The report has been reviewed over 500 international studies and found that policy can play a key role in helping drivers leave their car at home and that UK lags behind the leading countries in use of cleaner modes of travel.
In addition to encouraging low carbon cars, the UK government must not miss the importance of policies to reduce demand for travel.
Jillian Anable, head of transport research at UKERC, commented: We welcome the Government’s recent announcements on low carbon vehicles, but it needs to do much more than support electric cars.
Without managing travel patterns themselves, it is very difficult to meet the technological challenges, including how the electricity is generated, at the scale and pace required. Without effective policies to manage demand for travel, emission cuts through vehicle technology will be made much more difficult and may come too late. This report looks at what can be done to harness the large untapped potential to help people to travel in more efficient ways.
Robert Gross, the lead author of the report, has cautioned against excessive reliance on single policies: Subsidies for low carbon cars are likely to be effective, because the evidence is that people tend to discount long run costs.
There is no point forcing car makers to produce low carbon options if no-one will buy them, so it is right that ambitious regulation is combined with grants and other incentives – including taxes on gas guzzlers – to deliver a transformation of the car fleet. But there is a bigger picture. If car travel becomes cheaper overall and car dependence grows then all our efforts to reduce emissions get harder and may take too long.
The report concludes that advocates for public transport, cycling and walking often miss the potential of more efficient travel patterns, moving services closer to people and reducing car dependence. The report found that there is short run potential in improvements to bus, cycling and walking infrastructure, car sharing and work or school travel plans.
The biggest and long term impacts come through altering travel patterns so that fewer trips rely on the car. Moreover, these policies are most effective when combined with less concerned measures such as parking restrictions, road and fuel prices and reallocation of space away from cars.
Anable also said, It isn’t as simple as persuading everyone to get on their bike – nor is this realistic. Investment in sustainable transport, such as cycling, walking, car sharing and car clubs has great potential but is most likely to lead to carbon savings when we’re not increasing road capacity or making motoring cheaper. Mode switching is important, but even more important is the potential to change journey patterns so that both shorter trips and fewer car trips are made.
The report also shows the advantages of packaging policies together such that problems with one policy can be overcome by another. For example more economical driving styles can have an impact on emissions but need reinforcement through ongoing awareness campaigns, training and stricter enforcement of speed limits.
Similar to that, the absolute reductions in emissions arising from efficiency improvements made over the last decade are lesser than might have been expected. This can be down to rebound effects, people using fuel saved to drive further or faster, or choosing larger cars.
