 yw'r Seminar Cymru, gyda Professor John White-Leg. Mae'n llefyn i'r John i mi ddod, gweithio'r ffodus i'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod, o'n ddweud y Swi'n Cymru, ac mae'r Swi'n Cymru yn ystod yw'r Minister yw'r gweithio yma yn ein gweithio yma, a'r Swi'n Cyfrannu yn ystod yma yw'r ffodus i'r cyfrannu i'r cyfrannu i'r ffosul ar y cyfnod ffordd o'r cyfnod. Daeth amddai'n ffodol cyfnod ar hyn yn ystod y cyfnod ar gyfer y stocom sydd. Rwy'n meddwl i gyfnod y byddai'n meddwl i'r gwneud, ond mae'r meddwl i ffwyd yn mynd i chi'n meddwl. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i'r meddwl i'r byd yn ystod y byddai'n meddwl i'r meddwl i'r wyf yn ei gynnig. Felly mae'n nhw'n fath i gael John yng Nghymru. over to you, John. Thank you. I will probably destroy the technology. Okay. Thank you very much for that introduction. It is a great pleasure to be here. I joined the Stock Room Environment Institute at the University of York in 2001 and some of the most genuinely exciting and interesting projects I've done in my career where we've colleagues in York in SEI. yw'r cyfnwysbeth ar y cyfnod yw'r ystafell. Mae'r ystyried yw'r prydwyr yn y gallu'r ffordd, a'r ystafell yn rhoi, a'r ffordd, a'r ystafell yn rhoi, ac yw'r Yn Llyfrgell I'n ddiweddd o ymdodol yma'r ysgol, yw'r ysgrifennu, yw'r llwyddon, yw'r argyrchu, yw ysgolau i fynd i gael ymdodol, yw ymdodol i'r amser honno, yw ymdodol i'r llwyddon i'r parlymydd eurofin, the British Parliament, the House of Commons Select Committee on Transport, on most, not all, most aspects of sustainable transport, and all the time striving to bring about a transformation of mobility, so that without damaging the quality of life or the need to carry out daily activities, we shift the whole system away from something which I'll be talking about in the next 35, 40 minutes, away from something which is carbon intensive energy, space intensive, health damaging, ecological damaging and so on, towards something which is actually much more genuinely sustainable, in other words a sustainable transformation. The really unusual part of my presentation today, which is the core of what I'm about to saying, is I think all that activity has not worked. I hesitate to say failed, I don't like the word failed, it has not worked. And with SEI and with other projects I've been involved in, I've had the privilege of working in India, in China, Africa, south of the Sahara, most European countries, constantly with the Australian Government, especially on city transport in Australia, and everywhere the trend is getting worse and you could summarise transport policy including, and it's dangerous of me to say this of course, including in Sweden, transport policy is to make things get worse but more slowly than they might do otherwise. In other words we are reinforcing the trend, so whenever you see a nice big road being built or a new runway to an airport or high speed rail, we're feeding the mobility monster and we're doing it in a way that is actually unhelpful from a sustainable point of view. So the presentation is about what can we do differently, how can we change gear, how can we grasp the whole issue of paradigms, mindsets, political influence, a new direction in terms of scientific analysis and so on, to basically transform mobility and I hope to make some practical suggestions as well. And this is all now quite urgent, not only have we got the Swedish governmental example of a fossil fuel free economy, we've got the new approach sustainable development goals where transportation and road safety is actually there, that was a major achievement and I suspect many in SEI were responsible for that and we contributed. 11.2, climate change which I'll talk about in this presentation today, possibly again I may be stretching my analysis too far but on climate change for example my own work SEI work in York and other work around the world clearly points to the conclusion that our transportation carbon intensity and mobility trends have the potential to defeat the totality of all our climate change. We will fail miserably with anything to do with two degrees, anything to do with 80%, 100% reduction, we will fail totally because transport is booming, the mobility monster is getting larger and larger and larger and like all paradigms is unquestioned. So okay, let's see how we go. What is mobility? So again, I apologise, much of this will be very, very, very familiar to you. Did I do that? Oh dear, I've wrecked it already. Do I press something Ian? Back and now forward. Thank you. A very two, three minute digression on mobility, I'm sure we all understand it but I found when doing the kind of things I do in the European Parliament or the European Commission, the UK Department for Transport, House of Commons Select Committee, there is a fundamental lack of understanding that we're dealing with a long term historical trend which is still growing. Mobility can be measured in many different ways but for all practical purposes we're just interested in how many miles or kilometres we travel every year by all modes and it's growing. There are some fascinating scientific analytical implications behind this trend which I'll mention far too briefly under the heading travel time constant and then make the rather obvious point that it's a very deeply embedded paradigm. So if ever you suggest as I've done to the political leaders of Manchester and Liverpool that we might just a little bit reduce car use and we might head towards a percentage of all trips every day by bicycle that equals Berlin, which is not all that, it's 15% which is pretty good. London with all its hype is 2% and we think we're wonderful in London and we're not. If ever you suggest anything like that the answers are all no, no, no we can't do it, it will damage the economy. So the trend and I will deal with this far too quickly but I hope the presentation can be shared in whatever way you like so you can all look at it in more detail later. There is a vast amount of analysis of this kind and description and prediction and there's a whole other debate I don't have time to go into today around the title predict and provide. Basically mobility is a wonderful example of scientific fraud. What we do is predict the future level of mobility. You know this, I know you know it. We predict the future level of mobility, rail trips, air trips, trips by car. We predict it and then we say oh dear we need more roads, we need more runways, we need more things. We build them and then we say there you are, we were right, we did need them anyway and those things generate the trips. They create the travel and we can talk about that more later if you want. But this is a fairly standard analysis from a group of people of a global mobility study showing that you don't, I'm not going to talk about the numbers. The size of the pie chart if you like gets bigger and bigger and bigger. There's a structural shift as we abandon slower modes and move towards faster modes. So again back to Swedish and British transport policy. Let's make things get worse but more slowly. Let's maximise the amount of distance we travel every year. Let's spend as much as it costs to do so and let's go faster as well as further and that summarises Swedish and British