Mything the point
By Michael Kenward

13 May 2008

With the price of oil heading towards $200 a barrel, petrol/gasoline is becoming almost as expensive as fine wine. This must have many people wondering how long they will be able to afford to drive.

Those of us around in the 1970s can remember headlines claiming that the American motorist was falling out of love with the gas guzzler. Those stories were premature. Oil prices went back down and Detroit quickly fell out of love with 'compacts' – look no further than the rise of the 'Humvee'.

Things might be different this time, with China and India taking to the roads and a growing chorus of experts talking of "the end of oil". Should we, then, as we did in the 1970s, begin to look beyond petroleum? They certainly think so at Post-Petroleum Transportation, which is why they have come up with "five alternative fuel myths". (That probably means five myths about alternative fuel rather then five alternative myths about fuel.) The pitch is that widespread belief in these myths "hinder the development and deployment of alternative fuels".

First, a health warning: Post-Petroleum Transportation may describe itself as "an independent management consultancy", but it seems to be a one-person band, Charles Cresson Wood, flogging a book, "Kicking The Gasoline & Petro-Diesel Habit: A Business Manager's Blueprint For Action" (a mere $499 for the electronic version). That does not negate his arguments. Energy thinking can always do with novel insights.

The list starts with the basics: "The first myth asserts we have plenty of oil and that discussion of depleting supplies is not a serious matter." Smith challenges this with the statement that "the US Department of Defense has categorized "peak oil" as a serious threat to the nation. Competition for depleting supplies has already been a major factor in several military actions around the world."

For something sold to us on the back of "transportation" – transport as many of us label it – Smith's list of myths really seems to be aimed at the energy sector. It is only when we get to number four that transport creeps in.

"The fourth myth says we can convert to alternative fuels only after we make massive investments in infrastructure. This myth holds that only after our current transportation system is retooled can we benefit from alternative fuels."

Fair enough, but a part of his suggested solution is to plug into the electrical grid. "Rather than creating a brand new infrastructure, the energy distribution infrastructure for electricity already exists and only needs inexpensive metering facilities to sell electricity to consumers driving electric vehicles."

Where will that electricity come from? Smith doesn't say. It is quite likely to need plenty of infrastructure, some of it brand new, perhaps a whole 'fleet' of nuclear power stations with a beefed-up electricity distribution system.

Still, Smith is not alone in thinking that electric cars may have mileage. The notion that Detroit deliberately bought up and then buried the rights to some neat technology for electric cars could have been on Smith's list of myths, but in the real world car companies will sell us anything that finds a market. That is why GM, for example, is going big on its Volt initiative.

For all the nit picking, it is hard to disagree with Smith's punch line, "It's time for the nation and the world to evolve beyond petroleum, but not just for peak oil reasons." More important, perhaps, he may not have the right reality checks to his myths, but it always helps to pose awkward questions.

Further information:
http://www.kickingthegasoline.com/
http://gm-volt.com/

Anyone feeling congested?
By Michael Kenward

30 April 2008

Given the furore that the media managed to stoke up last year on road pricing, provoking millions of people to sign one of those silly petitions on the Prime Minister's web site, there was surprisingly little coverage of the recent invitation from the Department for Transport's Road Pricing Framework division for bids to conduct trials of technology for road pricing.

Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, said: “We have invited companies to propose how they would run a pay-as-you-go system, with charges varying according to time of day and route chosen. We expect to see trials running this autumn.”

You would have thought that at least the Daily Mail would have rushed in to proclaim this proposal as the end of civilisation as we know it, not to mention yet another threat to house prices. Instead, I could find little more than a factual account in the Financial Times.

Maybe it was the nature of the document, far too detailed and complicated for the average media scaremonger. Maybe the media missed the event because the DfT failed to issue a press release to go with the document.

You can understand why the DfT might want to play down its invitation to companies to bid for work on road pricing. After all, more than 1.8 million people signed up last year for the petition “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.”

Perhaps the DfT didn't need to worry. That petition seems to have been a well-orchestrated and media-fuelled one-off. A later petition to "Scrap the idea of ‘road pricing’” garnered a less than impressive 5,634 signatures.

The petitioners refuse to give up and are still in there. A new petition says: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop all pilot schemes on road pricing.” At last count, all of 20 people agreed with that petition.

All this does really is to support the line taken by Ruth Kelly in a recent speech that “much of the national road pricing debate has become sterile, with the 'yes' camp entrenched in one corner and the 'no' camp entrenched in the other”.

Perhaps this is why the invitation to tender for the work doesn't just talk about technology. The Framework for Road User Service Providers also says that the DfT wants bidders to include user demonstrations “to examine the attitudes, responses and experience of Road Users in respect of information and experience, particularly towards privacy and reliability”.

The technology side is pretty straightforward. The trials are supposed to go beyond simple stuff like toll roads and to make the most of the rapidly advancing world of telematics, using such things as global positioning systems (GPS).

Sure, most of the bits that could go into a road user changing system are around, but as other big IT projects have discovered, this is not the same thing as producing an integrated system, especially one that has to deal with one of the hottest issues for road charging: privacy. Any system has to be able to collect money without reporting travellers’ movements back to the security services, let alone the boss. Given the government’s record on data privacy, this could be the killer issue for many people.

Another aspect that goes beyond the technology is the plan to make these trials “a learning exercise”. As the invitation to tender puts it, learning activities “will be a key element of the Demonstrations Project and shall include the formation of expert groups and a series of colloquia meetings, as specified in the Statement of Learning Requirements”. Anyone who bids for the work will have to appoint a “learning manager” and to show how they plan to deal with these learning requirements.

These extra bits could be the make or break for road pricing. Futile petitions to the government may not have quite the same appeal as they did, but it is hard to see how anyone - least of all the government - can persuade road users to accept a pay-as-you-drive system. The only consolation for proponents must be that Londoners learned, if not to love, then certainly to accept that congestion charging has some benefits.

Further information:
www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/roadcongestion/roadpricingdemoproject/roadopricingdemoproject.pdf
www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/roadcongestion/roadpricingdemoproject/
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/roadpricingco2/

No obligation to be green
By Michael Kenward

16 April 2008

In the run-up to the introduction of the UK's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) this week, we saw the strange phenomenon of environmentalists calling for the government to abandon the idea. Biofuels may be intended to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases from transport, but Greenpeace screamed: "we must postpone the RTFO until proper standards are in place".

Greenpeace's knee-jerk response came as the result of a report in the Guardian that wily traders have been shipping biofuels from Europe to the US, adding a small amount of normal fuel - which qualifies the blend for a biofuel subsidy - and shipping them back again.

To ditch the whole RTFO experiment, which requires 2.5 per cent of all transport fuels to come from biofuel sources, just because of a bunch of cowboys - perhaps literally, given the American oil industry's links to Texas - seems to be somewhat extreme.

Anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at international trade practices knows that they are a mess. That is why we have organisations like the European Biodiesel Board condemning "massive exports of unfair subsidised US biodiesel" and threatening to start "a comprehensive legal action against this unfair trade practice, in the form of a joint anti-dumping and anti-subsidy complaint".

The environmentalists do, though, have a point. The idea that any biofuel is a good biofuel – a notion that they have done much to promote – is dodgy. As Greenpeace's own statement puts it: "At the moment there are no safeguards in place to make sure that these fuels are coming from sustainable sources, so they could be grown in areas of cleared rainforest in the Amazon or Indonesia, causing massive greenhouse gas emissions."

The key to this dilemma is 'sustainability', a word that is missing from many of the biofuel ventures hurriedly thrown together to clamber aboard the bandwagon and to milk export subsidies.

Stick a bioplant in the middle of a rainforest, or even in the middle of the American prairie country and there is a fair bet that it will add to climate change rather than reduce it. Unfortunately, while a blanket shutdown of the type demanded by Greenpeace would certainly clobber such ventures, it would also pull the rug out from beneath ventures that have put considerable effort into assessing their sustainability.

For example, a small British company, Ensus, is now in the middle of building a £250 million plant on Teesside to turn wheat into biofuel. The company's pitch is that, "The question is not about whether biofuels are good or bad – it is about differentiating between good and bad biofuels."

Ensus, in a peer-reviewed paper, makes the case that its venture does not even remove wheat from the food chain, as its bioethanol process creates a 'sidestream' product - dried distillers' grains with solubles (DDGS) - that is better than wheat for cattle food, the biggest use of the crop in Europe.

Amongst a welter of evidence, Ensus offers one chart claiming that savings in greenhouse gas emissions "compared to mineral fuel" are better for wheat than for the next-best option, Brazil's sugar cane to biofuel industry.

Ensus may well be polishing the numbers to make itself look good. But at least it has some numbers. What does Greenpeace offer instead? A strategy that would effectively write off the £250 million that Ensus has raised, along with other investments.

There is no denying that, without government action through policies such as the RTFO, biofuels are not economically sustainable in the current climate, even with oil prices going through the roof. Without the RTFO, no one would put money into biofuels.  The best way to kill off any interest in investing in the technology would be to put the whole notion on hold while someone comes up with a rigorous methodology for assessing sustainability. There must be other ways of differentiating between good and bad biofuels and of dealing with the insanities of US agricultural subsidies.

