Changing Urban Mobility

In an effort to reduce pollution and CO2 emission, many cities are intentionally making themselves unattractive to individual conventional mobility through regulation or even banning passenger cars. This means that individual mobility by means of passenger cars with combustion engines, and partially even electric, will be increasingly curtailed in the years and decades to come.

Electric mobility has little impact on CO2 emissions when it simply replaces combustion vehicles at equivalent volumes and mobility demand (based on EU electricity mix). The impact in terms of pollutant emissions is even smaller, the only significant difference lying in the absence of residual nitrogen oxides, which is however only one group in the overall NOx emission spectrum in cities.

Generally speaking, the overall environment requires less CO2 and pollutants. Cities need reduced congestion. So in light of the needs of our environment and particularly urban areas, electric passenger cars do not make too much sense, while curbing vehicle traffic altogether actually does.

The problem is that with the availability of transport, particularly cars, cities grew immensely during the 20th century. Even worse, an expansion in charging infrastructure in urban areas and affordable electric cars will increase the draw to cities even more.

With infrastructure mostly based on passenger cars, the abundance of energy and its availability, and dependency on passenger cars having been grown and groomed over more than three generations, it is unlikely that the current or the next generation will be able to backpedal on city planning within a short period of time.

Thus only a considerable reduction in mobility demand will be able to make room for change. However this, too, will be a multi generational process unless this need is shifted mid term from road to rail.

So what needs to be done? With the size of urban developments already expected to grow, electric mobility in the passenger car sector will only aggravate the cities’ crucial problem of congestion. The solution lies, just like the problem, in the field of infrastructure.

While city planners can redesign cities only slowly over numerous decades, governments can support alternatives to conventional mobility within a few years.

This is a plea to administrations to regulate the availability and modality of electric vehicle charging, including payment, and to call for energy providers’ commitment and investment. More importantly though, this is an appeal for more, easier, cheaper and capillary public transit, in particular on rails, in order to leave private transport and space to those who need it such as families with children, elderly or disabled people.

I will rest my case, but not before hoping that my fellow vehicle-developing colleagues may indulge with my environmentalist escapades and not excommunicate me from the automotive community.