transport policy. If any of you wrote those documents tell me and I will apologise and see you behind the bike shed afterwards. Again lots of diagrams like this linking the growth in passenger kilometres travelled per capita to growth basically in GDP per capita. Now like you I guess I don't like GDP, it's severely flawed but most of transport analysis, most of economic modelling, most of transport prediction is based upon GDP and comparing GDP around the world. And basically any diagram showing mobility trends of that kind will show something like this and you can even get into the regional, you could disaggregate global trends by region. So we have a very fast growing phenomenon. The trend is to travel further and faster and that is replicated in all regions of the world. At the same time as the income goes up and as the passenger kilometres travelled per capita goes up we get a decline in public transport. This vertical scale share of public transport modes in passenger kilometres travelled. Here is a bigger ideology that is at the root of the mobility ideology if you like that public transport in collective things become rapidly associated with socialism and other nasty words with ism on the end. And the promotion of individual modes of transport especially the car and higher speed modes of transport becomes the norm in all our so-called advanced industrial societies. I wanted to point out a scientific flaw in the whole mobility transport economic evaluation cost benefit analysis area. I'd be very interested afterwards in questions and discussion whether this has been discussed in Sweden. But this goes back to the work of a person called Marquetti at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna who has been plodding all. Is it in the DNA? Is it to do with Darwinian evolution, survival of the species? What is it? And I'm not so interested in what is it but it's 1.1 hour a day and Marquetti's work I've written about this in terms of the benefits of that project. So anything to do with the costs of that project, carbon emissions, dead bodies, people in hospital for air pollution are swamped because the benefits are hugely in excess of the cost. But what Marquetti's work shows and someone called David Metz has repeated it in London and I've written about it in my recent book. What this analysis shows that we never do save time. It's really important to grasp this because this is, I think, I may be wrong, I think this is a scientific fraud. We never do save time. We consume time saving benefits as extra distance. So the result of all our massive elaborate cost benefit analysis and transport infrastructure spending simply encourages us to travel bigger distances. So each year we travel further to do our shopping, further to take the kids to school, for everything increases. And that you know again, you know this, if ever you want to frighten yourselves, look at Atlanta and Houston in the States and then look at somewhere like somewhere in Berlin or somewhere in a nice Swedish city. And look at the population density and look at energy per capita, transport distance travel per capita. There is an enormous difference and we're heading more and more towards the lower density, the bigger distances and this. We know this is the case. We know that building transport infrastructure generates extra distance. We know it shifts us dramatically into more and more unsustainability and yet we do it. And I've yet to find a traffic engineer or a policy making outfit in a city council or in a national government who says, ah, but I don't know whether we should have 12 lanes of motorway between Darmstadt and Frankfurt. I'm not so sure that's a good idea because have you read Marquetti's travel time constant? Do you know what impact it will have? And that it's the definition of a paradigm because you're not even allowed to ask the question. And I dare say we will come back to that. So mobility is increasing. We have a very, very, very intensive trend and this is around the world. But is it a problem? Now you will know the arguments because I hear them all the time in Britain that higher levels of mobility, greater levels of car use improves the quality of life, gives access to many things, creates an extremely satisfying and enjoyable lifestyle. But what we don't do in transport enough is actually audit the consequences. And again, far too, far too short a checklist for me today. So we know that higher levels of mobility bring death and injury in road crashes and lots of problems from air pollution. We know this. I've produced a sustainable transport plan for Calcutta in India and we gave up trying to count the number of dead bodies. It's over a thousand pedestrians killed every year. And the city of Calcutta and the state of West Bengal are building flyovers. The Japanese are giving them money to build flyovers called International Development Aid, JICA. And the whole trend in Indian cities towards high levels of mobility and increasing levels of death and injury. It's enormously expensive. We have a discussion in Britain. We're told that we have to reduce the deficit and we're in an age of austerity. We can't pay for education. We can't pay for healthcare. But you can spend any amount of money on roads and high speed rail. It's dead easy. All you've got to say is it's modern and it's efficient. I'll say a little bit about social interaction and community life. The hidden dimension of transport policy and mobility damages older people and it takes up too much space. So this is just a quick audit of the things associated with mobility and the things that actually do get worse as mobility goes up. And the things that are never taken into account as a reason for transforming the nature of mobility to produce a different paradigm. We can manage at lower levels of mobility but a paradigm always rejects the possibility of asking questions. The numbers are I think not too important. Every day 3,200 people are killed on the world's roads. I work with the World Health Organization in Geneva training the road safety leaders of African countries. And it's a very, very difficult task to try and shift mindsets and thinking in Zambia's in bad way of Mozambique about deaths which are increasing rapidly. So 1.2 million a year, 85% of these deaths are in lower middle-income countries. 