Further information:
www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/biofuels-splash-and-dash-scam-greenpeace-reponse-20080401
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/01/biofuels.energy
www.ebb-eu.org/EBBpressreleases/EBB%20position%20RED%20Directive%20Jan%202008.pdf

Just the ticket for easy travel
By Michael Kenward

1 April 2008

It is a safe bet that several airlines held parties to celebrate the arrival of 'open skies' last weekend, as they prepare to slug it out for transatlantic air traffic between EU member states and the USA. If the newspaper reports are true, which is not always the case, we know that British Airways held a bash to celebrate the opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow. But one important recent innovation in transport probably went unmarked by popping corks of champagne.

April Fool's day also saw the arrival of free nationwide bus travel for anyone over the age of 60. While this is certainly a political move, it could not have happened without a hefty injection of smart-card technology.

The last time since I looked at the technology behind smart cards was when ITSO used the opportunity of the World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems to parade a joined-up ticketing system. ITSO, a member organisation, is the guardian of a technology standard that allows cards issued anywhere to work with whichever reader the bus operator picks ('Simple things on the cards', 16 October 2006).

Thanks to ITSO smartcards, 'seniors' and disabled travellers can board a bus anywhere in the country. The technology allows them to wave their bus pass, with its embedded chip, over a reader that squirrels away details of the journey. The technology chain eventually feeds the details back to the traveller's local authority, which then has to cough up the fare.

Someone else can worry about the finances of free bus passes; our interest is in the technology. As with other new IT projects, implementation of smart cards has not gone quite as smoothly as hoped. There are still some broken links in the chain. But it certainly seems to be less of a technological disaster than the IT systems said in part to be the cause of Heathrow's problems. And when it is all in place, these cards could perform many more neat tricks.

ITSO isn't only good for the free bus pass. Paying passengers can load them with cash. That cash can also pay for services other than bus travel. Some local authorities have looked into their use to get into tourist attractions.

Then there is the idea that ITSO cards could work as library cards, another service that comes from the local authority. How about kids paying for school meals with a card? Or even using them for security control in schools?

All of this might have happened without the free bus pass, but, as Neil Scales, chairman of ITSO and director-general of Merseytravel, has said, all those cards – they had hoped to issue 11 million by now – could provide the "critical mass required to trigger other applications in local authorities".

A further spread of ITSO smartcards will come as new rail franchises come into effect. Recent invitations to tender for franchises from the Department for Transport have specified ITSO-compliant ticketing systems.

ITSO was also a condition of the recent East and West Midlands franchises and the New Cross-Country franchise. South West train services from Waterloo also have a smart ticketing programme.

Even banks, quick to turn their noses up at ideas that they did not cook up, might show more interest, especially if the cards get into the hands of those who spend four-figure sums for their season tickets.

All of this could affect the lives of many more people than can hope to travel through Heathrow's Terminal 5, even when they have sorted out the 'teething problems'. Look no further than London's Oyster card to see how quickly these things can catch on. London's buses move more quickly as passengers stream on to them. Maybe they need something like this as Terminal 5.

Further information:
www.itso.org.uk/

Hydrogen buses gain traction
By Michael Kenward

19 March 2008

Catch a bus around San Francisco's Bay Area and you stand a chance of taking a ride aboard a vehicle powered by fuel cells. For the past couple of years, the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District (AC Transit) has run three buses in the area as a part of its HyRoad initiative, in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Hydrogen Fuel Cells & Infrastructure Technologies (HFCIT) programme.

European bus-makers and operators are also trying out hydrogen fuelled vehicles as a part of an EU backed initiative, HyFLEET:CUTE. London has even moved beyond performance trials to evaluating the operational viability of hydrogen buses, with an order signed for ten vehicles - five of them fuel-cell hybrids. The other five will have hydrogen internal combustion engines. The hydrogen infrastructure supplier has just been named, too.

The Californian buses fill up with hydrogen; the fuel cells turn that into electricity and that, along with juice from on-board batteries, powers the bus. At night, the buses recharge their batteries from the electricity grid.

In all, through its National Fuel Cell Bus Program, the DOE is keeping tabs on about a dozen buses that are testing fuel cells, drive trains and other bits and pieces from various manufacturers.

Two years on, and evidence is beginning to roll in from AC Transit's trial. The DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently issued an evaluation report of the first 17 months, comparing the fuel-cell hybrids with half a dozen conventional diesel buses.

NREL's report shows just how much it takes to get fuel-cell buses on the road. Building vehicles is only part of it. The hydrogen has to come from somewhere. In this case, Chevron built a fuelling station near to the bus depot.

Before anyone gets too carried away with the idea that hydrogen-fuelled buses wipe out greenhouse gases at a stroke, it is worth noting that in Chevron's case the feedstock for the hydrogen is natural gas. To start with, all refuelling operations were carried out by Chevron's team. Only now are the bus company's operators learning how to handle this basic task.

The bus company also had to upgrade its electrical connection to allow faster battery charging. With their hybrid system – fuel cells and batteries – the buses need a fair injection of electricity overnight. The connection also keeps the fuel cells hot enough to prevent their electrolyte from solidifying.

These may be early days for fuel-cell buses. They certainly have teething problems, with the main reason for non-availability in California being the fuel cells themselves. The project has been through various different designs, as you would expect for a demonstration project. After all, before AC Transit began its trial, experience with fuel cells in buses amounted to just a handful of vehicles.

Makers of fuel cells are steadily amassing operating expertise. One of the leading manufacturers, Ballard Power, has already racked up more than two million kilometres of road experience.

The bottom line is that fuel-cell buses can't match diesels. Maintenance, for example, costs more for the fuel-cell fleet, $0.59/mile against $0.44/mile (they still use miles in California.

The results come as no surprise. After all, the diesels have been around for years. But on many counts, the two propulsion systems aren't that far apart.

There is, though, one big difference between fuel cells and diesels. NREL's numbers put the "Bus Purchase Cost" for the new technology at $3.2 million while the diesels cane in at a tenth that price, $323,000. It will take a lot of carbon credits, not to mention new climate-friendly ways of making hydrogen, to make such buses both green and commercially viable.

Further information:
AC Transit
www2.actransit.org

HyFLEET:CUTE
www.global-hydrogen-bus-platform.com/Home

NREL
www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/pdfs/42249.pdf

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Bus Evaluations
http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_fc_bus_eval.html

Refuelling supplier named for London's hydrogen buses
Transport industry news

Have fun in your car
By Michael Kenward

05 March 2008

Learning to drive - and passing the driving test - are rites of passage for most young people. It is a safe bet that few of the teenagers embarking on that ritual see as their goal the opportunity to spend hours stuck in traffic jams as they commute to work or join the motorway for a journey to yet another probably pointless business meeting.

Perhaps some enterprising academic should start a research project that investigates when fun turns to tedium on the roads. If nothing else, the results might provide some marketing data for train operators wishing to appeal to younger passengers, sorry, customers.

One academic has thought about fun in motoring. Professor Iain Borden of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, recently mused on the subject and came up with some advice for the environmentalists who want to drive everyone off the roads. "If we are to deal with the problems of congestion and pollution, we must consider the pleasures of driving as a way of understanding why people will not simply abandon their cars, even when affordable and efficient public transport becomes available," said Professor Borden.

As someone who surprises the rest of the family by leaving the car at the station rather than driving to an expensive car park, I can see the appeal of this message. Professor Borden has higher objectives in mind than my own desire to avoid hassle. "Instead of the functionalist approach to discouraging car driving – by stating that car journeys should only be made when absolutely essential – we could argue the reverse, that car driving should never be essential, never be necessary; rather, driving should only be undertaken as a form of pleasure."

Given his work as an expert in architecture, Professor Borden naturally offers some conclusions for this audience. It is time to think about the design of cities, he says, so that the "driving experience," as the advertising community doubtless describes it, is more in line with the things that make motoring a less tedious experience. He points to developments in some cities, where they are introducing things like "signless road intersections," with no traffic lights, stop signs, road lines or other instructions.

The idea, says the professor, is to "create 'psychological traffic calming', slowing traffic by removing instructions to drivers, allowing eye contact to occur and hence getting drivers and pedestrians to self-regulate their speeds and trajectories". The objective is to produce drivers who are "no longer sign-watching zombies but instead alert, attentive, people-aware citizens".

Fortunately, given all those amusing stories about drivers led astray by global positioning systems (GPS), Professor Borden does not seem to advocate removing the more useful "street furniture" - the direction signs that guide drivers to their destinations.

There are problems with this idea. If the sense of danger is supposed to make us more reasonable and thinking drivers, how do you explain how people drive on motorways when the weather conditions are poor? Heavy rain and thick fog do not seem to make drivers more careful. Then again, by warning of dodgy conditions such as the possibility of icy roads, technology is changing how drivers respond to inclement conditions. As one recent EU report shows, there are also moves to do something sensible with GPS to "connect" cars to make drivers more "crash aware". Perhaps a combination of urban design and technology could make driving more fun.

