 Welcome everybody and thank you for coming. On behalf of the University of York and the Stockholm Environment Institute may I welcome you to the inaugural lecture of Professor John Whiteleg. I'm Trisha Sloper, I'm academic co-ordinator for social science at the University. Unfortunately the Vice Chancellor is not able to be with us right now so I'm standing in. John Whiteleg was born in Oldham in Lancashire and he studied geography at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He stayed there for six years enjoying the delights of Aberystwyth and the sea, I hope. On the way he got his geography degree and a PhD in the spatial analysis of manufacturing activity. He then embarked on a long journey through the varied landscape of transport that included mathematical modelling of the growth in demand for freight transport, the logistics systems of steel manufacturing and transport, running ferry and air services, responsibility for seaweed processing and tweed manufacturing and economic development in the outer hebrides, a really interesting and varied set of research. He then began teaching and researching on transport at Lancaster University, moving from a lectureship in 1977 to professorship and head of department in 1993. John has worked on sustainable transport projects for 30 years, which is a long time before many of us realise the importance, I would think, of sustainable transport. He's the author of 10 books and over 100 papers. He's worked extensively on consultancy and research projects for UK local authorities, the European Commission, the Australian government and many private sector clients. He's also worked extensively in China and India, including projects to produce transport strategies for Calcutta and Beijing. John came to York in 2001 and his recent projects include the York Intelligent Travel Project, which produced a 16% reduction in car trips in the target group. He's also on the team bringing the 10th International Towards Car Free Cities conference to York in 2010. He's professor at the Stockholm Environment Institute at York and visiting professor of sustainable transport at Liverpool John Moors University. He also edits World Transport Policy and Practice, the journal he founded in 1995 and he runs the Consultancy Ecologica. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor John Whiteleg to deliver the lecture, Energy and Equity, a Beginner's Guide, good, to designing zero carbon transport system. Thank you. Thank you very much for those kind words of introduction and it's an enormous pleasure to be able to do this in the University of York and to share some of my ideas with an audience as varied as the one here this evening. The subject, I think, it gets more important day by day and even though it's something I've been working on for longer than I would care to remember, it's also a subject where there's a lot more work to be done in transmitting and translating what we're doing in a research sense into actual implementation. Before I begin there's just one thought I'd like you to sort of ponder on a little bit, which is that currently the global population of motor vehicles is about, nobody knows exactly how many, about 750 million motorised vehicles on the planet. Many organisations, but especially one German forecasting organisation, has predicted that this will rise to 2.3 billion by 2030. So we're actually looking at a transport system that is developing in a way that certainly goes against the grain of almost everything that we've been taught to think is correct in terms of reducing impacts, improving our quality of reducing road traffic accidents and dealing with climate change. So what we're trying to do in a transportation research sense and in the Stockholm Environment Institute is get to grips with these issues and see what we can do to design a zero carbon transport future and we'll see how we get on this evening and whether you think it is a good idea and feasible and I've just broken the system. No I haven't. Yes I have. The Stockholm Environment Institute, I'm not going to read this out but you have to have a mandatory advertisement, is a global science policy institute with a considerable emphasis on not only doing the science well but converting the science into actual policy and implementation involving communication and media work and working with citizens right the way up to United Nations organisations and other global organisations. The plan that I want to work through in the next 30, 35 minutes is to look at some of the trends that are actually causing us a lot of concern us being not only a research community, a scientific community but a policy making community to note that things are getting worse. In passing to note that most of our policy if it's really really successful will achieve making it get worse slightly more slowly than it might otherwise but it will still get worse and most policy making shares the behavioural characteristics of the rabbit caught in the headlights of a passing car increasingly the transport policy community and this is not as rude as I can be I'm going to be on my best behaviour this evening the transport policy community shares the DNA with rabbits running down the middle of a road dealing with the headlights of passing cars and that's not very much of an exaggeration and the interesting thing is even though there's a great deal of kind of unpleasant consequences from the scale of motorisation I'm going to be talking about the solution the way forward the actual things we can do on a practical level are dead easy and there is no problem at all in implementing things but there is a nervousness and a worry about doing so so first of all the things are getting worse part of the presentation I'm not going to talk about any of these slides in great detail but I am going to make some incredibly scientific remarks like all these problems are graphed starting in the bottom left hand corner and going up to the top right hand corner and whether we're looking at energy demand, passenger transport growth in, freight transport growth and motor vehicle population ownership motor vehicle use the fact that one research organisation in the United States thinks that the target travel distance per person per annum is 270,000 kilometres a year that's taking into account the fact we all travel of 1.1 hours a day the average speed at which we travel is going up and up and up the population the planet is going up and up and up and all transport policy is aimed at repeating these graphs bottom left to top right so that's world energy demand with oil the red line at the top by the way a lot of these things are from the international energy agency so I want to acknowledge what this is also from the IEA so personal transport that is people moving around and you see there the trends are once again the same this is up to 2050 trillions I find it difficult to imagine what a trillion looks like trillions of passenger kilometres basically things are increasing very rapidly most of us are moving around far more if we live in places like China and India we're also starting to move around far more encouraged by the way by things like the Chinese government that have decided to commit a significant amount of budgetary expenditure on road construction other forms of transport as well but mainly road and a reallocated agricultural land away from growing food towards roads on the