96% of the child deaths in road crashes are in lower middle-income countries. I don't know if like as in Britain there's a debate in Sweden. We ban the use of the word accident. It is not allowed to use the word accident. There is no such thing as a road traffic accident. And this is the official position of the World Health Organization. The official position of the British Medical Journal and it's something I've argued about for years. Because every fatality in the road traffic environment is predictable and preventable. That does not correspond with the word accident. And it's very important because paradigms are associated with language. So no such thing as an accident. So there are deaths and serious injuries in the road traffic environment. And we know how to eliminate them. And in fact Sweden is quoted all over the world because of Vision Zero. And this is one of the projects I did in York on the Swedish Vision Zero project. Okay, disabilities and large numbers of people, especially in Africa and India, severely disabled for the rest of their lives as a result of a crash, a road traffic crash. And very high costs if we believe the economic analysis around the value of a human life. And that's tricky as well. The audit information, the data goes on and on and on. A couple of slides from this report, the global burden of disease from motorized road transport from a number of prestigious organizations, World Bank University of Washington and so on. It just puts things in an interesting context. When we're talking about mobility, we have to be aware of the negative, the disbenefits, the associations with mobility. So I'm not going to read out the numbers. It's interesting, again, from an ideological or paradigmatic point of view, that you don't get the same kind of discussion around road safety as you do about HIV. The deaths and injuries in road crashes exceeds HIV, exceeds many well known cancers. And quite likely HIV incansors require that amount of attention. But road safety does not grasp the imagination, partly because of the word accident. Over the last decades, road deaths increased by 46%. This is another aspect of mobility. That's a huge increase and that increase the various organizations, like the World Health Organization, are predicting a doubling and a trebling of deaths in the road traffic environment. An interesting little, another scientific point really, if you use official data, it's wrong, road deaths in Africa are underreported by a factor of six. In China, they're underreported by a factor of four. We don't know what it is in India. And that's based on detailed research where you go around hospitals and do counting and then you look at the official data and that's the disparity. I said I would mention social and community interaction type things. I really do think this is an important dimension of mobility, which is totally airbrushed out of the system. I've yet to find in my travels a city administration or a national government or any other agency that takes into account this kind of information. This is from a piece of German research some years ago and in German it was called How Fast Can Your Grandmother Run. And what they did in Germany is go around several cities and with a stopwatch looking at the green light for pedestrians. You press a button, you get a green light after a little wait. I just did that walking here from Central Station. There were lots of places where I had to stand around twiddling my thumbs waiting for a green light. And you measure the width of the road and then you work out the speed. When you get to somewhere like Castle in Germany, grandma's really do have to be athletic and they have to run very fast. Whereas life is a bit better in Hamburg, quite a lot better. A lot of really good British research. My colleague in SEI in York, Gary Hatch, is focusing on transport and the elderly, which is really interesting as a subject. And the elderly are increasingly isolated. They can't cross roads, they're fearful. If they're isolated and they're like friends and contacts, then there's medical research showing that the immune system is damaged and become ill and so on. So we have to identify the social consequences of mobility. So high levels of mobility are, let's us assume, great for those groups in society that can jump in a car or an aircraft or high speed train and run around a great deal. If you're an elderly person with a health problem, it's pretty dire. If you're a child and you want to wander around your neighbourhood, maybe walking and cycling and seeing your friends, it's pretty dire because in Britain, very well researched in Britain, children's independent mobility, we have exterminated the biological option of allowing children to grow and develop in their communities by walking and cycling. We got rid of it because it's too dangerous. And those social consequences are really important. I think many of you will have seen the famous Donald Applyard research in San Francisco many years ago. One of my students repeated this in Bristol in a British city. We can summarise all that quite easily. Basically, the top diagram there is a lightly trafficked street. So you count the number of vehicles. And the bottom diagram there is a heavily trafficked street. And if you look at all the black lines, which always remind me of slug trails in my garden, if you look at the black lines, what you're looking at, this is actual measurements of what people do. And they are going on to the street, crossing the road, talking to neighbours, hanging about, having a nice time using the space as a social resource. Once you get higher levels of traffic, the social resource is exterminated. People do not know their neighbours. They do not associate randomly or accidentally with other people. They don't cross the road very much. And that has a direct impact on how people report their worries and their doubts and their fears about living in their particular community. Again, I challenged traffic engineers in Britain to show me one example where this kind of diagram has been fed into a decision about traffic planning, about a transport plan for Manchester or Liverpool or York or whatever, and never has it been used. It is not used. And it's not used because it is paradigmatically unacceptable. It challenges the existing paradigm. And again, the core element of what I'm trying to say today is to identify that there is a paradigm that we're not allowed to question it and that there's a need to shift the paradigm. This is really important research and it needs to be taken into account. So, for example, we could take this into account, and this is where politicians in Britain, on one occasion I was giving a presentation, and two of them ran out of the room shouting rubbish and slammed the door as they left. So you might like to take advantage of that suggestion yourself. We can use this research and we can close streets. We shut them down, right? We say no more traffic. And the research we've done in Britain, some excellent research called disappearing traffic, shows that Western civilization does not collapse. The world does not come to an end. The economy does not collapse. There are no negative consequences and several hundred people have a happy, healthy, socially interacting, child-friendly, elderly-friendly life. But at the moment, the majority opinion is to encourage traffic, and traffic means cars. So we can close down roads. We can shut roads. I was very pleased recently to see diagrams in Seoul in Korea where they've demolished a large road and replaced it with a park. They're doing it in Vancouver, demolishing a large road and replacing it with green space and trees. I'm working very hard with colleagues in Liverpool and Manchester to demolish two large roads. They are motorways. Remove them, throw them away, shut them down. Who says we need more road space? It's the mobility paradigm that says we need road space. No matter how wonderful Sweden is, and I quote Sweden a lot as being wonderful, you build too many new roads and you widen roads and you feed the mobility monster with endless amounts of money because somebody somewhere thinks building roads is a really good idea. And it isn't. Space. Again, you've