Further information:
Crash warning for connected cars
http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/popup.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&ID=89414&AutoPrint=True

Solar pie in the sky
By Michael Kenward

20 February 2008

Maybe it is just a lack of engineering knowledge that sends my eyebrows shooting upwards when I read of the latest wheeze from the International Air Transport Association. IATA has just signed up for something called Solar Impulse, "the solar airplane that will fly around the world with no fuel and zero emissions".

The air travel industry gets a bad press. But other transport sectors seem to be catching up. For example, shipping is grabbing headlines of a decidedly confusing nature, with some painting it greener than air travel ("Take a cruise to a cooler planet", 7 January 2008) while others suggest that it pumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than air travel.

But the media find it hard to demonise shipping. After all, it brings us most of our much-cherished manufactured goodies, accounting for "80 per cent of world trade and 92 per cent of British trade," according to Mark Brownrigg, director-general of the Chamber of Shipping. Perhaps more tellingly, "Air freight produces 100 times as much CO2 per tonne-kilometre."

Even if shipping isn't as 'carbon-rich' as air travel, it is hard to see why airlines are lining themselves up behind what can only be a publicity stunt. Does anyone seriously believe that Solar Impulse will lead to a carbon-neutral way of flitting off to sunnier climes? This particular experiment makes the idea of putting kites on ships look positively inspired, even down to earth ("Flying a kit for shipping", 5 February 2008).

IATA's announcement comes with the usual obligatory quotes: "The Solar Impulse initiative is proof that with vision anything is possible – even carbon free flight," says Giovanni Bisignani, director general and CEO of IATA.

You could say the same of the lightweight solar-powered cars that students built to travel across Australia last year in the Panasonic World Solar Challenge. But you don't see even such eco-friendly car makers as Toyota, of Prius fame, holding them up as the hope for the future.

The sad thing is that IATA can point to significant improvements that really do add up to greener air travel. The new generation of airliners entering service - Boeing's 787 Dreamliner and the A380 from Airbus - fly into the real world with impressive energy savings ("Flights of fantasy?", 5 November 2007).

There is at least one way in which Solar Impulse resembles a grown-up aircraft. Like the Dreamliner and the A380, it is behind schedule.

Way back in September 2006, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine reported that the thing "should achieve an around-the-world flight in 2009". IATA's press release merely speaks of first test flights in early 2009. The round-the-world trip, with two passengers and four stopovers, will be in 2011.

The people behind the venture are serious, though. They talk of having "a little more than 40 years left to find a way to increase the payload to a few hundred passengers".

Does anyone know how that compares with Sir Richard Branson's plans to take people into space as paying passengers? Will IATA back that idea, too?

Further details:
www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/2008-02-18-02
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/19/carbonemissions.climatechange
http://wsc.org.au/

Flying a kite for shipping
By Michael Kenward

5th February 2008

Themes from recent comments come together in one of the many documents that the World Economic Forum (WEF) puts out around the time of its annual Davos bash. Just as airships seem to exhibit a cyclical pattern for publicity (Comment, 5 Dec 2007), so do sailing ships, otherwise known as wind-powered marine transport. Sea transport also cropped up when a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggested that the emissions from ships actually promote global cooling (Comment 7th January 2008).

Now shipping is linked with revived technologies in the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers 2008, which comes from something called the Technology Pioneers Community.

Each year, this twiglet of the WEF challenges companies to become a "Technology Pioneer", in a competition sponsored this time around by BT. One of the 39 companies that made it into this hall of fame was SkySails, a company whose wind propulsion system "offers a creative approach to cutting carbon dioxide emissions and saving fuel costs, for the rapidly growing industrial shipping industry".

SkySails belies its name and talks of "towing kites" rather than sails. These kites, says the submission, "could help individual ships to cut their fuel costs - and associated carbon emissions - by as much as 10-35 per cent annually, depending on wind conditions". SkySails also reckons that: "Virtually all cargo ships can be retrofitted with the SkySails technology trouble-free".

The paper in PNAS evoked quite some disbelief. So perhaps there is no mileage in the idea that marine transport is a way of countering climate change. In which case, maybe SkySails is on to something. In any case, sailing ships could certainly prolong the life of increasingly precious, and expensive, oil.

Sailpower for shipping does have an advantage over wind-generated electricity in bringing supply and demand close together. But it is hard to stifle all the doubts about such technologies. Can they be serious? Then again, you would hope that the WEF picked ideas with at least a small possibility of commercial success.

Most of the companies that receive the "Technology Pioneer" accolade seem to pass that test. Interestingly, this year's roster includes several other businesses that hope to do things for transport.

One company, Nanostellar, deals with an issue that could have the most immediate impact. The citation in Technology Pioneers 2008 tells us that Nanostellar's "Rational Catalyst Design (RCD) methodology unites two disciplines - computational nanoscience and advanced synthetic chemistry - to speed the pace of development for nanoscaled catalytic materials for diesel emissions control."

Catalyst design may not have the sex appeal of sailing ships, but there seems to be a lot of sense in the report's description of why the company is a pioneer. "Nanostellar's rational design approach is changing the face of nanomaterials design, in the same way that electronic design automation changed electronic circuit design, by allowing complex circuits to be designed and tested computationally." Now there's a bold claim. Persuade American motorists to buy diesel powered cars and the climate really might benefit.

Further information:
www.weforum.org/pdf/techpioneers/Tech2008.pdf
www.skysails.info/

Almost the ticket
By Michael Kenward

22nd January 2008

Thanks to the delights of BBC's iPlayer service, I recently caught up with the series of programmes that were broadcast to mark the redevelopment of St Pancras station as the London terminal of High Speed One (HS1), the fast railway line to the Continent.

Not owning a television set, I cannot say if this is representative of TV's portrayal of engineering. Does it always ignore the technical details and concentrate on personalities?
For a start, it is a pity that the programme's makers stuck with St Pancras. It may have been an old masterpiece, but it was really just the froth on top of the whole HS1 adventure.

The programmes did show that the engineers involved performed heroic feats to complete the work on time - well, up to a point, as we shall see later. Sadly, there wasn't much real engineering in what came across more like a soap opera.

The whole affair seemed to be about timetables, PR and personalities. All good stuff, it might even have had an effect on the career choices of any young person who was watching, although few of the engineers I meet spend much time on site swearing at tardy workers.

By coincidence, in the middle of catching up with the series a day trip to Brussels gave me the chance to experience the delights of the new service for the first time. It did not, unfortunately, quite live up to the televisual promise and not just because "engineering works" in the Channel Tunnel itself wiped out the time saved by the much faster, and certainly smoother, dash through the English countryside.

In the past couple of years I have become something of a regular on the Brussels run. Living on the Thameslink railway line that connects the south coast to St Pancras and onwards to Bedford (hence its nickname of the Bedpan line), it was delightful not to have to grapple with Clapham Junction and Waterloo.

Letters to the newspapers, possibly from habitual moaners, complain that St Pancras is less convenient than Waterloo. This isn't even true for most of the poor souls packed into the southeast of England; it is certainly hogwash if you consider the rest of the country.

Eurostar is finally a part of the wider rail system in the UK and, by extension, with the growing network of high-speed links throughout rest of Europe (Eurostar is well on the way to wiping out air travel between London and Paris). It is just a pity that the travelling there on Thameslink involves what may be the most dilapidated and sordid rolling stock on the network.

St Pancras itself was a disappointment, perhaps because of the subterranean route into that station from the train. There is nothing grand about emerging into a half completed mall with more boarded-up shop fronts than you see in a down-at-heel suburban backwater. The need to complete the shops – not to mention the longest champagne bar in the world – was a constant refrain of the TV mini-series.

I had to walk past more of these than I would have liked, partly because they had priority over Eurostar's ticket office, which was at the far end of the station from my point of arrival. In theory, I didn't need the ticket office. But there were no signs that I could see to the self-service ticket machines. I had to walk the length of the concourse to the ticket office, where they told me to go back to the Eurostar entrance.

I eventually found the expected row of machines and fed one my credit card. The machine found the booking and then refused to disgorge a ticket for some reason known only to itself (my credit card is in fine health, I should point out). Back to the booking office – and past more ticket machines that the hostesses had failed to point out – to get a human being to issue my ticket.

Getting ticket machines to work and putting up decent signs aren't the stuff of TV programmes. Nor are they really much to do with engineering. They are, though, the things that hit home when you try to use the transport system.

The engineering itself is impressive. Mobile phones and cameras came out as fellow travellers admired, and recorded, the newly restored ironware and brickwork. You could even glimpse some of the real engineering behind HS1 on the journey itself. It really would have been nice had the BBC chosen to record that for posterity.

Take a cruise to a cooler planet
By Michael Kenward

7th January 2008

When it comes to talking about transport and climate change, there is a lot to support the old cliché that the arguments usually generate more heat than light. We have more than once picked over the complaints that air travel is, according to some people, likely to bring about the end of civilisation as we know it. But who knows just how much air travel is behind climate change? And how about shipping?

Thanks to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Climate forcing from the transport sectors," we can begin to put some numbers to what has previously been a messy debate.