basis that they can cancel out the capacity to grow food to feed 70 million people per annum and to use it for roads instead the Chinese government made an explicit policy commitment to deleting agricultural capacity that would feed 70 million people and reallocating it to roads and that's not being rude about the Chinese government it's the same in other parts of the world so personal mobility, personal movement the ability to travel further, faster, more often use more space and reallocate space that is the norm this is what we're dealing with that's personal transport this is mode in other words car, air, two, three wheelers, buses, mini buses and so on of course on there we don't have walking and cycling I'll be coming back to some aspects of walking and cycling later on those tend to be in decline and again in China, as in India I've been involved with the state of West Bengal trying to persuade them not to ban the cycle rickshaw which they did ban in Calcutta the country in Bangladesh banning cycle rickshaws in Dhaka so there is a move in most parts of the world around grade walking and cycling whilst talking up walking and cycling as a sustainable mode, a zero carbon mode a healthy mode but in the meantime road space is reallocated away from those modes so motorised transport is increasing worldwide transport related fuel use same graph almost all the graphs are identical and you will already have such doubt that it's the same graph put in ten different ways trillions of litres of gasoline equivalent going up transport related well to wheel CO2 emissions by mode so there you see carbon dioxide gigatons, billion tons of CO2 equivalent and that is in its turn going up similarly from around six gigatons in the year 2000 to somewhere approaching 15 in the year 2050 and by the way there isn't enough fuel around to maintain that growth trajectory something else I'll come back to later by region you can see how China is developing and the OECD North America and so the regional breakdown of those growth trajectories is also important and giving a great deal of concern in terms of climate change resource allocation, global poverty eradication, food production because as I'm trying to explore in this talk transport is not as boring as most people think it is it really relates to things like quality of life air quality, respiratory disease obesity and the ability to grow food okay, I'm not responsible for the rude word in the middle of that slide but I thought I would leave it there just the same this is from a colleague of mine Professor Knofflacker in the Technical University of Vienna this essentially is the main transport policy trajectory around the world I don't think we've got one of those within 10km of where we are this evening but if you add up the amount of road space that's been added in Britain over the last two or three decades it is fairly significant and this idea that we can continue to build very expensive very space consuming infrastructure to increase levels of mobility and presumably to support what is increasingly regarded as a flawed model of economic development is one of the core arguments trying to restate restructure in the sense that what we want to do is to move towards a better allocation of resources less space consuming less time consuming which these things are as well so transport infrastructure is related in a very precise scientific sense to the spread of urban civilization across the face of the earth and the more of this we get the more we spread out where we live, where we work and produce the problems that we are quite familiar with so the next bit of the presentation is just to show you some pretty slides you all know this is the case but I want to make the point that one of the many underestimated underappreciated under-researched aspects of transport is space space consumption, land consumption we tend to talk a lot about road safety death and injury on the roads increasingly more about air pollution and noise, food capacity food production capacity but we are we are colonising our urban space and increasingly our rural space with things like this auto dependent sprawling cities all over the world there are many interesting studies of the degree to which North America differs from Australia and from Germany and from the UK and the energy intensity of different arrangements in terms of land use and basically you know the answer anyway the more we have large amounts of urban sprawl long distances over which people travel and commute by private motorised transport the more we have high levels of energy consumption fuel use and the thing feeds itself and goes round and round and round to produce more demand for car parking and more demand for yet more roads more demand to deal with congestion so the city of York council are very unkindly meeting this evening deliberately to clash with my talk and they are talking about how to sort out traffic congestion in York and in those kind of discussions you see the confusion I'm not saying York city of York council is confused it's a global confusion that building more road space helps to reduce or alleviate congestion and in fact it very very rarely if ever does that if you live in a small village in North Yorkshire with 300 people and you build a bypass it will probably help but apart from that it doesn't help any major cities Australian cities are very interesting places high level of awareness of sustainability high level of development of things related to sustainable futures very interested in local food production permaculture, a whole number of things but they have some kind of genetic predisposition towards spreading things out over very very very large distances and Adelaide and Perth are massively spread out over say 100 kilometres in each direction Los Angeles is the favourite example of all transport planners Hong Kong is at the other end of the scale very very very densely populated very high levels of use of public transport Asian cities very very high density low energy consumption per capita because of that but very severe problems in terms of time loss and congestion in moving around the trend globally towards decentralised car based work locations and indeed hospital education and so on is feeding the problem so that more and more and more we become motorised transport dependent high energy users and unable to see a way out of this vicious cycle of land use and transport change low density inevitably means vast road networks that's the way cities in North America and Australia are now quite extensive suburbs and cities have developed the ubiquitous business park science park usually with a large pond with a few ducks on it so that you can act in a large I won't name and shame any one university, not York one university is developing a science park for 1,100 staff with 1,000 car parking places and has produced a sustainable transport plan because it says there's a bus stop on the A6 and there is a bus there they think every hour this tends to produce this kind of problem in terms of extra spreading of trips and energy consumption the space side is incredibly important, the diagram there in the bottom left is something that one can repeat in many parts of the world that's simply looking at a typical cloverleaf junction and it occupies exactly the same area as a typical medieval walking city such as Salzburg the Autobahnkreuz the German motorway