probably seen this diagram. It's very famous. It makes a nice poster. Many students have it on their wall. But it's another example of the dominance of the mobility paradigm does not allow us to have a transport policy in Stockholm that says this is pretty dumb. In other words, if you want to move 10,000 people around every day and the British figure is the average car occupancy is 1.2. I'm not sure what 0.2 of a person looks like. So you need a lot of space if you're going to move 10,000 people around in cars. If you move that number of people around in a bus you need that much space and if you move them with bicycles you need that much. That looks like a lot of space compared to a bus but that's a lot better than that. So we know. Again, it's another aspect of how paradigms shift prioritisation and budgets and spending and planning into a sort of non-logical, non-intellectual area. So we know all this for example. This is masses of research. My training is a rather traditional 1960s geographer. Geographers are obsessed with space and time. Always. In fact, when I was a 1960s geographer I spent all my time reading Porstan Haegestrand at the University of Lund who was very famous and he was our hero. I don't know what happened to all that work. It was really exciting. However, we still look at space. So if you're a pedestrian and this varies by speed you need more space to move around the faster you go. Then the pedestrian at an average pedestrian speed uses 0.8 m2 per person. So it's incredibly efficient and cost effective and healthy to move as many people as possible around on foot. And the bicycle also comes in very well. But if you go for the car with one person which we do in Britain because we have policies that say we will have thousands and thousands and thousands of car parking places in our cities and we never carry out a basic exercise and say well how many do we need? How many match our mortal split aspirations? So this character here moving around at this speed needs is it 60 square metres per person? So if you compare a pedestrian with someone in a car that the gulf is enormous, it is dramatic. So we can plan our cities on the basis of a much more efficient allocation of space. We can reduce car parking, we can reduce highway capacity, we can have parks, we can have trees, we can have whatever we want. But we allocate space in an extremely inefficient manner in a place where space is incredibly valuable. If you wanted to buy a couple of hectares of space somewhere in Stockholm it would be really really really expensive. So why do we allocate so much space so expensively to people travelling around in cars? In my career of doing transport projects I had one major success. I persuaded Heathrow Airport, I was doing a travel plan, I'll say a little bit about that later, for Heathrow Airport and we were getting nowhere at all in the debate and I was saying you have to reduce the amount of car parking. It's really important. They said no no no no no, we need to encourage people to come by car to Heathrow Airport. I said well have you looked at your car park in terms of an asset, a real estate asset and the people I worked with, the managing agency for Heathrow Airport said oh interesting point. I said well let's look at this car park here and he said oh right. So if we develop the buses and the underground and the special train like your Alander Express if we develop all those things we will need less car parking. Is that correct? I said yes. Then we don't need that car park do we? Which has 750 car parking spaces. I said no you don't. And he said I can sell that space for £5 million to someone who wants to expand a hotel. So when you start to get that different way of looking at something that car parking is a suboptimal inefficient economically wasteful use of resources you begin to make progress. Okay. All this is leading me and I really do need to know I need your help what you think about this. Thank you. He's telling me to shut up. Thank you Ian. Towards paradigm shift. We need to shift the whole mindset, the whole mentality and I'm suggesting a very specific way of doing this. A very specific way because in my own work with focus groups and citizen jewellty and public engagement I have taken careful note that it attracts support. People are willing to move in the direction of the Swedish vision zero zero death and serious injury and they're willing to move in the direction of eliminating air pollution. So I've done work in London with focus groups and citizen jewellty and they're appalled. In London 4,000 people die every year because of poor air quality 95% of which comes from traffic. Okay. It's very dependently of Volkswagen's attempts to make it worse. And they like the idea. They like the idea of zero carbon and all these things working together give us maximum synergistic gain. Right. Paradigm shift. This takes a lot of time to explain so I'm going to skip it. Basically paradigms do shift and do change and you do end up going through at least three phases and I think we're already showing signs of being in the destabilisation and disorientation phase. The mobility paradigm is unravelling. The whole of transport economics is unravelling. Again, each one of these is worthy of a discussion in its own right but after years of buying into normal economics, normal transport economics we now know that new highway infrastructure does not bring economic gains. It does not create jobs, does not increase GDP. We know that new roads generate new traffic. They do not solve congestion and so on and so on. We know that sustainable transport actions bring massive economic benefits and that has been ignored, deliberately ignored in the past. This is a new European Commission project that I was involved in as an expert reviewer or something they called it. This was launched last week. The yellow doesn't work very well, I apologise for that. The whole project is called the EU evidence project and it is a detailed catalogue of global evidence showing that if you do the sustainable things and that's walking, cycling, public transport, demand management, all the things that we know about in sustainable transport they are economically in traditional economic ways high performers. They do better than non-sustainable options. This is backed up by, again, not going to show you all of these. Let me just show you one of them. Yeah, this one. Backed up by a lot of research that again has been airbrushed quietly out of the picture. Paradigms exterminate non-conforming evidence. This is from UITP, the Brussels based global public transport organisation. All you need to fix on there is that as the proportion of trips made on foot, bicycle and public transport goes up, so the cost of transport goes down. So it's like saying to the city of Stockholm, do you want to spend X billion, whatever, Swedish Krona or whatever on running the total transport system or would you like to spend half of X, which do you prefer? And you can have a totally functioning efficient transport system which costs less and is carbon reduced and if you want to know how to reduce carbon there's a wonderful report from the Stockholm Environment Institute in the University of York. This took us about three years to sort out with that group