The authors of the PNAS paper, from the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo in Norway, kick off with the assertion that, "although the transport sector is responsible for a large and growing share of global emissions affecting climate, its overall contribution has not been quantified."

They then go on to present what they describe as "a comprehensive analysis of radiative forcing from the road transport, shipping, aviation, and rail subsectors, using both past- and forward-looking perspectives".

The paper will disappoint anyone expecting to be let off the hook, though one bit of good news is that shipping actually leads to global cooling. The authors find that transport really is one of the key drivers for the growth in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and it is increasing its influence compared with other sectors. "Although global CO2 emissions increased by 13 per cent from 1990 to 2000, CO2 emissions from road transport and aviation each grew by 25 per cent."

It is even worse in some parts of the planet. "In Eastern Asia, the NOx and CO2 emissions from road transport doubled from 1990 to 2000." In the EU, GHG emissions from most sectors decreased between 1990 and, "but emissions from transport increased by nearly 21 per cent".

One of transport's problems is that it doesn't just chuck out CO2 and other greenhouse gases. It also gives out "indirect greenhouse gases" which are, says the paper, "precursors of tropospheric O3 or gases affecting the oxidation capacity of the atmosphere." Here they are writing about NOx, CO, and VOCs, volatile organic compounds.

That isn't the end of transport's environmental burden. You have to add "aerosols or aerosol precursors, in particular black carbon, organic carbon, and sulphur compounds". Finally there are the "indirect effect of aerosols, which trigger changes in the distribution and properties of clouds".

The paper then goes on to detail each of these components. It then concludes that "the current emissions from transport are responsible for 16 per cent of the integrated net forcing over the next 100 years for all current man-made emissions."

While the authors admit that there are, "significant uncertainties" in the picture they paint, a couple of points do emerge from this study. One is that the Kyoto protocol on climate change – the bit of paper that commits some countries to reducing their emissions of GHGs – manages to leave out some of the mechanisms by which transport warms, or cools, the planet.

On the warming side, the protocol misses out on tropospheric ozone driven by NOx, CO, and VOCs. When it comes to climate cooling, the protocol fails to capture the full impact of shipping "because of its large contribution to SO2 and NOx emissions".
It seems to be the sulphur bit that puts shipping on the cooling side (the paper describes how this happens). This could come as good news for the cruise business. Maybe there really is a good reason not to climb into a plane when you want to have a holiday.

Further information:
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0702958104
www.cicero.uio.no/home/index_e.aspx

Can't see the wood for the biofuel
By Michael Kenward

20 December 2007

In the wake of the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, all eyes are on ways of reducing man-made emission of carbon dioxide. Finally, the USA government has, albeit grudgingly, caught up with most of its people and officially accepted that the climate might be changing and that, just possibly, we should respond in some way. Why, then, question one of the few alternatives to fossil fuels that have caught on in the USA?

The last time we looked at biofuels (Food for thought in biofuels, 17 July 2007), the story was that turning crops into fuel for transport ran the risk of taking food out of the mouths of rather a lot of people and pushing up prices for everyone else. Now, it seems, that is only a part of the problem. Some approaches to growing biofuels for transport fail on other aspects of sustainability.

When National Express decided that it would not, after all, continue with trials of biodiesel in its coach fleet in the UK, the company's chief executive, Richard Bowker, explained that, "We are not dismissing the role [biofuels] may play in the future, but based on the evidence today I think it is vital that we wait until issues relating to the sustainability of supply are resolved before we press ahead with trials of biodiesel."

Bowker's concern was that in the rush to grow biofuels, farmers are actually ripping up the Indonesian rainforest to create more space for the crops that provide palm oil for biodiesel. The Indonesian government may be keen for that deforestation to continue, but in the process they encourage the destruction of one of the world's most important sinks of carbon dioxide.

Bowker is not alone in his concern. Hilary Benn, the UK Environment Secretary, chipped in on the subject during a government-sponsored web discussion. "Biofuels that are worse than what they replace, or which lead to massive deforestation, are not much good – to put it mildly," said Benn. "So we need facts and information to enable us all to judge their overall environmental benefit."

Professor Julia King, now vice-chancellor of Aston University and a member of the government's Technology Strategy Board and formerly a senior engineer with Rolls Royce, makes a similar point in her review of 'low-carbon cars' for the government. In her first report, Professor King states that in moderation, biofuels offer potential advantages over conventional fuels and can, over the medium term, occupy part of the transport fuels market. "But an over-reliance on biofuels, particularly in these early stages, could be counter-productive, putting the world's environmental resources under pressure," she warns.

Professor King, whose next report will include a lifecycle analysis of all transport fuels, points out that "14 per cent of CO2 emissions are from road transport while 18 per cent of emissions are from changes in land use, primarily deforestation, and quite a lot of that is starting to come from growing biofuels".

So, the next time you read a headline giving yet more publicity to a bearded knight who runs trains and planes or some bloke with a fast boat that he wants to take around the world and their plans to save the planet by using biofuels, ask yourself how many trees will die in the process.

Further information:
National Express statement
http://www.nationalexpressgroup.com/nx/mc/releases/pr2007/06-08-2007/
Hilary Benn's webchat
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page13738.asp
Julia King's report
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/pbr_csr/reviews/pbr_csr07_king_press.cfm

Transports of delight
by Michael Kenward

5 Dec 2007

When it comes to technology, and ideas for using it, you can usually rely on the Japanese to come up with imaginative new thinking. So it was interesting to read recently that an airship has taken off over Tokyo. When it turns out that the company that built the said craft is the German firm Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik, you really start to take notice.

Zeppelin has been plugging away at the new generation of airships for some years, with its first maiden flight 10 years ago. The newest helium-filled Zeppelin – none of that nasty hydrogen to burn up like the Hindenburg – has joined the Japanese air traffic, zipping around 300 to 500 metres above Tokyo at a majestic 80km/h. Anyone familiar with the city's traffic may assume that the idea is to get around more easily, but the flights are really just a tourist jaunt, perhaps something to occupy wealthy travellers between their sessions at Tokyo's newly-opened Michelin-rated eating places.

At a length of 75 metres, the new Zeppelin isn't going to make the airlines quake in their boots, even though it might go some way to reducing the impact of air travel on climate change. It seems that the airship has seats for just one crew member and eight passengers. So not even room for cabin service. But that might be a good thing given that, according to a Reuters report, Nippon Airship Corporation had to cancel initial daytime flights because of high winds.

This is not the only recent sighting of lighter-than air-vehicles. That other hotbed of innovation, San Francisco, is the home of Airship Ventures, "a corporation formed with the objective of bringing Zeppelin NT airships to the USA for commercial air tours, media and advertising operations, scientific research and special missions".

Airship Ventures also has an option on Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik's fourth airship.

The new craft is due to arrive sometime in the second quarter of 2008. You can keep up to date on progress by reading the Airship Ventures blog. This goes into the details of how the company has to navigate the planning process. There are some fascinating insights into the company's attempts to persuade NASA to let it use the Ames base. One argument in their favour is that at least an airship would add little to the local noise levels. Wolfgang von Zeppelin, grandson of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the man whose name is effectively synonymous with airship, reckons that noise - or rather the lack of it - is just one of the selling points for a new form of tourism.

Why not hover over environmentally sensitive areas in your silent aircraft? If upmarket tourists are prepared to pay large money to run the risk of being dumped in icy Antarctic waters, perhaps he has a point.

His other idea, that tourists might like to make their flight to the Mediterranean a part of the holiday, would certainly strike a chord with anyone who has made the journey on a charter flight. Radio Netherlands quotes the younger von Zeppelin as saying, "During the flight, passengers can enjoy space, peace and quiet and good cuisine, to say nothing of the fantastic view. When you look at it that way, who cares if a flight to a holiday island takes a day and a half?"

Unfortunately, Radio Netherlands offers its listeners the opportunity to comment on the story. Some spoilsport over there points out that airships aren't quite as green as you might think. The airship has to struggle against some formidable winds when it is down near ground level. Then again, how about using solar cells to run electric motors for propulsion? Perhaps a new generation of airships really could take off after all.

Further information:
www.airshipventures.com/pressreleases.html
www.zeppelin-nt.com
www.radionetherlands.nl/radioprogrammes/earthbeat/071115-zeppelin-airship

Fly local
by Michael Kenward

19 Nov 2007

Seasoned travellers, or those who like to think themselves such, have always shared notes on the best way to arrive in a country. Going to New York? No one in their right mind arrives at JFK. They use Newark, which is not only less crowded, but also has better transport connections to New York City, not to mention the rest of the USA's north-east coast.

Coming to London? Once again, real travellers gave up on Heathrow long ago. Denizens of the south-east much prefer Gatwick.

Heathrow may have caught up in terms of travel into London, albeit you end up at Paddington, the capital's most difficult station to reach by public or private transport. But even today, with many more people flying through the airport, it is still quicker to get in and out of Gatwick.

The airlines have done their best to reduce consumer choice by concentrating their schedules on the world's worst airports. They would rather fly dozens of direct flights to the USA every day than to offer a flight or two a week from a better airport.

