Zero Emissions Transport Trial Zone
Transport needs to be decarbonized. That’s a huge and complex undertaking, which cannot be achieved by random steps and misplaced small partial initiatives.
The idea is to create a seriously big trial to make transport zero emissions, all the way, e.g. in the (whole!) North East of Scotland (open for other options). Accounting rules will accommodate cross-border issues for evaluation purposes, not for expediency or excuse purposes.
This is a highly complex integrated undertaking, which will require a proper complex-project business-based approach. This approach is commonly used in industry where large long term (multi-decade) investments are in play. Just like here, but few politicians and civil servants are familiar with such an approach.
This will involve seriously implementing the complete “transport hierarchy”. Creating active travel infrastructure, expanding public transport to cover all possible routes for everyone (including e.g. novel share and public taxi solutions), negative incentives for private transport, especially for fossil fuel private transport, creating infrastructure for car sharing where required/desired, working towards massive modal shift from road to rail for freight and passengers where appropriate, completely electrifying and expanding rail, coordinating last-mile connections to rail, developing tourism and leisure around this premise, developing cycling markets and solutions, full focus on commuting and school run (most trips are short distance – i.e. highly polluting in cars), and more. Just the freight transport innovation (creating goods logistics in e.g. modular mini containers for easy rail-road-delivery transfer) will be massive, exciting and ground-breaking.
If this sounds daunting: excellent! Doing it nationally, or even globally, is necessary. So if we can’t “test” it in a “small” region and do our best to really make it work, we may as well throw in the towel, stop pretending and give up.
Mistakes will be made, hence the localized trial conditions to avoid political blame. The sooner mistakes are made and recovered from, the sooner we can get on with living our zero-emissions lives and stop the struggle against the polluters, the naysayers and the fossil fuel based industries.
The market will not solve this thing in time. It’s an emergency, requiring emergency measures.
The idea is to create a seriously big trial to make transport zero emissions, all the way, e.g. in the (whole!) North East of Scotland (open for other options). Accounting rules will accommodate cross-border issues for evaluation purposes, not for expediency or excuse purposes.
This is a highly complex integrated undertaking, which will require a proper complex-project business-based approach. This approach is commonly used in industry where large long term (multi-decade) investments are in play. Just like here, but few politicians and civil servants are familiar with such an approach.
This will involve seriously implementing the complete “transport hierarchy”. Creating active travel infrastructure, expanding public transport to cover all possible routes for everyone (including e.g. novel share and public taxi solutions), negative incentives for private transport, especially for fossil fuel private transport, creating infrastructure for car sharing where required/desired, working towards massive modal shift from road to rail for freight and passengers where appropriate, completely electrifying and expanding rail, coordinating last-mile connections to rail, developing tourism and leisure around this premise, developing cycling markets and solutions, full focus on commuting and school run (most trips are short distance – i.e. highly polluting in cars), and more. Just the freight transport innovation (creating goods logistics in e.g. modular mini containers for easy rail-road-delivery transfer) will be massive, exciting and ground-breaking.
If this sounds daunting: excellent! Doing it nationally, or even globally, is necessary. So if we can’t “test” it in a “small” region and do our best to really make it work, we may as well throw in the towel, stop pretending and give up.
Mistakes will be made, hence the localized trial conditions to avoid political blame. The sooner mistakes are made and recovered from, the sooner we can get on with living our zero-emissions lives and stop the struggle against the polluters, the naysayers and the fossil fuel based industries.
The market will not solve this thing in time. It’s an emergency, requiring emergency measures.
Why the contribution is important
This is important for many reasons, a few of which are given here:
1) Even such a “small” trial sounds daunting… so we need to bite the bullet, now.
2) We need to start somewhere, else we’ll never learn and then never do it. The small incoherent measures are not going to do it. Getting a handful of people onto a bus will not change transport, but changing everything will.
3) This will hopefully help both government and citizens realise it requires a different approach to get things done differently. The essential and well-proven methods to approach such complex “projects” are not normally applied by government, but are the only way to tackle long-term strategic and behavioural transformation.
4) This is the only way to keep climate change from going on the rampage.
5) For our health and wellbeing, and survival of the NHS (health improvements are substantial).
1) Even such a “small” trial sounds daunting… so we need to bite the bullet, now.
2) We need to start somewhere, else we’ll never learn and then never do it. The small incoherent measures are not going to do it. Getting a handful of people onto a bus will not change transport, but changing everything will.
3) This will hopefully help both government and citizens realise it requires a different approach to get things done differently. The essential and well-proven methods to approach such complex “projects” are not normally applied by government, but are the only way to tackle long-term strategic and behavioural transformation.
4) This is the only way to keep climate change from going on the rampage.
5) For our health and wellbeing, and survival of the NHS (health improvements are substantial).
by ErikDalhuijsen on August 29, 2022 at 10:03PM
Posted by Tony August 30, 2022 at 12:11
You have a naturally contained environment (excluding tourists) and smaller populations so lower overall costs for implementing pilot schemes.
As islands have goods delivered by ferry you're instantly removing issues surrounding people just driving into areas with goods vehicles - you can control access to the environment.
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Posted by lm0001 September 08, 2022 at 12:21
RE: the comment above about islands. I think the issue with public transport is it tends to be most efficient in denser areas, so islands may not benefit the most from it.
Where islands would benefit is greater connectivity with the mainland through greener transport. Where appropriate for the island population, we should be considering modern alternatives instead of continuing to build expensive (to build and maintain) ferries that can be easily disrupted by bad weather, looking instead into direct connections through on-sea-floor (instead of under-sea-floor) tunnels. Combined with green access like rail for passengers and goods it could provide better island connectivity.
This is something that Norway has been investigating (though has not actually built yet) to ease access across it's many fjords, and such technology would be suitable for scottish use too if we could develop it. If we could be the first to perfect such technology that would give scottish engineering a valuable technology to export.
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