. Dedication may evaporate in the face of other people not just cheerfully helping themselves to what we've passed on, but mocking us for not doing so ("hair shirt" / "virtue signalling" / "living in a cave").
The most effective arguments are probably those like "nicer places" or "it can be as quick AND less stressful to cycle / catch the bus to work" - you're promising some kind of jam, if not tomorrow then fairly soon. However this is very delicate because we have only have smears of jam to offer right now! It's hard not to appear simply to be restricting the favourite treat (car). We won't have whole pots of jam available until a reasonable number of people have decided to drive less.
This is a case of tell us something we don't know. However, I will be keeping this link handy for the next tine I have a run-in with a cyclist-hater.
A lot of people are intelligent enough to know that jumping in the car to pop 2 mins to the shops is bad for the environment. The trouble is we don't give enough of a shit.
Its the same as the people looking at the floods in Spain and saying how tragic it is seeing as it's a favourite holliday destination, somewhere they fly to every year and hire a car to drive around. We struggle to join the dots between our individual actions and outcomes that appear on a massive scale, seemingly way beyond our sphere of influence.
That's what's so frustrating. Outright climate change deniers are rare in the UK (I hate to say it, but we probably have Thatcher to thank for that), albeit the influence of deniers from the US is beginning to show, and there is a growing number of organised climate change minimisers and those who want to delay action. But on top of that, there are a lot of people who do appear to accept we are living in a climate emergency, but can't believe their personal actions are relevant. They might think (with reason) that most of the hard work need to be made by governments, but then they complain when governments at all levels take necessary actions.
Even those that support a bit of extra tax to support collective actions will then convince themselves that their wasteful car use or latest city break doesn't make any difference.
An old school friend, who I know isn't short of cash because she was telling me how they avoided paying inheritance tax on her in-law's estate, also told me they couldn't afford a heat pump. But also - 'isn't it terrible that olive oil is so expensive now'. The disconnect is real and widespread.
It's a knotty problem! We may well be like people over 100 years back when faced by the putative horse manure crisis. We might be able to realise the position we're in but that doesn't necessarily mean we can get back out.
There is considerable distance in space, time and result between our actions and the consequences. Most individuals' contribution is miniscule. Then there's essentially zero feedback that would allow you to "tune" your actions appropriately.
We're not even clear on the specific consequences (locally). We are more certain of the general ones of course.
Also - opposite direction of human endeavour - people do make sacrifices / accept reductions in stuff but only in limited circumstances. This is "tragedy of the commons" stuff: if only everyone could agree a mechanism of cooperation much benefit could be gained with less effort. But cooperation is hard! And even more so where the actions of a indiviuals don't have obvious, immediate consequences.
Tell her to go to Lidl's.
Olive oil is expensive in Lidl too!
Everyone cares deeply about the environment...until they actually have to be mildly inconvenienced.
My issue with this is that I don't own a bike that I am comfortable having stolen, and in another news item (I think on this very website) we have been told that bikes can be stolen from even outside of Scotland Yard with complete impunity.
I don't want to buy and house a "disposible" bike but even my "second" bike is too valuable to me for me to consider it worth the risk of leaving it anywhere.
My employer has bike lockers that I think might work as a solution but the lack of secure bike storage at supermarkets and other facilities kind of rule this out for me.
My local supermarket is 0.8 miles away. There is a bigger one 2.7 miles away.
Years ago in the 90s I used to always drive to the big one because congestion made getting to the nearer one so difficult. I was one of those short distance drivers.
Some years later I started cycling to work and from then on I cycled to the nearer supermarket, which I did for maybe 10 years until I just couldn't stand the aggression of drivers. On back streets in particular drivers not yielding when I was in the narrow sections between all the parked cars felt particularly hazardous and annoying. Having to have cameras running front and back just to do a 5 minute ride to the shops is ridiculous.
Now I consider it safest to walk the 15 minutes or so it takes each way regardless of the weather and how much I need to carry even though I'm aware that walking is not statistically the safest way to travel.
I've also changed the route out to my training route to reduce risk but it is getting really difficult to find safe routes. Previously okay routes just aren't safe anymore.
If walking becomes too dangerous it is not unthinkable that I'd have to go back to driving again.
It is a massive challenge getting people to use bikes for transport when people just keep buying more and more cars, and as a result there's less and less road space available for those that don't want to drive, and those that do drive don't share the space well with other types of vehicles.
Until it gets a lot safer to cycle I just can't see anything changing anytime soon.
In other news, scientists have just discovered that bears shit in the woods.
