Urban responses to climate change: the transport battleground

For cities to become truly green, they need to be less about cars and more about people. Perhaps a revolution is needed...
Road traffic
President of the Institute for Transport and Development Policy in New York, Enrique Peñalosa believes mobility is a political issue. A protected bicycle lane is a symbol that shows a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to a citizen in a $30,000 car. Photograph: Antonio Olmos Antonio Olmos/Antonio Olmos

While cities only take up 2% of the earth's surface, they account for 50% of the human population, 75% of its energy consumption and 80% of CO2 emissions. How cities respond to the challenges of energy production and emissions reduction is therefore fundamental to the fight against climate change.

Speaking at the Urban Age Electric Cities conference in December, Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics and author of The Politics of Climate Change', argued that "the two great convergent themes of living in the city today are on the one hand, the [dependence on] an electric grid, and the other environmental sustainability.

"The city has to build in resilience. The great difficulty is that cities in the poorer parts of the world have no means of doing this, and in the industrial countries [it is] fantastically expensive and demands long-term thinking. Politicians in democratic countries are not so good at long-term thinking."

It's a bleak picture. A 2012 LSE green cities survey of 100 world cities found that less than a quarter of cities have achieved success in their attempts to reduce resource consumption, establish energy security, or reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On many of these issues the hands of city governments are tied, says Philipp Rode, executive director and senior research fellow, LSE Cities. "The energy market is a national one. We all have contracts as individual consumers with national energy companies, often international players that own the centralised power plants ... if you look at the detailed budget of the Greater London Authority (GLA) for example it is very limited, and most of it is earmarked for transport."

Transport, however, offers a significant battleground upon which urban sustainability can be fought. Enrique Peñalosa famously introduced a bus-only road circuit and cycle superhighways when mayor of Bogota, Colombia. Over half of all trips in Bogota are now made by bus, only 22% by car. Also speaking at the Urban Age conference in December, Peñalosa – now president of the Institute for Transport and Development Policy in New York, said, "If it is true that all citizens are equal, then a bus with 80 people has a right to 80 times more road space than a car with one person. Mobility is a political issue, not a technical one ... Similarly a protected bicycle lane is a symbol that shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to a citizen in a $30,000 car ... We need to build our cities a little bit more for people, and a little bit less for cars."

Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's Senseable City Lab, believes that car sharing schemes could have a big impact. "Twenty years ago it was cool to arrive at MIT in a big, powerful car; today what's cool is to arrive together in a Zipcar. Most people don't own a car on campus now." MIT students are hardly a barometer for mainstream America but, he responds: "In January, Zipcar was sold to Avis for $500m – I'd call that mainstream. These are just some examples ... in New York City we have done a piece of research looking at all the GPS information from taxis for a whole year ... If you allowed people to share the trips they make already, you could cut the number of taxis by 50%."

According to GLA, the UK's capital city emits around 45m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year (or 8% of the UK's CO2 emissions), 20% of which comes from transport. Almost 40% of all trips in London are made by car – a figure broadly similar to those of New York and Stockholm. However, only 2% of trips are made by bike, compared to Copenhagen where it's almost 20%.

Rode argues that Copenhagen's conversion to cycling is "one of the best examples of something a city can really do if it wants to." Car use for commuting in Copenhagen fell from 42% in 1996 to only 26% by 2004, through pro-active policies. There is no excuse, he says, not to build protected cycle ways.

Adam Greenfield, founder of New York urban technology company Urbanscale, formerly worked with the US army looking at psychological operations, or "the art of getting people to do what you want them to do".

"One of the foundational principles of that work is making it easier for people to do that thing than to take any other option. [Copenhagen] is a perfect example – it is easier to make the 'right choice' there than it is to make any other choice. Even public transport there is not as usable as a bicycle: there's infrastructure at every level, air pump stations, flat tyre stations ... Whereas if you look at urban planning in the United States, it's so massively car-centric that even urban planners with the best intentions are constrained by the reality that's out there."

Safe cycling in cities has the obvious benefit of boosting health and wellbeing while reducing carbon emissions; while public transport may not contribute much to the former, it could also play a very big part in the latter. Ratti argues that the information and data available to planners and authorities to design efficient transport systems is also better than ever. As people increasingly use smartphones to navigate the city, literally or culturally, the knowledge of how, when and where people use cities is easily identifiable. In turn, smart applications allow individuals to make more informed choices.

"It is almost like the Arab Spring", says Ratti. "The Arab Spring showed us how people can use new technologies to participate and promote change to an unprecedented degree. What we are seeing now you could call an 'Urban Spring' – people using these technologies to take action and control over how they use their cities."

Perhaps a revolution is what's needed for cities to move from good intentions to becoming truly green. But as transport shows, it is in the hands of local politicians and citizens to make it happen.