junctions which tend to follow even though Germany has some claim to have a higher level of sustainability in transport than Britain the motorway junctions in Germany tend to occupy as much land as would be occupied by say 20,000 people in their homes one university and one large hospital they're very space greedy their land requirements and they produce the effect that then we try and deal with when we say we want to design a low carbon, zero carbon or sustainable transport system congestion is a problem almost in every part of the world almost every city the city of York council are fundamentally frustrated and annoyed and grumpy about congestion in York and yet are unable up to this evening unable to do anything about it and we'll see what comes out of it after this evening the provision of parking places in Melbourne in Detroit, in Chicago and high quality transport infrastructure exacerbates the problem makes it worse and makes the long term solution more difficult to arrive at there are health problems Los Angeles used to be smog central but has now been overtaken by some developing cities in Mexico City we still get lots of smog we still get lots of ozone pollution we still get lots of respiratory problems related to particulate emissions hospital admissions and deaths in the world cities so there's a fairly gloomy catalogue of nasties that we're trying to do something about I hasten to add we're going to get to the point very very soon where we will elaborate what can be done about it and it is not difficult to do but I want to try and bring these points together now by saying okay we know a little bit about space we know a little bit about time we know a little bit about road traffic accidents I agree with the world health organisation by the way that we should never use the word accident road traffic accidents are not accidents they're entirely predictable they're entirely preventable the world health organisation takes a view that most road safety practitioners do not take that there's no such thing as a non-predictable non-preventable death and serious injury they're all predictable broken bodies, air pollution oil, a brief digression into global warfare okay, space cars take up a lot of space I'm a great admirer of German ways of portraying what I'm now talking about they're very good at showing identifiable streets and if you had whatever it is 100 people or whatever you can show how much space will be occupied by those people if they were in cars if they were on bicycles if they were on foot if they were in some other kind of form of transport and it very quickly becomes apparent that if one is dealing certainly with a European city it is actually pretty dumb to make a fundamental assumption that we should try and get 20, 30, 40,000 people through our streets a day with one person in one car or even 1.4, 1.5 people in one car and many interesting aspects of British transport planning is that average vehicle occupancy to use one of the many boring transport statistical indicators average vehicle occupancy goes down over time so we get a greater level of demand for space because fewer of us are sharing cars we prefer to use a car with one person in that car there are several hypotheses about the fact that this is because we're increasingly miserable and antisocial and unfriendly and we don't want to share anything with anybody but that's another story getting people out of cars where it is appropriate, where it is feasible where there is a congested city where there are our quality problems where there are road safety problems is entirely reasonable entirely explicable it's easy to do but most cities around the world we're back to the DNA rabbits are very, very, very, very uneasy so we can liberate a lot of space this is one of my favourite diagrams and I always feel a little bit uneasy because I can't talk to you for five minutes about each line on the graph, there is no time let me just show you and you can see it already I hope what's happening in this particular graph the relationship between motor transport speed at which we travel and space requirement is fundamental I am a geographer by training and if you really want to be bored and never invited to cocktail parties talk to a geographer and pick up space-time sort of arguments because we can be, and I am incredibly boring about space and time basically if you want to organise a city so that you waste loads of time and loads of space and create a very unpleasant anti-social, unfriendly environment you would end up doing something like the car where you skip down 3, 4, 5, 6 or whatever the car with one person at 40kmh with the big red blob on the right hand side there that says that person needs 60 square metres in other words speed at which you travel because of distance between vehicles is related to space that is occupied if we have a city that is largely functioning with lots of people walking and cycling but there the pedestrian needs 0.8 square metres per person and I do not think anyone has done the sums about how that changes if the pedestrian goes at 40kmh I do not think they do that and the cyclist needs 3 square metres per person and you begin to construct a way of looking at the way in which space land should be allocated in cities and that goes down to the bottom of the diagram there looking at buses and metros and trains we need to put space at the centre of our thinking so we can design attractive cities and speed is also a very interesting concept in transport planning that tends not to be followed through in terms of detailed planning from an engineering or implementation point of view because of the idea of effective speed or social speed it comes in different ways and effective speed or social speed is basically saying that speed we are going to look at speed for a moment and we are going to see how speed varies according to how much time we are allocating to carrying out particular kinds of journeys and you know all this time and speed but going back to the work of Illich in the early 1970s and other people including a colleague of mine Paul Tranta in Canberra in Australia looking at social speed what you need to do to understand transport impacts fully and the power of restructuring space and time in world cities is actually starting including the money that we need to earn to spend on our cars in the calculation about speed and that this idea amazingly was first introduced in 1854 and then was very finely developed by the work of Ivan Illich in energy and equity and that's an excellent book still worth reading and Illich produced this particular conclusion at the time that the typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car he spends four of his 16 waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it so basically we want to run around in a car we have to pay the cost of car ownership car use we have to work to do that we have to put that money into it and that then gets factored into the speed so the average the model American as Illich says actually gets effective speed of five miles per hour now of course if we're talking to the RAC or the AA or some other organisation they find this ridiculous but in terms of linking fiscal issues to spatial issues and time issues and urban design issues this becomes quite important and it's actually becoming very important now in Australian cities which are in fiscal crisis for a number of reasons