There are, of course, exceptions to this. There are cowboy airlines that promise to fly you to a city, whereas they really take you to a Nissen hut in the middle of nowhere. This isn't what most frequent flyers have in mind when looking for a more convenient way to travel.

Long-distance air travellers have their own way of dealing with airlines that want to take people to inconvenient destinations. They avoid the need to allow two or three more hours to drive around the M25 to Heathrow by changing planes in the USA, where connections can be such that the journey takes little longer and is much less fraught.

Evidence that passengers are fighting back comes in recent statistics from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in the UK. The CAA has just updated "Air Services at UK Regional Airports," its account of the latest developments in regional air services.
The report tells us that "Over the period 2000–2006, passenger numbers at regional airports have continued to grow more strongly, at an average of 7 per cent each year, than London airports, which have averaged 3 per cent." The trend is such that "Regional airports now handle 42 per cent of traffic at UK airports."

This is not a sign that people are flying around more within the UK. There was almost no growth in domestic traffic in 2006. There was even a fall in the domestic traffic in and out of Heathrow.

The big change is that "passengers to and from points outside London are using regional airports rather than travelling to London". As the press release accompanying the document puts it, "More passengers are flying direct to their ultimate destination from their local airports, or are connecting at hubs outside the UK."

It is clear how this trend fits in with another of the "key messages" in the CAA's study: that "there is a much greater focus on environmental issues". Does this really fit in with growing use of airport hubs in the Middle East? Perhaps someone could do a detailed comparison of how the CO2 output varies with these strategies.

One point that the CAA's report does not make is about the pressure on the Government from the UK's financial institutions to "do something about Heathrow". This topic is said to be on the agenda whenever the Chancellor of the Exchequer rubs shoulders with the leading lights in those financial institutions.

Perhaps the answer when this next comes up should be to point out that the UK's airport system isn't just there for them. If other travellers have found ways to avoid this bottleneck, maybe those senior executives could do likewise. The phenomenon could even do something about the insane concentration of so much of the UK's economic activity in the south-east.

Further information:
www.caa.co.uk/application.aspx?catid=14&pagetype=65&appid=7&newstype=n&mode=detail&nid=1535
www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP775.pdf

Flights of fantasy?
by Michael Kenward

05 November 2007

You have to admire the air travel industry. In the eyes of many environmentalists, it is public enemy number one when it comes to climate change. But unlike the makers of the gas-guzzling four-wheel drives that bully their way through London's traffic, the people who build the aircraft are fighting back.

We have already seen moves by the airlines to paint air travel in a pleasant shade of green [Can airlines turn the sky green?, 22 June 2007]

I wouldn't normally return to a topic so soon but the companies that make airliners and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) have thrown more fuel into the engine.

IATA does so with an especially provocatively headlined press release. "Aviation Sets a Benchmark on Environmental Performance For Other Industries to Follow," it says.

The press release accompanies a speech by Giovanni Bisignani, Director General and CEO of IATA, at the World Air Transport Forum, in which he repeats some of the usual statistics. "Fuel efficiency improved 70 per cent in the last four decades and the IATA target is a further 25 per cent by 2020." Not bad going, and an achievement that few other energy consumers can match.

While Bisignani's speech - especially the headline on the press release - is eye-catching, it was actually the competition between Boeing and Airbus that first brought me back to air travel and its links with climate change. Both have taken out full page advertisements in various newspapers, promoting their latest additions to the airlines' fleets, Boeing's 787 Dreamliner and the A380 from Airbus, which made its first commercial flight at the end of last month.

The Dreamliner, says Boeing, "will bring the economics of large jet transports to the middle of the market, using 20 percent less fuel than any other airplane of its size". Over in Toulouse, Airbus boasts that "The A380 burns 17 per cent less fuel per seat than today's largest aircraft."

Airbus isn't just keen to tout its reduced impact on the climate, where it boasts that the A380 is "the most significant step forward in reducing aircraft fuel burn and resultant emissions in four decades;" it also proclaims itself to be a clean manufacturer. "Airbus is the first jetliner manufacturer to be certified to international environmental standards ISO 14001, for full lifecycle coverage, including all products and manufacturing plants." Good grief, they even move bits around Europe on "river barges, which generate very little disturbance to the ecosystem".

It is certainly a sign of the times when aircraft manufacturers compete on their green credentials. Maybe they just want to make travellers feel less guilty when they next turn up at the airport. After all, doesn't it make you feel good to read that "the A380 produces only 75g of CO2 per passenger and per km, almost half of the target set by the European Union for cars manufactured in 2008"?

Of course, it would be silly to forget the fact that a trip to New York and back represents a year or so on the road. But these improvements, and Bisignani's reminder that - thanks partly to the new aircraft - air travel will account for just 3 per cent of CO2 emissions in 2050, do make you wonder about some of the more shrill claims that every time you get on a plane you hasten the death of the planet.

Further information:
www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/18-10-2007-01
www.airbus.com/en/aircraftfamilies/a380/index2.html
www.boeing.com/commercial/787family/index.html

Join the club and throw away your car keys
by Michael Kenward

22 October 2007

It is probably unwise for a rural dweller to tell townsfolk how to live. When bus timetables work in days rather than hours, a car is all but essential. So who are we to urge townies to throw away their car keys? Then again, a recent report from the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) suggests that in some cities at least it isn't just economically sensible to eschew car ownership, it also makes environmental sense.

UKERC recently put out a 'mini report' – in a Quick Hits series of things that are relatively easy to do – suggesting that the UK could "produce annual savings of 7.75 million tonnes of CO2" if car clubs reached their full potential. The headline news from the study is that "A national network of car clubs could save an extra 115,000 tonnes of CO2 annually by 2010." There's a good description of car clubs, and a directory of those in London, at the web site of London Car Clubs.

Here you will read that these clubs "offer a viable alternative to car ownership that frees you from the worries and expenses involved in owning a car. No more servicing, maintenance, tax, insurance and MOT costs; as a member of a car club, the only thing you need to think about is when you want to use a car for that trip to Ikea or weekend away."

Car clubs appear from time to time in the media, often in sections given over to money management, the main thrust of the argument at London Car Clubs. UKERC's line is that clubs can also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. At first sight this might seem odd. After all, does it matter who owns the car? Doesn't a club car chug out just as much CO2?

Two factors are at work here, according to UKERC. To start with, car clubs can have vehicles that are more efficient than one that sits outside the owner's front door.
The author of the report, Matthew Ledbury, of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, draws on the experience of Switzerland here. "In Switzerland, the national organisation Mobility Car-Sharing has invested consistently in energy-efficient vehicles and in 2005 the average fuel consumption of the Mobility fleet was approximately 15 per cent lower than the fuel consumption of all new cars in Switzerland in 2005."

The second reason why CO2 emissions fall with car clubs is that people drive less. Once again, evidence from other countries suggests that those who give up their cars reduce their mileage by a third or more. Then again, as Ledbury points out, car clubs can also attract members who previously did not own a car.

Drawing on the experience in other countries, Ledbury reckons that as much as 15 per cent of the population could be suitable candidates for car clubs. The problem is to get the thing on the road, so to speak. UKERC's line is that car clubs "need political support from local authorities, the provision of 'usable' on-road parking bays and finance and organisation to assist with marketing".

There is already evidence that this works. Schemes are proliferating, aided in London at least by the backing of Transport for London and various local authorities. In Kensington & Chelsea, for example, the council increased the number of on-street bays for car club vehicles from seven to 99. As result, "70 per cent of car club members in the UK are now in London".

There are increasing signs of life elsewhere. For example, the Yorkshire Forward regional development agency is investing almost £500,000 to encourage the establishment of car clubs across the region.

Perhaps even more surprising is the development of car clubs in the USA, where the right to own an automobile seems to be a part of the constitution. And yet Zipcar, which arrived in the UK from the USA earlier this year, claims to be "the world's largest car sharing and car club provider".

As you might expect for an American business, Zipcar's pitch is brash, encouraging us all to become "zipsters". The firm also throws technology at the operation, "outfitting the cars with wireless technology". There is even a GPS service for tracking down vehicles, linked to a booking service that works on a mobile phone. Zipcar may be a commercial service, but it too has CO2 in its sights, claiming that "each Zipcar replaces over 20 privately owned vehicles".

If car clubs really can reduce the number of cars on the road, maybe that would mean fewer townies driving too fast down the middle of country lanes. So we yokels might even benefit from the network of car clubs that UKERC calls for.

Further information:
http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/MediaCentre/UKERCPressReleases/Releases2007/0709Carclubs.aspx
http://www.londoncarclubs.net/
http://www.zipcar.com/press/press-one?item_id=61587636

Can we keep society moving?
by Michael Kenward

Without the wherewithal to provide electricity, water, rail, road and urban public transport, society would soon come to a halt. These essential services all depend on vast, and vastly expensive, infrastructure. That is why the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) set out to investigate just what it would take for its member countries to sustain this life-blood of society.