you see on the bottom there. So that obviously is on the SEI website and we showed in this report, British, it's all UK data, that it is possible to totally decarbonise land transport and get rid of about half of aviation's carbon and half of shipping's carbon and it's on the website so you can go and look at it yourself. I'm not going to talk about the methodology even though it was my life's obsession for three years. And we had a business as usual scenario in the baseline year, then we took business as usual to 2050 and that's what we ended up with having produced a detailed analysis of all the interventions. So this is the practicality. What do we do on a Monday morning? What do we actually do? We have to talk about the reality in Stockholm or London or Europe or wherever and we can reduce carbon, the numbers. The key thing about reducing carbon is synergy. So we have to do the spatial, the fiscal, the behavioural, the technological, the organisational and this in a sense is a kind of a hybrid thing of all the ones above there but we have to sort out budgets to make those things more important. We have to do workplace travel plans. I'm very proud of this. This is from the British Standardisation Institute. It is the world's first guide to travel plans and they asked me to write it and it was funded by Transport for London. This tells anybody including the Stockholm Environment Institute in Stockholm how you can get rid of anybody who's coming by car every day. I'm sure you don't hear anyway. You're a very noble lot and everyone can use bicycles and buses and so on. We're not there yet. We're still in trouble. There are big obstacles. So what I'm saying we need to do, paradigm shift, paradigm change, we've got to do a lot more to do it and I think we can do it but we've got to start by identifying the big obstacles. Subsidy, prices, don't tell the ecological truth. Famous quote from Mr Weitsecker in Voketal and our whole best cost benefit analysis and appraisal I've explained that is based on invalid assumptions. Whenever I go to a meeting in Brussels I always have this picture with me because I think it's very helpful to think in terms of elephants. So we have Pachyderm 1 and Pachyderm 2. Pachyderm 1, so you have a big discussion about your sustainable transport, fifth environmental action programme, sixth environment, all the stuff we talk about in the European Commission. Nobody is prepared to recognise that the whole system is driven by 270 billion euros a year of transport subsidy. So the European Commission is primarily organised around upping that number. So we throw 270 billion euros of direct subsidy, cash transfers, that's not externalities. And that is even bigger elephant than I've managed to show there. It's an enormous elephant. And then people talk about the growth in demand for transport and how we must change it. So this is it, we're nearly over Ian finished. There are two options for the future. We can have an expensive health damaging, carbon generating, ecologically damaging infrastructure fetish system, that's Stockholm and London and most other cities. Or we can go for lower cost health promoting, carbon reducing, ecologically responsible mobility re-engineering. We can go for Mumbai or we can go, I should really have shown somewhere, I was giving lectures in Lund last week and I thought I should really show Lund because it looks very pretty in the middle of Lund anyway. And of course I don't want you to buy it because I was told you what's in it. But this, it took me a long time to write this book and it's available and everything I've talked about today with lots and lots and lots of references because I know in Stockholm environment you have lots of references. There's lots of references and you can follow up everything I've said today in this exciting new book. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, John. That was very stimulating and I hope that we've got some part that's trying to put more of the mic. Oh sorry, yes. I'm also sort of exchanging out the room. Right, yes, thank you very much John. That was very stimulating. I hope provoking as well for people. We're going to open it up for questions from the floor. I had one immediate one perhaps to get things kicked off. You talk about the sort of infrastructure if you build it they will come. What alternative types of infrastructure would lead to your Amsterdam, your Lund? What do we need to do on the Monday morning in that case? Yeah, I think first of all what we have to do is just go back a step to look at structure and space, spatial structure and subsidy. First of all if we get the subsidy thing sorted out and the spatial structure thing sorted out a colleague of mine in Germany, Helmut Holtzapfel runs a project funded by the federal German government called Creating the City of Short Distances. Fundamentally we have to intervene first of all so that things are nearer and there are more things. There are ways we can do this. We can do it with healthcare. We can do it with schools. We can do it with a whole number of things that people travel for. If we get that right then the current infrastructure is going to be more in harmony with and in tune with the demands to be made of it. So it's almost like the old Irish joke when you ask for directions and someone says if I was you I wouldn't start from here. It's going back a little bit and starting from the structure. In terms of infrastructure then there is a real need. When I've done projects in India and China for example I've recommended and this goes nowhere at all because state governments and city governments are not interested. I've recommended a total pedestrian infrastructure where every highway and every road in every city in India and China in between has a 2.5 meter wide segregated pedestrian path. Now I've no idea what that would cost by the way but I do have an idea what motorways cost and high speed rail costs and so on because one of the main problems I know Indian cities better than Chinese cities and one of the main problems with road safety and with people moving around is that there is no pedestrian infrastructure at all not even an ability to cross the road and so the infrastructure then would include crossing facilities which would just be a raised big hump of some kind. So there is a need for infrastructure so I suppose what I'm really advocating is abandoning the expansion of motorised transport and carbon generating transport until the system has settled down a bit more by doing the spatial planning and by doing that kind of non motorised transport infrastructure. Thanks very much, John. I can already see there's a hand over there. If you want to ask a question please say who you are and where you're from. Hi, my name is Aaron Etridge with SCI here in Stockholm. So thanks very much for a really interesting presentation of the analysis of the use of time and space really good. I'm just wondering how much of your argument is really about mobility versus mode because at the beginning you talked about the mobility paradigm and I was expecting almost that you'd end up by having us question the concept of how much we should actually move and how much we should move around but it seemed like a lot of your emphasis was actually on switching