but fiscal crisis because they have extensive suburbs relatively low income people owning cars and driving cars in extensive suburbs and those people are in deep distress as fuel prices rise so ideas of effective speed become particularly important in understanding how to create a fairer society and how to make it work well another aspect of a fairer society that I again think is massively underplayed, underestimated and should be factored into all public policy making and decision taking to do with how far children can move around and travel I did a project on this with Mayor Hillman and John Adams in the early 1990s published in a book called One False Move and You're Dead and the very catchy title I hope you'll agree and the Department for Transport got very angry with us because that was the title of a road safety campaign the point is very elementary that if you look at that diagram for example you'll see that there's a very big funny shaped area there around Sheffield is the area over which an eight year old could walk and move around and do things on their own without adult company without a car, without anything in 1919 and if we go to somewhere in the top left hand corner there we have slightly smaller areas considerably smaller areas where children are now not allowed to do anything but in the top left there you see Ed, now eight, is only allowed to walk on his own to the end of his street we have vici aged about 1897 and I was allowed to walk to the swimming pool alone half a mile away the point emerging from this work is deeply significant and it's that our transportation systems and other things there is a debate about whether this is a stranger danger issue as well that's a very intense debate in transport moving around in an urban area for example because of transport worries and road safety or because everyone is terrified that there is some very serious person going to murder them or something at the end of the street that is a debate that goes on but we have seen in a matter of three decades in this country the termination of the ability of children to walk and cycle and explore and our psychology colleagues that we work with on transport matters tell us that that has enormous and negative implications for cognitive skills, spatial ability and interestingly given my concerns about DNA and rabbits it stops of solving problems we don't solve problems very well if our life is a kind of a movement a very small distance movement between the television and computer the car and the school and another car trip we don't have the spatial ability to understand how space and place and fairness and the ability to move around and accessibility and quality of life actually mean a great deal to the future of civilisation and that's not underestimating it broken bodies gets very serious at this point and it's a source of immense concern globally 3,000 people die on the roads of the world every day 1.2 million annually 20% of child deaths are in low and middle income countries I've done transport projects in Calcutta and in Calcutta they don't know, they can't count them very well but they think about 1,000 pedestrians a year are killed in Calcutta 96% of child deaths are in low and middle income countries 20 to 50 million very difficult to quantify injured or disabled each year and even though the economics is a bit wobbly and suspect it's possible to put a price on all this mayhem and it's over $500 billion per annum we really do need to sort out the degree to which our global transport systems are basically killing our own species are systematically massacring our own species the ability to drive a car for a couple of miles and buy a packet of cigarettes or a pint of milk is of a higher significance in public policy making than the threat that represents people who live on streets with heavy traffic or simply want to go around on their bicycles or on foot a lot of that debate then is about speed so we're back to speed and time and effective speed and again I'm not going to go into this in great detail but the percent chance of surviving if we had every street in York or Leeds or wherever properly controlled at 20 miles per hour and so that's like no deviation a big sign Leeds at all possible points of entry and outside York saying this is a 20 mile per hour city get lost if you don't like it we don't want you it's 20 mile per hour don't even think about 22 miles per hour and the reason for doing that is sound epidemiology sound it's science the science says you have a 95% chance of surviving if you're hit by a car as a pedestrian at that speed and that goes as you see there 45 and 5 so if you hit a 40 mile 40 miles per hour you have a 5% chance of surviving road safety and the probability of death and injury on the road is a fantastic area which is a no-go area for science if you're a scientist do not get involved in road safety we're not interested the speed limit is 30 miles per hour we don't care about data and by the way if you go at 36 miles per hour it's still all right we do not use science and this is what I mean by science of studies of this kind world health organization if you have a 10% reduction in speed you will produce something like a 10% reduction or more in fatalities you can actually go up and down the curves and produce your own calculations there the world health organization says road traffic crashes they prefer that terminology not accident road traffic crashes are predictable and therefore preventable in order to combat the problem though there needs to be a close coordination and collaboration using holistic and integrated approaches across many sectors and many disciplines the problem is rabbits in highways don't do holistic and integrated approaches now this then comes to another interesting point in terms of a wider political, philosophical future of society use of science debate we seem to like things that go very fast I recently got into a lot of trouble by arguing that high speed trains are bad I won't even go into the details of that they're bad in the sense that they produce higher levels of carbon dioxide emissions and they encourage us all to travel further and faster more frequently but is it practicable is it possible, can we argue that going slow is a good idea on the political and a policy point of view slow is a kind of a bad word it doesn't really ring the sort of bells that politicians and economists like the whole of economics if you do transport economics which I used to teach and then gave up because it was making me very unhappy if you teach transport economics you have to get to grips with the fact that saving time is a large positive asset it's a large value in an economic calculation if you want to build a road around York the Treasury and the Department for Transport set a very complicated cost benefit analysis procedure to enable us to calculate whether or not building a road around York is a good idea if you want to build a road around York and it will generate lots of extra traffic and lots of extra pollution it's a good idea in a cost benefit analysis because it will use a lot more fuel and that means a lot more taxation is paid to government so it has a large positive value if you want to build a tram in Leeds or York or something like that and the calculations show that it will remove people from cars reduce the number of cars, reduce pollution and reduce CO2 emissions it has a lower