Could we Reduce the Need for Transport?

The “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” mantra of sustainability is not in an arbitrary order. If we don't use the resources - or at least use less of them in the first place, this is the best possible option for sustainability.

Reducing Packaging

The obvious angle here is reducing the packaging that goes around our goods in transport - or at least the resources used in producing it. There are numerous laudable improvements visible in this arena. Air-filled bags, vegetable foam “peanuts”, shredded waste paper and so on all reduce our use of new materials and in being lighter, make transport more efficient. So this area seems to be being tackled already.

Reducing Total Tonne-miles

The “amount” of transport can be measured in terms of the weight carried multiplied by the distance it travels. This gives a number of tonne-miles. The actual resources used and cost of a tonne-mile obviously depend on the type of transport used. The enormous cargo ships we see today are that enormous because that is the way to minimise the cost per tonne-mile. They travel thousands of miles carrying tens of thousands of tons of cargo - so with tens of millions of tonne-miles per trip, it makes sense to concentrate on this metric! The online grocery delivery van is less sensitive to this metric - and also much less efficient by this measure.

So, the other way of looking at “reduction” is in reducing the actual amount of stuff and/or people and/or the distance it has to travel. If we - and the goods that we use - all travelled less, that would be a big help. Most efforts in this arena fall into what I term “bullying” or “guilt-trip” methods. For example, if you won't stop buying food that has travelled from the other side of the world when this fact is shoved in your face on the packaging or shelf labels then we'll force you (or at least the poorer members of society) to stop doing so by raising taxes on fuel and roads to the point where you can no longer afford to buy it.

The wider consequences of this sort of approach are not always attractive. The Kenyan green bean farmer does not thank us for reducing the air miles his beans fly on their way to Sainsbury's. The struggling mother would like her children to eat a wider variety of fruit and vegetables but is finding it too expensive. The only people not affected at all by such approaches are the “fat cats” with more money than conscience - and that doesn't feel very fair.

If we really want to reduce energy consumed in travelling, we shouldn't simply attempt to bully (a.k.a. “tax”) or cajole people into travelling less or changing the mode of transport they use. Instead we should first look at why they need to travel in the first place and see if we can reduce that need.

There are already concerted attempts to reduce, for example, the number of miles our food has travelled. Concentrate first on the reasons we and/or our stuff travel - as shown in the table above. At the risk of being politically incorrect, a key factor here is whether we have to go and fetch items or whether they can come to us.

Key Opportunities

In the table above, we can immediately spot some “low hanging fruit” - and, not surprisingly, those categories are being addressed already. Video- and tele-conferencing are slowly chipping away at business travel and will continue to do so. However, there will always be a need for face to face contact in some cases.

We can also spot some areas that we may not really want to reduce. Tourism (arguably) and caring (certainly) are in this category. So, leaving the well-trodden paths of more and better tele-commuting plus making you feel guilty about how far your kiwi fruit has come to one side, and assuming no-one is going to crack the teleporter for a few years, an action plan to reduce travel should certainly include the following points.

• Where commuting is necessary to access small items at the workplace, these should come to the worker instead of vice-versa. Likewise anything produced from them will have to be sent on to the workplace or direct to the next worker or end user.
• School runs will also be discussed under “reuse” but note that many parents drop their kids off at school “on their way to work”. In fact, most are diverting off their optimal route to work. There is also a secondary influence here. If a parent feels it necessary to take their child to school by car, this then increases the likelihood that they will continue all the way to work by car. In the UK, school bus provision is rarely free within a few miles of the school and is often charged at a flat rate regardless of distance travelled. We should therefore look to increase the availability and reduce the cost of trusted, safe, shared transport to school - whether travelling a few hundred yards or several miles.
• Online shopping is growing rapidly and is reducing, to some extent, the amount we need to physically “go” shopping. Clothes, handbags and the like will still need to be touched and tried on. A home delivery of groceries, though, may actually save you making a trip. At present, the cost of delivering makes this uneconomic for low value items. Even where delivery is “free on grocery orders over £50” it's not really free. It just means that you're paying for it in the ticket price. On the assumption that delivery of stuff to us is going to be more efficient and “greener” than it is now (see the “Reuse” section that follows) then we need to bring the cost of delivering stuff down enough that it makes sense to have most things delivered rather than travel to collect them.

Action Required

All of the above points rely on “making transport cheaper”. How practical is that? Surely UPS, DHL and others would have done so if it were possible? The elephant in the room here is in the third column of the table. Transporting my book from Amazon to my house isn't of itself that carbon hungry. When the last mile (in my case - admittedly towards the extreme end of the curve) means a two ton van and driver are also transported an extra mile just to deliver my book we have hugely inefficient transport. I'd have been perfectly happy for the milkman, the postman, or the paper-man to bring the book with them instead.

The key to reducing transport resource usage and hence cost is not just - or possibly not even - simply to reduce the miles travelled by the things that need to travel but:

• to ensure the right thing travels (Mohammed not the mountain)
• to ensure that the “overhead” that also travels (the car, driver, packaging) is minimised. The best way to do this is to ensure the overhead is shared across as many items as possible being delivered to or collected from as small an area as possible.