away from cars to other means of transport so how much of it is mobility and how much mode? Again a bit like the last question the first point I would want to make is reduce the need to travel so that fundamentally you're not even at the modal bit yet you know we have to reduce the need to travel the 1.1 hour travel time constant would also imply that we should have enough things within that kind of walking radius or certainly cycling radius so as to make the non motorised modes perfectly suited to living a high quality of life especially in an urban area there's a separate discussion by the way about rural areas which I'm also involved with and then in terms of your main point about modal transfer our carbon, our decarbonisation study in SEI in York was very much concerned with first level 1 reduce the need to travel reduce the amount of car travel and level 3 increase the amount of walking cycling and public transport so the modal transfer thing is important but it's actually a problem with current sustainable transport what shall we call it discourse is that most of it doesn't even deal with the different levels it takes a particular context and says right if I improve this bus route or if I build an urban railway or if I build an underground metro then I will switch or usually if I build a tram I can get maybe one third of the car drivers to switch we took the view that that's not the correct approach the correct approach is to reduce the need to travel to develop the alternative so that they are very attractive but that requires this spatial dimension that I keep talking about city of short distances high quality accessibility and that's as I think and correct me if I'm wrong it's missing everywhere in Lunt last week I asked people about this and we had people from the municipalities of Lunt and Malmo and they said yes it is missing in those cities even though lots of good things are happening with cycling and with public transport and other things so my answer is there is a slight amount of confusion in the way I argue these things and that's about three level thing right I think everything follows from that and it would work out more sustainable than the current Thanks I'm going to rush over here Henry Do I need to use this? Henry Carlson, SEI Stockholm first to comment and a question it seems to me that Sweden has a good reputation with regards to transport but when I look at Stockholm and Gothenburg for example they are close to Atlanta with regards to urban sprawl the number of people per square meter in Stockholm is roughly the same as Atlanta and what people to when people talk about Stockholm in daily life the area what we mean with Stockholm is roughly the same as London 1.5 million people and in London 12 million people in the same area so this is I have a big question mark in my head why is this in Sweden the same in Gothenburg Malmo is a little bit more dense this brings me over to the other question what I think is the real monster you need to fight is the car industry because in Europe the overarching policy goal everything that has happened in the European Union is job creation and the car industry is one of the very few areas in which I think European policy makers think that here we have a chance to fight the Chinese, the Japanese and the American the car industry is really really strong and it seems to me that it's not included in your analysis so far Thanks Henry I might take a couple of others I don't know if you can keep those in your hand Yeah I'm going to brush past you actually because Tim had his hand up first Thanks Tim Sorgata also SCI Stockholm I was interested in how freight comes into the equation movement of goods around because I think when you talked about that the economic analysis focuses on time savings and that's gobbled up by extra distance that people travel in the case of freight it would probably be more density in terms of passage of goods and to me it seems like it could make more economic sense but then again when you look at the political discussion and the reason behind the building of infrastructure mostly it appeals to people personally and that they want to drive they want to be able to get somewhere quicker so I just wanted if in European does freight make sense and how does that come into the cost benefit analysis and is that even a real consideration when people talk about building infrastructure Thanks I'm going to rush it over to you now John I've seen other hands going up I've noticed that so yeah something to do with the policy incoherence if you like about wanting to stimulate jobs and therefore the car industry having a special interest in policy makers minds while at the same time having pollution targets and wanting to build sustainable cities that's I think a way of interpreting your question and then freight Okay thank you your first point about the what shall we call it the low density of population in Greater Stockholm I did not know and that clearly is an element of non sustainability it's quite all those funny graphs which I spared you a lot of them deal with density and energy consumption per capita for example it's overwhelming that if you're at those lower levels of density you're in trouble and that's part of the mobility paradigm because we're not going to be able to produce the reductions we need in carbon emissions with the transport sector if our density remains at the kind of levels you're talking about so something has to change and there are ways I mean again in this presentation I'd love to talk in much more detail there are ways of intervening to alter the density which in trouble in terms of low density to create new nodes of high accessibility and new developments around railway stations but that's another story so there are practical ways to intervene the car industry my hope is that somebody else picks that one up I am trying to be a mixture of a geographer and a transport scientist but part of me wants to go out and campaign against the car industry but I feel that I've got to leave that to somebody else I didn't say enough about this evidence project that I flashed up on a couple of slides but it goes back to what you were just saying the actual economics is the reverse of what he said if you carry out an economic analysis because the Chinese have done this for every car they make they claim to create there's an equation so many jobs for every car they make a powerful sort of rhetoric or powerful argument but you can make the same points about high accessible cities and investing in walking, cycling and public transport and the evidence project brings that together it shows that the actual job creation is higher and it's higher in term this is crucial in terms of local geographies localities so yeah a lot of money goes into the motor vehicle manufacturing sector of the economy and lots of jobs are jobs in London, Malmo and Stockholm and all these other places you have to invest in the sustainable transport otherwise the money's draining away it's draining away to Eastern Europe or to Taiwan or wherever it's like a globalised system for siphoning off the cash the economic gains but we could talk more about that later we do need something that brings this more into the forefront of the public imagination now