The resulting report, Infrastructure To 2030: Volume 2 Mapping Policy For Electricity, Water And Transport, tells us that we need these systems as "a means for ensuring the delivery of goods and services that promote prosperity and growth and contribute to quality of life, including the social well-being, health and safety of citizens, and the quality of their environments." The report then warns that governments "are not well placed" to meet many of the "growing, increasingly complex challenges" that they face if they are to find ways to pay for that infrastructure. As the OECD says "public budgets fed by taxes will not suffice to bridge the infrastructure gap".

We don't have to look far for evidence of this challenge in the UK. The recent announcement on the funding of London's Crossrail project (estimated to cost £16bn) showed just how hard it can be to negotiate acceptable financial arrangements. Long gone are the days when the government would have dipped into the taxpayers' pockets for the total cost of such massive projects. If nothing else, spending on health for what the OECD labels "the retired population," which is less easily palmed off on the private sector, will take a growing share of public spending, putting pressure on other areas.

The OECD calls for new ways of funding infrastructure, urging increasing use of public-private partnerships "as a means of raising additional financing for infrastructure investment and diversifying business models," but the organisation also believes that we have to make much better use of the existing infrastructure. In particular, we need to "support the use of technologies both to improve efficiency in infrastructure and to enhance demand management."

Three of the report's five chapters on particular aspects of infrastructure deal with land transport, specifically rail freight, urban public transport and road transport. Each chapter makes some interesting points.

It is for the private sector, says the OECD, to pay for the infrastructure needed for rail freight. Then again, it isn't always that easy to separate this out from passenger transport, where there can be a good case for public investment. "The rail infrastructure challenge lies equally in the willingness of governments to identify social benefits and costs of freight services transparently, and to fund them," says the report.

As with many OECD reports, this one, from the organisation's International Futures Programme, is a well-thought-out analysis, replete with supporting data and examples and case studies from many different places. There aren't that many surprises, but in comparing what goes on in different countries, the OECD provides a valuable check that an observer can apply to, and use to challenge, the solutions on offer in their own neck of the woods. What do we make, for example, of the news that in Paris "half of all households do not have a car at their disposal in the city – usually out of choice"? Maybe it is because the Metro works very well and Parisians aren't as car mad as the Londoners who seem to delight in their "Chelsea tractors".

The OECD's report points out that we may have to make some hard choices if we really do want to maintain a transport system that works. Not least of the nasty surprises could be the need to pay more for the privilege of moving around. Then again, the report does point out that when it comes to public transport, London has already blazed the trail.

Along with Barcelona, Britain's capital has among the highest R/E ratios – that is operating revenue divided by operating expenditure. Londoners, of course, may not be too happy about this revelation or the fact that the congestion charge is "a very expensive toll for motorists," but the report's authors take a different view. "As is often the case, UK policy can seem a little surprising whereas in fact it is simply somewhat ahead in terms of practice and opinions."

Who would have thought that the UK has become a role model for transport policy?

Further information
http://www.oecd.org/document/49/0,3343,en_2649_36240452_38429809_1_1_1_1,00.html

More than just a railway line
by Michael Kenward

24 Sep 2007

It was natural enough for the media to focus on the speed record when the Eurostar press junket arrived at London's St Pancras station at the beginning of September. At long last travellers did not dash through France only to crawl to a snail's pace as the train staggered through Kent.

From 14th November, all of Eurostar's passengers will have the same opportunity, when the service makes the overnight switch from its present London base at Waterloo. This isn't the only benefit from the construction of the new route.

The first noteworthy achievement is that this is yet another major infrastructure project that came in on time and to budget. Much as many Britons, and much of the press, find it slightly amusing when something like the Wembley Stadium turns into a project manager's nightmare, such sagas are poor advertisements for British engineering, which is why it would be nice to see more coverage of successes like the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL).

In reality, this isn't the only project where the construction industry seems to have got it right. Not far from Wembley sits the new Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal Football Club, which in media terms also proved frustratingly trouble-free during construction.
Coming back to transport, have you ever wondered why we hear so little about Terminal 5 at Heathrow? BAA, the people behind the thing, may be sitting on the story, but they sure as heck could not have done were the project hopelessly late and over budget or if there were expensive court cases involving different contractors.

The successful construction of High Speed 1 (HS1, the new name for the CTRL) owed much to how the project was organised, according to an article in Ingenia - the magazine put out by The Royal Academy of Engineering (shameless plug alert: I happen to be on the editorial board ) - by Mike Glover, a director of Arup and technical director of Rail Link Engineering.

Bruised by earlier disasters, the people behind HS1 decided to do things differently. They established a procurement strategy that "used contracts that provide incentives to the parties through its gain/pain share mechanism, whereby the contractor shared in the savings or excesses of the cost of the works compared to an agreed target cost".

Just as important as the way in which they put the project together was the reason for doing it. Sure, they wanted a fast train line, but, as Glover explains, they also wanted to promote urban rejuvenation. "The new rail link will achieve this by providing the transport spine for the development of the East Thames Corridor. The new link will stimulate rejuvenation of derelict areas at Ebbsfleet and the inner city sites around Stratford and King's Cross."

There's even an Olympic connection with this project. "The new and expanded transport facilities and development at St Pancras, Stratford and Ebbsfleet were also a key feature in London's successful bid for the Olympics in 2012." Given the likely cost of the Olympic Games - also justified in part on the basis of the rejuvenation that should follow - the £5.8 billion that went into HS1 looks like a bargain.

We don't have to look far for evidence that transport links can do wonders for a region, if your definition of wonders includes massive housing construction and the rapid growth of local businesses. This is just what happened around Ashford, the railway station in Kent that has, until recently, been an important part of the Eurostar network.

We may soon have an opportunity to test the theory that transport and development go side by side. Ashford is about to lose its direct link to Brussels, much to the annoyance of some of the people moved to write letters to the newspapers. Eurostar justifies this seemingly puzzling move on the basis that Ebbsfleet International, the new station for out-of-London connections, is much nearer to the M25 motorway.

Whether it is a good idea to put more traffic onto this road is another matter. You certainly have to question the sanity of the idea when a further strand in the argument is the proximity to the Bluewater shopping complex.

Further information:
http://www.ingenia.org.uk/ingenia/articles.aspx?index=426

Rails feel the strain from overweight trains
By Michael Kenward

10 September 2007

You would think that the UK’s railways go out of their way to brighten our lives with funny excuses for delayed trains. The latest bit of light relief - an ironic phrase, given the story in question - comes in the shape of trains that are too heavy. The report of this on the BBC’s web site quotes the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) as saying that heavier trains were "causing a different sort of wear to the track".

While the phrase “a different sort of wear” hardly has the same ring as the wrong sort of snow, leaves on the line and other excuses for leaving passengers stranded, it does have a horrible ring of déjà vu. Yet again, one bit of the system has been getting up to tricks that make life difficult for bits of the railway business.

It isn't that long ago that I heard an interesting talk by a railway person turned academic. He made the point that back in what some people like to consider “the good old days” of rail travel - with everything in the public sector and run by a single business, British Rail - the various parties involved were still not quite as good at joined-up thinking as we would like to believe. But whereas today the complaints are that it is separate businesses that are passing the buck as quickly as possible, in the BR days it was competing bits of the engineering profession. Somehow they never managed to take a systems approach to the combination of train and track, a state of affairs that continues to this day.

The problem with the overweight trains is that they have stiffer suspensions. This means that they behave differently and place a different type of strain on the track. This has all come about because they have bought some shiny new trains to run in the southern bits of the UK. The new trains are certainly a vast improvement on the slam-door horrors that they replace, but they are also heavier.

Are these, we wonder, the same trains that sat in the sidings for quite some time, awaiting a beefed up the electricity supply system that could deliver enough power? The delay was, as reported by some of the railway people you talked to when travelling on the afflicted lines, down to the fact that no one told the people providing the electricity that the new trains would need more juice.

The academic’s point in his talk was that the railway used to be run by different groups of engineers who didn’t talk to one another as much as they might. Civil engineers got on with laying and maintaining track, mechanical engineers designed the moving bits and electrical engineers got to play with the control systems. The result, he said, was that you never ended up with an optimised system.

A consequence of such confusion is that you can end up with problems in the wrong places. If only some of the trains running on the line are too heavy, forcing the rail maintenance teams to step in more frequently. Then even lightweight trains suffer from delays. This certainly seems to be the problem with the latest episode. According to the ORR, which is upset by delays on the lines in question, “Train companies will have to work out a different maintenance regime.”

The BBC has a great quote from Gerry Doherty, one of the rail union leaders. “This could only happen in Britain where we have such a fragmented rail network. Network Rail gets the blame for delays caused by trains that are owned by the banks and leased to the private rail operating companies.”

Maybe sense will finally prevail, even with the current fragmented system. It seems that someone has had a brain wave and given Network Rail a new role in life. It will be involved in the design of new trains. Let’s hope that the company’s engineers have overcome their territorial thinking.

Further information:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6968868.stm

Too old to hit the road?
by Michael Kenward

31 August 2007

In the wake of recent accidents, the Australian state of New South Wales is considering restricting motorists over the age of 85 to driving no further than six miles (10km) from their homes. Perhaps because the story broke in August, with too little happening in the corridors of power back at home, the British media pounced on it. As usual, though, the coverage was designed more to scare people than to consider the issue in any depth.