value because it produces a loss of revenue to government in terms of taxation so economics and language and philosophy end up giving us a problem this book is particularly interesting because it's in praise of slow across a whole number of subject areas you'll be very happy to hear I'm not going to elaborate on these subject areas I once gave a lecture to a group of transport students about the relationship between slow food slow sex and slow transport and they started leaving the room so I'm not... and all I was doing was copying from this person about the... because there are some interesting interconnections between those three areas but this is not part of my inaugural lecture so how do we promote slow is slow good or is slow bad it's a little bit like the English language when you start talking about traffic calming and you start talking about designing streets I frequently challenge audiences so I'll give it a try this evening of giving me an English word that sounds good that conveys the idea that lots of people will hang about on a street and have a nice time talking to each other because all the English words I can think of lingering hanging about they're all kind of negative whereas if you look at street design in a German city or a Dutch city or a Danish city and you see lots of attempts, evidence, lots of investment in encouraging people to linger then you see there's a different way of thinking about things and those other languages have nice words for lingering so we have to move from fast greedy, energy intensive frequent, high speed high distance consumption towards something at the slow end but how do we package that, how do we market it, how do we describe it well one way that we have found is Donald Applyard's classic study in San Francisco in 1981 in his book Liveable Streets now to cut a long story very short what Donald Applyard did is actually going to specific streets in San Francisco and identify the traffic floor per day which you see there categorise as heavy medium light and then do the kind of survey work that would make social scientists in this audience a bit green about the gills I think which is to say how many friends have you got and how many acquaintances have you got and apparently I've not done it myself there is a reasonably robust methodology for working this out and on a heavily traffic street the people have, the residents have three friends per person and three point one acquaintances and you go down to the bottom and they've in the lightly traffic street and they've got three friends per person and six point three acquaintances per person now classic social science here what's cause, what's effect, what are we talking about what's going on when I taught transport to undergraduates many years ago one very smart guy who I'm glad to say got a third class degree when he left the university said that's because it's very interesting social science point this actually that in other words it was nothing to do with the hypothesis I was trying to explain that if you live on a heavily traffic street you're frightened, you're nervous, you don't go out you don't hang about on the street you don't actually know your neighbours you hide in a back room you don't socialize on a lightly traffic street you do so he turned that the other way round interestingly another person has recently done a study of this kind in Bristol and that's been published and is available on the internet replicating the work of Donald Applegard in San Francisco the point is, do we want streets that are traffic sewers or do we want streets that give elderly people people who can't move very fast slow people maybe we've got slow people children that give people a pleasant, rewarding nurturing experience or do we regard our streets as something to shove masses of traffic down to produce air pollution and noise and every now and then kill somebody what is the purpose of a street and that again is a serious argument we're not really getting into I'll speed up a little bit through the health because I think the evidence base on the relationship between traffic and health especially air pollution and obesity is now largely known I'll pause on this one because I've tried this over the past 20 years ministers of transport in this country what this research draws upon is a number of different studies in different parts of the world which is about the exposure of individuals on different modes of transport to air pollution so for example, if you're sitting in a car what is your exposure to carbon monoxide nitrogen dioxide and then really nasty things like benzene toluene and xylene and all the research points to the fact that the worst place to be is in your nice modern car made to the very highest possible engineering standards meeting all European Union directives and regulations about quality and even the poor cyclist who is struggling behind maybe a lorry and a diesel bus doesn't have the same degree of exposure to pollution as the smoke person in the very modern expensive car now the importance of this is this is a major public health issue that has been replicated in different parts of the world Government ministers back to rabbits are very very very nervous it's okay to say smoking will kill you it's okay to say alcohol will kill you but do I go on television or something and say sitting in your car will kill you or some combination of not necessarily kill you but make you very ill so we do have levels of scientific information that are in a no go area they shall not be communicated and we do not want to alarm the proletariat so that they might get upset this kind of work is repeated all over the world physical inactivity they're popping up next to tobacco in terms of the burden the physical burden disability life years the physical burden of disease and illness in society and you trot down that list and look at things that people do like to talk about a lot unsafe sex, occupational hazards drugs, cholesterol, obesity and then you get physical inactivity so anyone involved in transport or public health should have a very strong agenda for doing something, doing increased levels of physical activity in society and that has actually gone very well in recent years in terms of level of awareness and debate and what we need to do with walking and cycling and accessibility and local services and local facilities but we don't have the will and we don't have the integrated holistic thinking necessary to re-engineer our cities so that for example it is physically possible and rewarding and nurturing and encouraging to make contact with our local shops, our local post offices by the way we've just closed 3,000 local post offices in England so we have made post offices further away and there is a clear modal shift away from walking and cycling to the car because of that and physical inactivity is a killer and we need to get to grips with that in the widest public health sense. Percentage of children driven to school by car this is the kind of work I mentioned earlier in one false move and you're dead but there's a very interesting dimension to this work which is the international comparison dimension we're currently trying to repeat this project in England, Germany and Australia and there you see the Germany with the left hand of the three columns actually having quite low levels of percent of children driven to school by car though that's 1990s