freight, I am once again guilty if you go to a chapter in there it's all about freight there is such a thing as sustainable freight transport I did a report on that for Greenpeace European Greenpeace some years ago and it's all about taking the same kind of approach I've adopted for passenger transport and applying it to freight so first of all reduce the demand and here I've worked with Helmut Holtzapfel who has produced an analysis of regionalised freight so at the moment I was saying rude things about Swedish and British transport policy where we encourage people to travel as fast as possible as often as possible we do that with freight so what you can have is a regionalised freight model whereby systems are set up for encouraging those that consume whatever is in the back of a lorry swap, distant sources for near sources to carry out a different kind of urban logistics where you actually intercept large vehicles on the edge of cities for example to use more coastal shipping to use more so everything about model shift and everything about reducing the demand is there in the context of freight and in Germany there's some very interesting if I can remember the German for it Laskraftmoutwagen I think it is or Laskraftmout I'm not sure anyway there's a tax on lorries a weight distance tax and that's produced a re-jigging of the spatial economy still being monitored so there is such a thing as sustainable freight it's more challenging because when you get into the global trade flows and you get into the large container ships coming to Britain from China with everything we need for Christmas and we don't really know I have not yet worked out a way of dismantling globalisation I think there will be a way of dismantling globalisation but I'm focusing on some of the easier things first of all so everything I've said about passenger transport applies to freight as well and it's in there and aviation and shipping it's all there Thanks very much John I think I saw Ola's hand going up anybody else and Ellie as well I'll start with you Ola and I've got a couple of questions from online as well I'm wondering in what way is there a conflict between city planning and the apparent benefits of choice from living in a city you can plan to have a hairdresser and a grocery shop in one place but I don't like that so I'm not going to go there even though it's the closest one you see what I mean Hold on John I'm going to bring Ellie in as well Yep, Ellie Dawkins also from SCI I was just wondering is there any evidence of the economic models changing at all or are they staying as they are Thank you Yes, let me think about the more difficult one first whilst I answer you not much evidence of change in that UK sorry the European Commission evidence project we had discussions about specifically about benefit cost analysis and the value of time and whether or not it is possible to bring in all the health implications of mobility so I haven't talked much about that at all because it is much bigger than road safety so the number of people hospitalised as a result of poor air quality for example and the national government in Britain is very resistant does not want to change because we have a whole system of economic appraisal evaluation and benefit cost analysis for transport projects the government admit that it is biased against sustainable transport biased against non motorised transport so it actually punishes projects for example public transport projects get a big negative monetary they get a cost associated with them because they take people away from cars and the government loses revenue from fuel taxation so a public transport project has a tough time it can't survive it has a tough time and there's no willingness on the part of government to change that which takes me back to my ideas about changing mindsets and changing paradigms so the evidence project points to much better ways of doing this and in fact cycling has already made quite a lot of progress there are specific economic analysis tools for cycling about the economic benefits associated with cycling in urban areas in Europe so in the whatever we call it on the fringe in the NGOs and in sustainable transport there are practical suggestions for changes but government well British government it just won't change may I explore your point a bit more what I took from what you said is that in terms of city planning I'm arguing for a higher level of what I would call destination rich more things that you can go to within a shorter a smaller geographical area and in the British context I don't know enough about the Swedish planning context we can work towards that through the planning system we can have city planning that for example encourages because Britain is still locked into a strange ideology that says retailing is there housing is there other jobs are there so we like to maximise distances and the way we're trying to do what we call it is to change the planning rules to allow things to be co-located so it's changing a regulatory regime it doesn't in any way involve any element of compulsion or any element of the denial of choice though when you get into the choice this is why I was confused about part of what you said the whole thing about the current paradigm is it deprives me of choice the British transport planning system and governmental funding system for transport assumes that the car is the default option for all journeys so I am deprived of choice I don't want to use a car I want to cycle, I want to walk I want to use public transport my daughters just moved to an English village which is incredibly beautiful and when I checked how to get there by bus it said there's a bus every other Tuesday and I'm still in a state of shock it's usually bad but that's especially bad so what that tells me there's a message there that everyone in that village owns a car and the expectation on everyone's part is that they will use the car so that's where the lack of choice is but have I misunderstood what you were saying no I think you were exactly on my way of thinking I was just that the car is like attached with all these illusions of choice and flexibility whereas in reality there's pretty much the opposite of in the case thanks very much anybody else in the room with a question I've got a couple actually on 9 if that's alright John one is a question around whether there are cultural factors at play in determining mobility or choices about which modes are suitable to use and the second is whether you had examples of international development aid that instead of ended up building mega infrastructure and highways and that sort of thing were actually aiming for a more sustainable infrastructure on the the second point the development aid that was your point wasn't it there are examples by development agencies and by the World Bank and by the relevant bits of the European Union that claim to be sustainable transport but he's still aimed at things like a metro like an underground system or a tram system and so on what I'm not aware of and I will be delighted if it did exist is projects for example my point earlier about the pedestrian infrastructure to give every Indian city every Indian resident every settlement segregated from traffic and I'm not aware of anything like that