One report of the Australian situation puts it down to predictions that a growing number of 'senior citizens' will be driving around suffering from Alzheimer's disease, vision problems and other inevitable consequences of getting older.

Fortunately, we do not have to rely on garbled accounts in scaremongering newspapers to get insights into the problems that ageing drivers pose to themselves and other road users. The Rand Corporation, which has been 'think tanking' for longer than most, has produced two recent reports on the subject. Both provide useful insights, although they miss out on some of the options that technology offers.

The first Rand report to note is "Estimating the Accident Risk of Older Drivers" by David S. Loughran, Seth A. Seabury. Their first point is that it isn't as straightforward as you might think to calculate the scale of the problem. While they are considering the position in the USA - where they reckon that a lot of accidents go unreported and that, "data on vehicle miles traveled are self-reported and error in those self-reports could increase with respondent age" - I'd lay money on there being similar uncertainties in the UK and other countries.

Loughran and Seabury reckon that they have come up with a way to get around these statistical problems. As a result, looking at data from between 1975 and 2003, they conclude that "drivers 65 and older are 16 per cent likelier than drivers 25–64 years old to cause an accident".

They make some interesting observations in their interpretation of these numbers. For example, they warn that their analysis reflects the "riskiness of older drivers who continue to drive," but then go on to say that they suspect that "the riskiest older drivers significantly limit how much they drive or choose not to drive at all so as to lower the risk that they might cause property damage or injure themselves or others. In other words, older drivers do, in fact, self-regulate."

This is almost certainly in stark contrast to that other band of road users known to be more dangerous than most. These are the younger drivers with shiny new driving licences, too many of whom have yet to catch on to the idea that other people also have a right to be on the roads and that it is a good idea not to crash into them.

One interesting conclusion from the Rand study is that there is "little or no correlation between measures of the riskiness of older drivers and the existence of specific state licensing policies". They add that while some states have tightened up on their regulation of older drivers between the early 1970s and the 2003, "the relative riskiness of older drivers changed little".

The second Rand report, "Regulating Older Drivers," describes the extent of the issue. "By 2025, drivers 65 and older will represent 25 per cent of the driving population, compared with 15 per cent in 2001." The two reports come together in a two-page Research Brief, "What Risks Do Older Drivers Pose to Traffic Safety?". Their key observation is that "because older drivers drive comparatively little, the risk they pose to overall traffic safety is actually much lower than that of other drivers, even though they are likelier to cause an accident when they do drive".

It would have been interesting to have developed a point they make at the end of this brief, where they observe that "because older drivers are so vulnerable to fatal injuries in the event of a crash, researchers suggest that policies focusing on improving the safety of automobile travel for older drivers might save more lives and impose fewer costs than would screening older drivers".

Yes, policies might help, but what about technologies that could also improve the safety of automobile travel for older drivers? We already have global positioning systems used to monitor the driving habits of younger drivers for insurance purposes. Has anyone ever looked into the technological options that older drivers could use to make their motoring safer? For example, if GPS linked to insurance rates works for younger drivers, why not adjust insurance rates for drivers who install proximity detectors?

Further information:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR450/
http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP189/
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9272/

Four wheels good, two wheels better
by Michael Kenward

16 August 2007

Newspapers and radio programmes in the UK just have to mention bicycling to provoke an outbreak of 'letters wars'. Cyclists come over all sanctimonious, proclaiming their environmental superiority over evil motorists, while pedestrians complain of being mown down by cyclists riding illegally through red traffic lights and on pavements and footpaths. The car drivers, of course, remain tactfully silent.

The fear of accidents is, after the UK's rotten weather, probably the biggest deterrent to cycling in this country. Recent reports show that cyclists in other countries also have every reason to worry about their safety. For example, the US Department of Transportation - in its report, "Pedestrian and Bicyclist Intersection Safety Indices" - tells us that in 2004, "4,641 pedestrians and 725 pedal-cyclists were killed in crashes, accounting for approximately 13 per cent of all traffic fatalities in the United States".
It seems that the danger of bicycling is no longer a matter of the age of the cyclist.

Another report on the safety of cycling - "Patterns of bicycle crashes in South Australia," from The Centre for Automotive Safety Research at the University of Adelaide - looks at the ages of the victims of these accidents. "Perhaps the most notable finding," says the Australian report, "is the change that has occurred between 1981 and 2004. In 1981, pedal-cyclist casualties were mostly children and teenagers. In 2004, pedal-cyclist casualties were mostly spread across the age range from 16 to 49." This could well be because today's children aren't allowed to vanish for hours far from home on their bikes.
Both documents attempt to understand the safety of cycling and to suggest ways to make it less hazardous. Why bother? As the Australian report puts it, pedal-cyclists are a small minority of traffic on the road, so you could conclude that "the safest thing for cyclists would be to become car drivers."

However, they do not think like that in South Australia, whose capital, Adelaide, is one of the more civilised and pleasant towns around, with a layout that could be extremely cyclist-friendly. South Australia is keen to encourage the locals to get on their bikes, with a website urging that, "Cycling is fun, economical, environmentally friendly and a healthy way to travel."

South Australia even has its own cycling strategy, with a growing network of cycle friendly routes. The strategy document tells us that, "Market research shows that many people choose not to cycle because they perceive cycling to be unsafe – so the challenge lies in improving not only safety for the existing cyclists but the perception of safety for those not currently cycling."

It is hard to see how such an approach could work in those parts of the US where pedestrians are an alien species, thanks partly to the absence of pavements for them to walk on. This doesn't mean that the US has given up on cyclists. The report from the Department of Transportation sets out "to develop macro-level Pedestrian and Bicycle Intersection Safety Indices (Ped ISI and Bike ISI) that would allow engineers, planners, and other practitioners to use known intersection characteristics to proactively prioritize crosswalks and intersection approaches with respect to pedestrian and bicycle safety."

With its indices, this report shows that it is possible to throw some rigorous analysis at the problem of safer cycling. Anyone who wants to avoid the ranting of those moved to write letters to the media can see the results of this thorough work on the websites that host the Pedestrian Safety Guide and Countermeasure Selection System (PEDSAFE) and the Bicycle Countermeasure Selection System (BIKESAFE).

These sites are impressive in the details they offer, with all manner of "worked examples". They may not deal with all of the circumstances that cyclists, and those planning for them, might encounter, but they do show what is possible.

Further information:
http://www.transport.sa.gov.au/personal_transport/bike_direct/index.asp
http://www.transport.sa.gov.au/pdfs/personal_transport/bike_direct/cycling_strategy.pdf
http://www.walkinginfo.org/pedsafe/
http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/

Flood on the tracks
by Michael Kenward

1 August 2007

It was obviously pure coincidence that the government's white paper on the future of the UK's railways appeared between bouts of massively disruptive flooding that created transport havoc. The first (northern) floods closed important roads. The second (southern) floods brought chaos to the railway system near the west of London.

No one should have been surprised by the vulnerability of the country's infrastructure to such severe weather. Indeed, just about everything that happened in those rain-soaked days is described in some detail in the reports of the Foresight Flood and Coastal Defence Project.

Published three years ago, after a long process of research and consultation that brought in some of the UK's leading experts on flooding, these reports are particularly severe on the risks to coastal routes. The experts talk of the savings that could accrue by shifting roads and railways away from vulnerable coastal sites. There are also warnings that some of the newer electronic technologies now used on the railways are far more susceptible to flood disruption than older, more mechanical systems.

The good news is that the white paper on the railways doesn't just masquerade under an environmental banner, with its title "Delivering a Sustainable Railway". The media coverage may have concentrated on the usual subjects – finance, the costs of tickets and crowding on the trains – but the document also outlines the environmental challenges, including those that arise from climate change. "Experts do not forecast steep increases in average temperature by 2037, but they warn that severe weather incidents could become much more frequent. Network Rail is already planning for this and designing increased resilience into its renewals work."

The white paper promises that "As the network is renewed, it will incorporate new severe-weather standards, improving its resilience to climate change." The real challenge, though, will be to come up with what used to be known as "joined-up government," before the term became a cliché. As the Foresight study makes all too clear, individual transport systems are useless on their own: "while the connectivity of the road network has increased in the past 50 years, parts of both local road networks and the strategic road network still offer only limited rerouting options (this is also true for rail). For example, a large flood on one of our main rivers seriously damaging a motorway or mainline railway bridge would effectively cut off parts of the UK from the rest for surface access, with serious and sustained consequences."

This is just what happened in England this summer. Road and rail travel became even more disconnected than usual. Transport problems have also lingered on some time after the waters have subsided.

Perhaps consideration of exceptional conditions is one bit of good news to come out of the pathetic lack of investment in railways in the 1980s, when only a handful of doomsayers worried about the effects of climate change. Had the UK spent billions on railways back then, there would have been little thought for the need to protect against occasional severe floods. The country would then have found itself paying for another round of improvements to the improvements. Well, you have to look for some silver lining to that particular cloud.