which is why we want to do the work again next year in 2010. England why do Brits take the kids to school by car far more intensively than do the Germans and it's a very interesting question from a social science point of view it's a bit tricky to answer but the Australians are even worse and we have to get to grips with the international comparisons. Obesity we are told constantly by public health professionals and others we have an obesity epidemic we're going to be spending £50 billion per annum by whatever it is 2030, 2050 and yet the integrated holistic thinking needed to deal with obesity which means getting to grips with transport. It doesn't mean getting to grips with organised sport it doesn't mean getting to grips with Olympics I was recently accused at a meeting with government ministers of saying I wanted the Olympics scrapped because I was arguing that I wanted that money spent on cycling and walking facilities in every locality in the United Kingdom but we're not going to get to grips with obesity until we recognise the detailed ways in which we can encourage higher levels of physical activity right down to number 32 at Keisha Avenue this is of course a test of whether you're paying attention or not it is a rigged diagram in that it is designed to show what I want it to show because the countries are simply ranked but the numbers are accurate the numbers you look at the percentage of obesity and the percent of walk, cycle and public transit there what percentage of the population is walking cycling and using public transport so let's go immediately to the goodie goodies not Sweden in spite of the fact that I work with the Stockholm Environment Institute but Denmark, but Sweden is very near to Denmark I'm sure the Swedes would argue that the Danes copied off them anyway so there you see to the good end, Denmark right at the good end there where we've got 55% of all the trips walk, cycle and public transport and the obesity the percent obesity level is what banging around maybe around 18% and then if we go to the bad end the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom you get the opposite way round and in terms of obesity by the way it's always the United States Australia and the United Kingdom that just kind of swap places in the top 3 and why, why do they do that and we need to think of that now even more seriously oil and war I'm going to have to pass over this very quickly it's a big subject to put it at its mildest in terms of increasing scarcity of oil supplies, peak oil the rising global demand for oil and the evidence which is contentious but it is there the evidence that we are actually facing a decline in new oil discoveries and the availability of oil naturally mines are turning to the ways in which we can use military force to nick it and hang on to it because we don't really want China and India to get to a situation where they can have more oil than we deserve ourselves so this is just one of many quotes from US military pentagon type discussions basically we must start thinking in terms of using military power to commandeer available supplies of oil globally that's pretty bad news actually but we may return to that later in question time ok this is the peak oil point this is from a study carried out by two Canadians using international energy agency data and looking at the relationship between the projected consumption demand for oil in what's called the IEA reference scenario always very attractive terminology going up there to the top right by 2030 and production millions of barrels per year now when you start looking at graphs like that even rabbits ought to realise that there's something funny going on now the predicted increase in consumption may of course change a thing about predictions to 2030 it's possibly not going to happen in the way that this diagram shows but there's a very serious problem that we tend to call peak oil and there's a very easy solution which is decarbonising the economy this is all dealt with in this absolutely fascinating book transport revolutions moving people and freight without oil Sweden has adopted its own approach putting in a plug once again for in a sense the sponsors of the Stockholm environment institute making Sweden an oil free society not entirely without problems but there are lots of signs of clear thinking at the national level in Sweden on this matter which are absent in the United Kingdom my favourite Australian road sign which indicates I think what we are now facing we are doing things wrong and we need to change our mind I always like to acknowledge that I stole this from Sustrans the national cycling network organisation so I'm now moving into the final part you'll be glad to hear and relatively quickly I've said it's easy, what do we do about all this how do we put everything right we could have a process of basalisation basal in Switzerland very wealthy, very successful lots of American multinational pharmaceutical and chemical companies it sends all the right signals in terms of economically successful and that matters in this kind of debate why does basal manage to get 21% of all its trips every day by cycling and not in 1.6% interestingly York University is an absolutely wonderful place 25% of all its trips every day by bicycle which is amazing we forget those minor places like Oxford and Cambridge but York is actually at the top of all the real places excluding those minor ones and that's because of real policy that's real policy over probably 20 years or more so we need to do what basal has done and I don't have time to tell you exactly even the basalisation idea has been reproduced by the OECD this is OECD data another attractive acronym EST3 Environmentally Sustainable Transport version 3 scenario so the OECD 3 scenario says that if we don't do very much intelligent stuff we'll have 76% increase in our traffic levels and that goes almost exactly the same way for CO2 and if we do a number of things say here are the 84 things you need to do we will bring that down in the way you see there so we'll have a 23% increase which is a big change having done our basalisation we can do our Vaubanisation Vauban is a suburb of Freiburg in southern Germany Freiburg claims to be the eco city par excellence the solar city par excellence everything that they do in Freiburg looks really good Vauban is a new residential suburb it has its own tram route the city planners said that before anyone moved in the tram route had to be up and running a concept that British traffic planners are unaware of that you should be able to sort out transport before people move in we move 5,000 people into residential estates on the edge of cities and build them three parking places each and no buses and no trams and three years later we put a leaflet through the door saying the bus that is very intelligent so Vauban is a very successful residential suburb and there's lots of best practice lots and lots and lots of best practice around the world cycling in Munster 36% of all the trips every day in Munster by bicycle, basal talked about urban logistics 60% reduction in lorry miles per day in five German cities doing urban logistics and pedestrian charging even in London and Stockholm oil free Sweden car reduced Lund Freiburg Lund is a pretty small town in southern Sweden which has a very successful policy of reducing car use in the city rural public transport Freiburg mainly through