which is what I'm looking for and the first point because I've forgotten already cultural I'm very wary of the word cultural because anywhere in the world so in my non-sustainable lifestyle I've worked extensively in Australia and I haven't worked out a way to get there sustainably so in an Australian city the first thing you're told is look you this is Australia not Britain and we like vast spaces and we like to travel long distances and we want a house by itself surrounded by gardens with a swimming pool with a garage for three cars and parking for an additional five cars and this has been told to me many times in all Australian cities and working and I say okay well let's just talk about that a little bit more the relevant cities have done projects and the Australians are just as good as anybody else in the world for changing that so when you start to so for example Subiaco which is a suburb of Perth in Western Australia the world's remotest city in Perth and that's a new railway station and a new bus station and a new shopping centre and thousands of new apartments all in a very small area and Australians have flooded into that and really like it and suddenly these big distances that they travel are very much reduced so I'm not convinced that there are cultural factors I think there are cultural factors that politicians have in their heads that stop them doing kind of things that people like me suggest if I could put it that way I think there are ways of not trying out different things but I do genuinely think that if you give whatever we call it residence, children, older people real transport choices in a high quality transport environment where it is choice rich again what's culture I worked in Germany for three years and all my colleagues really liked cars and I didn't like that I wasn't happy but where I lived in the city of Bochum when I wanted to go to my office I had a bus, I had a tram I had a cycle path and I had a railway station and I had a car and to me as a Brit working in that environment it was astonishing and all my colleagues who really liked Porsche and BMW and all this kind of thing used to tell me it is stupid to drive your car into Dutteldorf where our office was based it is stupid why would anybody want to drive so where's the culture in that it's a car fetish country which values lots of alternatives to the car so I'm sceptical but if anyone's got any evidence what is the Swedish culture there was a culture of bicycle used in cities and with increasing wealth I guess it's being reversed so you can see that the cultural factors perhaps not as strong as some of the other factors I actually discussed this when I worked on an SEI project in Beijing some years ago with the Chinese governmental persons and they'd made a decision to widen the roads delete the cycle paths and feeding this growth the growth in motorized traffic was so great that people formed the view that it was very dangerous to cycle and they couldn't cross roads so you're quite right to raise the Chinese example but the view that was put to me in Beijing was that this was objectionable but it was a good idea to do with economic development and lots of societal objectives in that direction which meant exterminating they needed the space to get rid of the bikes they needed the space for the cars and if you read the transport literature in North America it's very interesting that in the 1920s and 30s General Motors and tyre manufacturers bought the urban rail and tram systems especially in California cities but throughout the United States and shut them down and then said oh there's been a decline in the use of public transport so the story is always one of the really exciting things about transport is there's a story within a story which is again why I'm a bit sceptical of culture because there are usually fiscal things governmental policy things there's all sorts of things in Germany people travel a lot by car because when they fill in their annual tax return and say I have driven 65 km each way to my place of work they fill that in a box and they get a tax rebate and my colleagues in Germany have worked for years and failed to delete the idea that you get a tax rebate to reward you maximising your travel by car to work I mean that it does not conform with any concept or any definition of sustainability to go to work by car Thanks John Can I just challenge you on this point on this point about culture I put it in terms of thinking of cars as status symbols something that isn't just about getting from A to B which undoubtedly they are both in developed and from the questions I'm getting online in developing countries and if that is the case that somehow there is something to do with how we show our status through that there's also a question around you're talking about needing to have more denser cities with greater choice and easier access to services over a shorter distance you're actually asking people to value other things than let's say a car you are actually saying something about culture so it must lie there somewhere culture must come into it instead of having the status of owning a Porsche it's the status of living in Sweden on Södermalm or somewhere else where you've got easy access to whole range of services and choice Since 2004 every year we've seen a decline in passenger kilometres of car use in cities in Europe Australia and North America and we're all having a big worry about why and there's been some detailed analysis in Britain on this and the reason is that young people at the age of 17 are now deciding that they like their iPads and their tablets and they like all the associations all the characteristics of city living without a car much more than at any time in the past mobile communications all the attributes if you like of city living so this wouldn't deal with a rural situation and in a way we had a cultural predisposition when I was growing up and when my children were getting to that age all the 17 year olds waited for their first car and this was absolutely the norm and certainly in the United States was the norm getting your driving licence and getting your car absolutely critical, that is gone this is detailed survey work with people aged 17, 18, 19 and 20 and they say why would we want a car? we like living in the city mobile communications, we like the electronics so there's been a cultural shift so even if there is such a thing as cultural predisposition and cultural, what shall we say cultural identity it's far more susceptible to shifting than I think we've ever appreciated in the past I'm sure there's still our cultural things but we need to be aware of the change factor thank you very much John I think we're going to wrap up on that quite hopeful note about the opportunities for change and leveraging young people's wish actually to not to buy a car not to be brought into that system but the things I took away very much from a talk that's very difficult to summarise in any way was the point about needing to address a systemic change to think about transport really is being just one thing that gets you a service rather than being something that you need to maximise and increase all the time and we're very grateful that you were able to come so a round of applause for John please