The Future of Personal Travel

The Welsh Assembly Government has launched an initiative to try to make personal travel more sustainable, essentially by encouraging us to use our cars less for local travel. Deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones said:

“Personalised Travel Planning could become an important part of our transport system, challenging all of us to consider how we could benefit from alternative modes of travel other than the private car and contribute to greater accessibility, social inclusion and sustainability.”

The initiative is about finding ways to encourage more of us to walk, cycle, use public transport or share cars for local trips which tend to be no more than a few miles on average. Even here in rural Powys, the vast majority of our car journeys are under 8 miles and it is these short journeys on cold engines that offer the least efficient use of dwindling reserves of fossil fuel.

The sad fact is that most people regard walking and cycling as leisure activities. At other times, we have become used to moving around without physical effort, and short of having a personal chauffeur, the private car offers the most flexible solution in terms of source, destination, and timing, albeit an expensive and unsustainable one in terms of money and environment. The challenge for the government is to tempt us to take alternatives without coercion. They can do that by making sustainable alternatives more attractive, unsustainable alternatives less attractive, or a combination of the two.

The Welsh Government initiative will try to make sustainable local travel more attractive. It should give city-dwellers, those who have access to public transport, and those who live within a reasonable distance of most of their local destinations, a financially attractive alternative to the private car for local travel. But what’s likely to be offered will probably not be viewed by many as very attractive in other respects. If and when the fossil fuel does run out and/or we decide that burning more of it is going to be really hazardous, we will switch, reluctantly, to viable and more sustainable alternatives. But we may not see these as an improvement over what we have now.

The effortless alternatives to the private car are unattractive in three critical respects:

1. They tend not to start from where you are,
2. …they tend not to go to exactly where you want to go, and
3. …they don’t go (and come back) when you want to.

Since these requirements are likely to be unique to each traveller, it is tough for any shared transport system to deliver them. And to a very large extent, the widespread availability of private cars has created this situation as well as just benefiting from it. If we all had the good sense to live near a bus stop or railway station, and to work, shop, and entertain ourselves near a bus stop of railway station, we would only lose the convenience of travelling just when we wanted to. As it is, our private cars enable us to live miles away from anywhere we might take advantage of the economies of scale that a decent public transport system depends on.

So what’s to be done? If the car industry is to survive and prosper, it needs cars to offer a more sustainable solution to the local travel problem, while retaining as many of the benefits that today’s cars delivered. And that is where the electric car are supposed to help, but general purpose electric cars have a very difficult act to follow.

Electric cars are currently being set an almost impossible set of objectives which become more impossible year by year as conventional cars work on the apparent problem –delivering ever more efficient long range vehicles. To make a feeble first stab at replacing regular cars, electric cars are going to cost twice as much as conventional ones for less than half the “performance” as measured by car industry and the consumers it has educated. The only benefit of electric cars – if you ignore (as most consumers will) congestion charging, pollution, and noise – is that they are cheaper to run. And even then they are only cheaper to run than the most efficient conventional cars because of road and fuel tax they don’t pay. It is hard to see why a normal car customer would switch to buying a first generation electric car.

Everyone will wait for the day when improvements to battery technology and refuelling infrastructure enable electric cars to go as far and as fast as current ones, and to be refuelled in a couple of minutes. But although a few generations of electric car development will undoubtedly improve the performance, that day will never come – or certainly won’t come before the fossil fuel runs out. So although I have little doubt that in a hundred years or so (if we haven’t fried ourselves into extinction) we will be moving around in electrically powered vehicles, I am as positive as I can be that they won’t be moving long distances on battery power.

But having said all that, electric power can meet the local travel needs of most drivers today – the same problem that the Welsh Government is trying to address. For journeys up to about 30 miles round trip – 15 miles each way – it doesn’t make much difference how fast you go. And the battery power you need for a local bus speed trip of 15 miles can be replenished quickly enough for it not to inconvenience you. And the simplest electric vehicle that can deliver that in a reasonably weatherproof way can cost much less than a conventional car. It will satisfy most of your local travel needs as well as the auxiliary problem of transporting you to the nearest mass transit hub for longer journeys.

To start with, a vehicle like this will be a useful second car. You’d use it to go shopping, and to eat out. You’d be happy for your kids to use it, and happier to buy them one if you can afford it. Your “main” car would be used for longer trips, to carry more people, or more cargo. Over time, and for many people, a vehicle like this might become the only vehicle they buy for themselves, because it would fulfil all their local travel needs. They would be happy to rely on shared transport systems – either public bus, train or tram, or perhaps a shared car pool – for everything else.

And we’ll be able to experiment with this kind of “car” very soon. The Renault TWIZY, pictured above will launch in France in 2011, and the U.K. in 2012. It looks like fun, and although the price is rather vague at the moment, Renault intend it to be price competitive with a (high end) motor scooter. This could still be quite expensive, but less than a third of the true price of a “full feature” electric car and critically, competitive with entry level conventional cars. And if Renault find they have a winner here, it does not require any major break-throughs in battery technology let alone battery physics to drive that price down - industrial competition should be enough. The Twizy carries two people in “tandem” formation, so we won’t have to wait for a right hand drive version!

Now the Twizy is clearly not a car, so it hasn’t saddled itself with a specification that competes with today’s cars. There will no doubt be a sport version, but the standard model to be sold in France (where you don’t need a licence to drive it) should deliver a 40 to 60 mile round trip for two people at just less than 30mph. It will completely recharge itself in less than 3 hours, and because of the way batteries work, about half its capacity in less than an hour. That electricity will cost about a pound at today’s price.

If you can’t wait to try the Renault Twizy, you can sign up to try one of our b-bugs this summer in the Brecon Beacons. In exchange for your comments and assessment of the concept, you can have one for three days to see if something like this really could meet your local travel needs. The b-bug isn’t quite as weatherproof as the Twizy, but the ride should be more exhilarating!