speed limitation and decommissioning parking places great successes we mustn't forget rural transport this is a particular example there are many such examples in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany citizens bus basically even the German plan has got fed up of rural dwellers saying that they didn't have enough buses so what they did is give them a bus and give them a computer and train somebody to do the insurance do the maintenance and say right and there are 60 schemes now running so small grumpy villages and failure get given their own bus and said stop whinging just sort it out yourself you know you do the timetable but you must make it connect with the following trains the following buses the following and so on and that's worked very well to sort out rural transport in the Stockholm Environment Institute we have a project called the zero carbon project and this is something we're currently working on at the moment and this is to design a zero carbon transport system for the United Kingdom by 2050 we're doing calculations of the amount of carbon we can strip out of the system we have a very sophisticated technique called the salami technique which basically means that we say okay what can we get out of this with congestion charging with cycling, with getting people on buses with taxation and so on so we're collecting all that together with fiscal, behavioural, spatial and technology stealing ideas from the Germans about a federal programme in Germany called creating the city of short distances so how do we pull all that together we're producing a hybrid approach combining elements of those four different approaches and then identifying policy pathways we are designing a zero carbon transport system and we've been told that we have to get the main answers out by the first week in June so we'll let you know what if it doesn't work what if we can't get to our zero carbon transport future through science, through modelling through scenarios, all the work we do we think we can it might not be zero carbon I think it might be 92.5% carbon reduction but okay now if we can't get there then I'm going to go back to an approach I learnt from this character Professor Hermann Knofflacker of the Technical University of Vienna talking to the Austrian Government for many years and this is him outside the Ministry of Transport of Austria in Vienna and he says that really they don't listen very well so he wants to produce a clear image of what life will be like if pedestrians behave like cars so when he goes to meetings that's what he does and he does I've seen him, he does it and he wanders around he wanders around the ring road of Vienna and says hello some motorists wind down the window and say rude things but he speaks to them nicely because he's a transport professional and we're all very nice so he talks to them then he parks and he actually puts money in a meter as well and puts the little parking sticker on on and he explains to people that this is what Vienna would be like if everybody behaved as a car please behave differently, behave like a pedestrian not like a car and then he gets his transport students I think my employers in the University of York might have a problem if I decided to take 50 undergraduates of York University around a particular part of York's highway system in this way so I haven't yet thought of that and he takes them around and it is actually causing a great deal of interest and he's bringing about changes in the way that Vienna is planned thank you very much and I look forward to your questions thank you that was really wide ranging and very interesting we've got a few minutes for questions so I'll ask your response and your questions I'm sure you've hit the nail on the head with one of the many problems but I think your opening remark was incorrect I don't think we do have democracy actually but that's another story in terms of what we're trying to do at the moment the default option is the car so it's not constructing a vision of a new society where people can't use a car and this is the essential point that most of us are trying to get over it's not a case of the fat controller or whatever saying you must not use a car and you must cycle from Selby to York and that's it and do your test go shopping and then cycle back with it it's not like that at all it's about saying there shall be a range of options and in the German context and this is part of the basilisation thing it's quite simple there are trains, there are trams, there are buses there are car share cars, car club cars personally owned cars you know you're looking at six or seven choices so you're right in what you've identified as a sort of a nervousness on the part of politicians but we all need to think a lot more clearly about how we shift that mindset towards what we want is a more choice rich environment so the default option is not the car there are many options and then you choose so I need your good ideas on that that's about electric transport I know you need new energy that generates electricity could you raise something about electric cars electric transport as you point out there is one strand when I very briefly referred to technology in one of those slides electric vehicles is pretty high on the list of technological approaches to producing zero carbon or low carbon futures at the moment they're very expensive but they will be around by 2050 we are assuming in some shape or form a lot of the potential impact depends upon the electricity mix and there seems to be some confusion about that so what will we be using to generate our electricity by 2050 and then that in its term will inform the answer in terms of what contribution electric vehicles can make but there are a couple of like things going on as well a vehicle uses one sixth of its lifetime energy use in its manufacturing the vehicle itself is also associated with these other things I've been trying to talk about road safety and space and all those different things when I talk transport I had a slide which I've spared you this evening where there is an elderly lady dying on the streets of London saying thank God I was run over by an environmentally friendly vehicle in other words there are a lot of other problems which electric vehicle won't solve the road safety world are getting concerned about electric vehicles because they think they're a bit quiet and think that that in its term will lead to a little bit of a bite back they're part of the mix all we would say I guess in the team working on this in the Stockholm Environment Institute is that they are part of the mix but we must look at the fiscal, the behavioural the choice rich, the spatial for example if you could imagine a community where people really can walk and cycle and use public transport to carry out the majority of their everyday tasks then to what extent does that change the demand level for the car and moving through it with a different set of scenarios is what we're trying to do it's not ignored electric cars shouldn't be called cars because you have to burn a load of fuel and that is a pattern that is creating a lot of fuel so the first priority must be to reduce the demand or prevent an increase in terms of electrical consumption and still the point where you get a large penetration of the vehicles and I just want to come back to the timescale which is I read quite a lot about electric cars and