But things can get very complex when you compare a cyclist that has to do a hot bath afterwards and eat a burger to catch up lost energy. There is not just transport, home and water heating and food are great emitters that we don't think them that much.
News to me that we have to have a hot bath and a burger after every ride.
I have heard rumours that car drivers/occupants may also have a hot bath and a burger too, so I'm not sure that your accounting for externalities is very accurate.
No doubt "we can't have cycling because all the pollution from ebike batteries and carbon-fibre bikes!" ... therefore we continue to promote electric cars (while still retaining ICE ones).
Cycling rather than driving, taking the bus or train (or even walking) is good because it's so energy efficient. And people will still be heating their houses, taking showers and eating burgers however they travel!
Overall though humans are almost certain to continue the trend of increasing resource usage, and not worrying about the impacts until further down the line.
For me it's as much about making the place a bit nicer and giving humans a prompt to be a bit more active and social. Yes - cycling can be a very social travel mode - and is where that is made possible (rather than actively doing the opposite in UK - "two abreast" etc.)
https://aseasyasridingabike.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/side-by-side/
When I first started cycling I used to eat excessively after each of my commute ride (short but with quite enough elevation). Now I understand I didn't really need it, and no big differences.
Also in summer that you can get sweaty surprising easily, I just don't use the warm water and not that bad as imagined. Taking a cold bath in a cold house is really indeed hard though, but in winter you can find that sweet spot of pedaling and not sweating.
So if CO2 really matters to you, small changes can really make a difference.
What is that? Sounds like the worst of all worlds! If I'm pedalling I definitely want to be cycling...
Those interested in "hacks to save the planet" - it's almost entirely the simple "use less" idea. Currently you're going to be outvoted by the billions though (mostly using far less than you, but there are lots of them) plus the vastly excessive usage of those in the US. So better make sure you're enjoying it and it's mentally sustainable for you!
Lol that is indeed the worst, meant sweating, edited it.
I cannot change the world neither wanting to live in a cave, but it is good to try new things that are good to fight climate change and improve air quality. I actually started cycling like that, primarily to reduce carbon footprint compared to car use, but it had hidden benefits I didn't expect, like fitness and great travel times compared to car.
Some people dream of KOMs, opponents beated or get the bike with the 5 digit price they wanted, my targets are CO2 and pollutants reduced and it gives joy too. My opponent is just me without doing this effort.
If CO2 really matters to you, the best thing to do is kill a billionaire.
No need to go that far - just have them neutered. (And nowadays - probably reduce the amount of time they're elderly. Those people are often low-producers and high resource users. Healthcare is a massive resource consumer and ever expanding).
... only ... our mental systems are built around the desireability of becoming one *. So you will need a lot of ammo / surgeons. In fact, that may end up creating a class of people entrusted with that job, who may then get their own ideas about how things should work...
* Of course there is a question over the rate of generation of billionaires from nothing - on inspection quite a few of them turn out to have had a billionaire (or at least millionaire) background. But it does happen. Or at least - many people are highly motivated to become "a bit better than the next person" etc.
Neutering them isn't going to stop them jetting around the world (or even rocketing)
But it would stop them blowing resources in a less sustainable way on their children - a major source of increased consumption [e.g. here] - although disputed e.g. here on the grounds that future environmental policies will limit resources used by them - which is very arguable...
Except - as I've noted - seeing other humans of higher status is often a very powerful motivator for unrelated humans to increase their own resource use.
This is such a defining feature of humanity that the phenomenon of commissioning things just to destroy them is known. (Perhaps even seen in other creatures in the so-called "handicap effect"?)
Far more carrot and stick is needed...
How about a stick made out of carrot ?
How about a bike made out of vegetables?
"CoMoUK" - it must be hard to find a bike that fits you when you're a rhinoceros in space armour...
On the plus side, you wouldn't ever catch one of them riding through a red light...
Just for a perspective:
Only 10 miles of driving emits more CO2 than one square metre of the atmosphere can take (an additional 100ppm). - Yes, one square metre - from the ground into space.
Are you sure about that? That sounds... unlikely. Thats 100km of height ie. 100,000m3 of atmosphere. Are you sure thats not just 1m3.
He obviously meant 1 cubic meter, but you know that
My wife has a disability, walking any distance is a struggle yet she manages to hobble (her words) the half a mile to the town several times a week. To my constant surprise I see people who live a little nearer to town walk no further than their cars. We just need to make driving short distances difficult and as socially unacceptable as drink driving has become in my lifetime.