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news
London traffic jam (licensed CC BY 2.0 by Garry Knight on Flickr)Emissions cuts from electric cars will be negated by new road-building
The Government’s efforts to reduce vehicle emissions by encouraging greater uptake of electric cars will largely be negated by its £27bn road building programme, according to a new report.
Environmental consultancy Transport for Quality of Life says that in the next 12 years, 80 per cent of the CO2 savings from electric cars will be wiped out by the impact of new roads and the traffic they generate.
The BBC reports that its findings are based on data collected by Highways England.
About a third of the increased emissions from road building between now and 2032 will come from construction (land clearance and embodied carbon in materials); a third from higher speeds; and a third from increases in traffic.
A government spokesperson responded: “This assessment is wholly incorrect and doesn’t take into account the benefits from the massive surge in electric vehicles.
"The Road Investment Strategy is consistent with our ambition to improve air quality and decarbonise transport."
Cars could be slower than bikes on England's urban A roads within a decade
The report accepts that in the long run CO2 emissions from cars will go down as a result of the switch to electric vehicles. However, it says that as the majority of cars will still not be electric by 2030, the process will be too slow to avoid climate catastrophe.
“If we are to meet the legally-binding carbon budgets, we need to make big cuts in carbon emissions over the next decade," said lead author, Lynn Sloman, who is a consultant for the Department for Transport.
"That will require faster adoption of electric cars – but it will also require us to reduce vehicle mileage by existing cars. Unfortunately, the Government’s £27bn road programme will make things worse, not better.”
Studies have repeatedly shown that new road schemes create more traffic as they also tend to give rise to car-dependent housing, retail and business parks.
“More roads just mean more cars,” said Sloman. “Decades of road investment have not solved congestion.
“Sustained lobbying for more money for roads, leaving less for public transport, cycling and walking, is one of the reasons we now face a climate emergency. We can’t afford any more to indulge this Toad of Toad Hall model of mindless road-building.”
She added: "This is an institutional problem. There are people in the Department for Transport and Highways England who have built their careers on big road building budgets, and they won't easily give them up.
“But there are also some officials – and perhaps some politicians – who are starting to recognise that the climate emergency means we need a radically different approach to transport."
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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12 comments
It's blindingly obvious - a huge road-building programme means more traffic, higher emissions, and more car-dependent development https://hedgehogcycling.co.uk/harrogate-relief-road-terrible-idea-reason...
You can't do it and stick to your carbon-reduction commitments.
I know politicians typically like to hold two incompatible ideas at once, but we can't afford that here.
The Tories do a lot of flag-waving and are specialists in jingoism, but they are not patriotic. They sell out the country to the highest bidder, and here they are proposing to ruin the countryside the climate in one go. It can't happen.
But what will their construction company owning party-donor friends build if not the roads we provide contracts for?
This idea that everyone needs to travel from here to there and back at the same time as everyone else is doing it in the same places everyone's doing it needs to change. Remote working for people who sit at a desk and affordable living for people providing services in the area that needs them, we have the technology and apparently the money - £27bn on housing and setting up comprehensive nationwide internet coverage should should get the ball rolling nicely, then chuck the HS2 budget at at it too
Bloody website
"A government spokesperson responded: “This assessment is wholly incorrect and doesn’t take into account the benefits from the massive surge in electric vehicles."
A spokesperson from the government of Boris the Liar? The benefits from a massive surge in electric vehicles is largely illusory and consist of a reduction in local pollution of combustion exhaust gases, NOx, and some particulates, but there will be no reduction in congestion, there will still be significant particulate pollution from brake and tyre dust, they will still deter active travel. There will need to be significant increases in electricity generation, and serious investment in the grid to cope with the extra power transfer.
All in all, the benefits are rather like those claimed for road building itself; mostly exaggerated and not really worth the effort, and in the current national financial situation, very difficult to justify. Cycling on the other hand........
NOx kills nearly 12000 people per year in the UK.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/air/health-impacts-of-air-pollution/hea...
Accelerates the deaths of, rather than kills, to be more accurate.
It wasn't 'Murder' your honour.
I merely accelerated his death.
It's more like 'I didn't kill him, your honour - I just told the murderer where to find him'.
It's funny isn't it?
On another thread you are calling out a poster for alledgedly posting anecdotal evidence regarding the closing of the cycle path at Eton, yet here you are coming out with a spurious comment about the grid not coping with an increase in electric cars that hasn't even happened yet.
So, where's your evidence, or are you just quoting the Daily Mail?
While we might lack a reliable charging network right now, the actual grid is in no jeopardy of going kaput, even if everyone was driving electric cars right now.
For a start we wouldn't need to waste huge amounts of electricity refining oil into a number of different fuels to drive todays vehicles, then you don't actually need to top up a battery that often. The average commuter only does about 20 miles a day so even the cheapest EV's on the market need only be recharged once a week.
So, realistically where is all this extra electricity needed?
I'll give you a clue, it isn't.
Like you, I would love to see everyone riding bicycles, especially for local journies and I think many motorists will find themselves priced out of driving over the next decade as we finally try to get to grips with global warming, but the simple fact is electric cars are here to stay, they are a damn sight more efficient than anything we have right now and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, with nothing to back it up.
It is needed. You simply cannot change consumption from one form of energy to another without resulting in a decrease in one and an increase in the other. Every electricity grid in the world operates on demand projections with a small buffer. We produce the electricity we need, and little more. Of course it will take more generation. Here in Australia the estimates for electrification of the entire vehicle fleet amount to from memory an additional 43TWh of generation, an increase of around 17%. That factors in improved use of existing generation assets.
The problem with electric cars is that while an improvement, they don't move the bar very much. In terms of mass efficiency (consumption for payload) they're still only about 3% efficient. But because they cost more to buy, less to run and are promoted as clean, they're driven more (to amortise the higher cost you need to do more miles). So the amount of inappropriate use (where walking, bike or public transport are better choices) increases. The result is they don't achieve very much - they are still a consumption device, and far more benefit is achieved by changing behaviour than technology.
Electric vehicles are still mostly pointlessly large vehicles that will take up large amounts of road space with most of their potential carrying capacity being unused. This will cause preexisting and recently purchased locally polluting internal combustion engined vehicles to sit, belching out pollution.
Massive investment in roadbuilding has yet to put a stop to congestion, maybe a few more trillions and it might just do it...