I read a lot about peat oil basically it peaked in July of 2008 according to the best analysis and for me that gives a real sense of urgency to what we need to do and I'm just wondering I mean I see it basically a deck anyway where you have to use the remaining resources that we have to construct you know a sustainable economy and I'm just wondering how can you get that sense of urgency across because I see it basically as a world war 2 mobilisation I think you're quite right about the degree of urgency and the use of the word mobilisation but the signs are that that has not yet reached those people that will be primarily involved in national level in making the changes that need to be made because the changes are largely budgetary are we going to spend our money on for example I'm involved with one bypass in another part of the country four miles of road where government has said we will spend £140 million on building four miles of road and there's a large number of things you can do with £140 million which would give us a better chance of dealing with this problem and again in the Stockholm Environment Institute we often discuss resilience what this is about is making cities regions, rural areas, societies more resilient it's not about telling people what to do but we have to be ready to adapt to some fairly significant and in some cases nasty changes so all we can do is keep talking about it and talk it up and there are other bigger things going on that I've deliberately excluded from the talk this evening which is carbon rationing and personal carbon trading so one of the ideas for example is that we could all be given a quota you can have 10 tonnes of CO2 and then when it's exhausted that's it depending who you talk to you can choose whichever one of the following would apply to you you don't use a car you don't eat you don't go on holiday you don't fly you don't have a ticket of the discussion but in terms of the urgency and then the degree of mobilisation that's necessary I entirely agree with you and those discussions are going on but not very productively in this country one more quick question there's a city in Kent I've completely forgotten which one it is could be Ash's forgotten one where they've taken away all the road marks I'm just wondering whether you've got to comment on that as I don't know what about it I'm not sure where the Kent place is but this is the Hans Monderman approach a Dutch traffic engineer which says clear away all the clutter it's been done in Kensington High Street get rid of traffic lights get rid of zebra crossings pedestrian crossings, get rid of railings and so on and it's very popular in Germany and in the Netherlands of course and the idea is that you create a new context where people negotiate with each other and eyeball with each other and you produce a more friendly environment, especially in the city so that the so-called slow modes or sustainable modes or physically active modes become more likely to take off what I've read about it and what I've seen in other parts of the world is it sounds really great British traffic engineers are a bit nervous of doing it in the sense that it's the usual debate we would have in Britain and we need to somehow close that debate will it produce a lot more dead bodies in the short term kind of debate but the evidence from these places that have adopted it on a larger scale in other countries is that it works really well we have to re-engineer our cities our physical environments to make the streets much more people friendly and less dominated by the car one ton of metal carrying a person weighing 75 kilos is not good physics so we have to change no we're in the physics building by the way thank you so good evening I'm Johann Schiele and Chair and I'm going to give a vote of thanks to John Whiteleg for those of you who don't know me I'm the director of the Stockholm Environment Institute Centre here in the University of York we're formally part of the biology department but we have linkages with departments across campus I would like to very warmly thank John for his very engaging talk it's very timely John has been with us since about 2002 and he's always provided us with lots of ideas rather sort of radical ideas in many people's eyes but new and exciting ways to view sustainability an informal sustainability debate and transport is a major cause of all of the environment and development problems across the world that we have to deal with and we're very pleased that John has chosen to work with us and this zero carbon project I think will be very exciting so it's very timely that he gave this talk and I just want to share with you a couple of brief insights which illustrate how important it is to address these transport puzzles I listened the other month to Nick Stern when he was giving a talk at the opening of the Climate Change Economics and Policy Centre at the University of Leeds and he said that talking about this goal of the 80% reduction of greenhouse gases by 2050 he said that the UK can do this all it has to do is totally decarbonise the transport and electricity generation systems and then that's fine then we'd just about be able to make it so that's all we have to do and the other is last week I was invited to go to Tehran to the mayor's office invited to talk about air pollution and its relation to transport the transport, the impacts and the integrated assessment and we were shown around this transport centre I mean Iran is not a developing country I would call it a country in transition and there was a room about this size with two huge screens about 20 ft with views of every single traffic intersection across the whole of Tehran with cameras that they could look at all the traffic jams basically and they are trying desperately to solve their transport problems and they're putting in a bus rapid transit system and they're trying to build out their metro and I said well with all this sophisticated stuff can you see any difference and they said well it's a bit difficult last year we had 700,000 new cars added to the roads of Tehran so any improvement is swamped by this massive increase in transport so I mean we've certainly not solved any of the transport problems in this country it is true that other countries such as Sweden do seem to be a bit more proactive all the buses in Sweden seem to work on biogas it's sort of like one of tomorrow's world things in the UK and we're creating some really massive problems throughout the world it's very important that researchers such as John Whiteleg provoke us into assertive action and John has been considered a bit radical when it comes to transport policy but it's clear to me at least that radical policies are totally required and so therefore I really thank you John for the insights you've given us today and and I hope that you continue to provoke us and provoke others and provoke ministers and try and get the rabbits to sort of jump out of the way of the lights and start thinking constructively and then finally I'd just like to thank also the communications office for organising this lecture and the invitations and also the Vice Chancellor's office for their help and organising this event and very finally I'd like to invite everyone here to join Professor John Whiteleg and herang him with further questions about how to save the world outside there are some nibbles and drinks so thank you very much John