Food for thought in biofuels
by Michael Kenward

17 July 2007

Could biofuels go from boom to bust without having any real impact on the people who make or drive cars? The first reality checks surfaced about a year ago, when the Worldwatch Institute took what it described as the first detailed look at the possible social and environmental impacts of biofuels (see Commentary, 28 June 2006).

Fortunately, analysis of the biofuel economy continues almost as rapidly as plans to make the stuff, with announcements from the likes of BP that it is investing in biofuels. By coincidence, albeit it one that might delight cynics, the oil company made its announcement not long after it also revealed that it would not continue with a project to grab and store the carbon dioxide from a power station in Scotland.

BP has set up a venture with D1 Oils, a biodiesel business that is quoted on AIM, the alternative investment market, to cultivate the inedible jatropha plant as a feedstock. This news came soon after BP announced another joint venture, this time with Associated British Foods and DuPont, to build a "world-scale bioethanol plant," whatever that is, on its chemicals site at Saltend, Hull. The plant is due to start up before the end of 2009 and will make some 420 million litres a year using wheat as a feedstock.

It is this last bit that makes you sit up and wonder. Wheat? Does it really make sense to take something that is usually seen as a food feedstock, or to make alcohol of the drinking variety, and use it to run cars? For evidence that this really could be an issue, look no further than the latest edition of the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2007-2016. The press release that came with this report warns that "increased demand for biofuels is causing fundamental changes to agricultural markets that could drive up world prices for many farm products".

These things are naturally more complicated than they first appear. Fortunately, in May the Foundation for Science and Technology (FST) held a discussion meeting on biofuels and such is the FST's clout that it managed to get Lord Ron Oxburgh, who the foundation bills as the chairman of D1 Oils but who was also until recently the chairman of Shell, to talk at a meeting entitled: "Can biofuels offer a significant contribution to low carbon energy supply?" As the account of the event puts it, Lord Oxburgh "stressed the disparate nature of biofuels: some were good, some bad and some not so bad".

The FST's discussion also included a contribution from Professor Sir Howard Dalton, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He was of the view that it is important to take into account the full carbon footprint of biofuels. But, as he said, if the UK used five per cent biofuels by volume by 2010, that would be equivalent to taking a million cars off the road.

Sir Howard's line is that first-generation biofuels are unsustainable in the long run, but there could be mileage in second-generation biofuels – with a reduced need for fertiliser and good agricultural land, not to mention water for irrigation. As the FST's account of the meeting puts it, "we had to be aware of the problems of seeking to meet renewable fuel targets by use of agricultural land in the UK – it could mean using 20 per cent of agricultural land in the East Midlands, with dire effects on biodiversity".

Quite how wheat and corn, wherever they come from, fit into the picture is open to question. Fortunately, with studies flowing almost as freely as biofuel – look out for another from the Royal Society later this year – we do have a chance to avoid stumbling blindly into an unsustainable future in which rich countries turn food crops into biofuels while poor countries are short of food. Whether we pay any attention to these studies is another matter.

An escalator to nowhere
By Michael Kenward

29 June 2007

The smallest issues can provoke a newspaper's readers into penning a letter to the editor. In recent weeks, readers of the Financial Times have abandoned the state of the economy and political interference in the business world as their pet topics and have maintained a constant stream of letters about the state of Heathrow Airport. As John Kay put it in the FT: "The flood of letters to the editor complaining about Heathrow Airport rivalled Santa's postbag in the days before Christmas".

The message from readers seems to be that the airport is a national disgrace. Is this really the way to welcome travellers to the UK? Broken escalators, nasty toilets and one big litter-strewn shopping mall. Then there are all those queues to get through security on the way out. Were that the extent of the complaints, then it would hardly justify a constant stream of letters. What these symptoms really show, say the correspondents, is that the UK has made a mess of the infrastructure that supports air travel.

This is not a trivial issue. After all, joined-up travel is what most people want. The airlines may be wonderful, always on time, immaculately clean and great value for money – well, someone may believe that – but if your arrival in the country is one big inconvenient let-down it takes the shine off the journey.

I was recently reminded of one of my own returns to London through Heathrow when I arrived by train from Oxford. Despite the stalwart efforts of an efficient dispatcher, the long queues of both taxis and travellers moved at a snail's pace, a remarkable contrast to the way they manage things at the Gare du Nord in Paris. The Eurostar may disgorge trainloads of people there, but somehow the taxis keep up.

The irony of travelling into town from Heathrow by train is that you may be subjected to a fatuous announcement describing Paddington as the most convenient way to arrive in London. In reality, this station is even worse than all of the other railway stations when it comes to access to taxis, buses and the Underground.

A really efficient transport system would ease such connections and allow much more efficient use of the whole transport system. So while Heathrow and Gatwick both have express train services into London, getting between the two airports is a nightmare. Two hours or more by train on a cross-country route whose only good point is the scenery; possibly even longer by road, even though the timetable says an hour.

The last time I flew to California I took advantage of living near Gatwick to travel via Atlanta rather than take a direct flight from Heathrow (airlines no longer operate direct flights from Gatwick to San Francisco for some strange reason.) That would have meant going to Heathrow and the prospect of sitting for hours on the M25 motorway, the world's biggest car park.

The letters in the FT talked of the need to connect London's airports, including a link between Heathrow and Stansted. Network Rail could do this simply by extending the proposed Crossrail link, now destined, if it ever gets built, to end in suburban southeast London. They could even add a major junction to allow interchanges between the north-south railway line that connects Luton and Gatwick. Even that link has had its problems. Some cheapskate decided that there wasn't enough money in the kitty to pay to improve the interchange at St Pancras during that station's major redevelopment for the new Eurostar terminal. Fortunately, the people building the new station knew that this was a stupid decision and included the bare basics of a new connection in their work.

It is this penny-pinching that has made Heathrow and London's other airports a torment for travellers. Then again, there may be some logic in this. The fact that the airport public areas are so nasty is an incentive to business travellers to pay the exorbitant price of flying business class to get access to the luxurious lounges that the airlines maintain.
Maybe we should adopt a different tactic and make air travel even more grim. Perhaps shutting down those business lounges might encourage the FT's readers to ask themselves if they really do need to travel many thousands of miles for a business meeting that they could easily conduct over a videoconferencing link. Then again, that would deprive them of all the frequent flyer miles that seem to be an essential business perk. Did someone mention climate change?

Can airlines turn the sky green?

By Michael Kenward

22 June 2007

After travelling to a family wedding in Florence and back again by train, I am feeling a bit smug about the impact that air travel has on the climate. Then again, cooking four hot meals probably takes more energy than making a budget-airline sandwich.

Fun as the train experience was, the limited timetable between the UK and Italy couldn’t satisfy the demand for seats. So even if air fares rise, Europeans are unlikely to switch to trains in large numbers. Anyone who likes a foreign holiday and who cares about climate change really does have to worry about their impact on the environment.

Until recently, the message seemed to be that there’s only a limited amount that you can do to reduce air travel’s propensity to belch out carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Now, though, there are signs that even airlines are beginning to take the issue seriously.

So far all we have had is airlines such as Ryanair claiming that they are doing their bit by using newer aircraft than the competition and cramming more people into crowded planes. A nice ploy that makes the business traveller’s luxurious seating seem positively criminal. But quite how that tactic will look in future years, as Ryanair’s notorious penny-pinching kicks in on its ageing fleets, is another matter.

Even BA, not quite as aggressively ‘in your face’ as Ryanair when it comes to telling the world where to get off, seems to be in two minds about the climate. At least, that is the sense from a recent report in The Guardian. It seems that one bit of BA thought it would be good PR to climb aboard the climate bandwagon. So it launched a scheme to allow travellers to offset their carbon emissions by paying someone else to plant trees or to support some other dodgy carbon sink.

Another arm of the business wanted to bury any suggestion that airlines have anything to do with climate change. Given that the world is waking up to the possibility that offsetting itself may be no more than a PR stunt, this might be a wise move. But it hardly sounds like joined-up corporate thinking.

Maybe this will change now that the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the airlines’ talking shop and lobby group, has, in a press release catchily titled “IATA Calls for a Zero Emissions Future”, issued “four challenges to drive the air transport industry towards its vision of zero emissions”. Air travel? Zero emissions?

After recounting the industry’s undeniable progress in recent years – a 70 per cent increase in fuel efficiency over four decades and “billions being invested in new aircraft” that “will make our fleet 25 per cent more fuel efficient by 2020”, and all that before anyone started to urge them to cut carbon emissions – the statement goes on to admit that “a growing carbon footprint is no longer politically acceptable – for any industry”.

What to do about it then? Green miserablists would ban anyone from flying anywhere. IATA lives in the real world and throws out four challenges to us all. For example, swiftly passing the buck, it says: “Governments and air navigation service providers must eliminate the 12 per cent inefficiency in global air traffic management.” Giovanni Bisignani, the director general and CEO of IATA, adds: “Cut air traffic inefficiency in half by 2012 and we immediately save 35 million tonnes of CO2.”

Not the stuff of green campaigns. But this is just one of the many actions that could reduce transport’s massive carbon footprint.

Have mobile, will travel

By Michael Kenward

15 June 2007

Apart from keeping track of Test Match scores, just about the only regular use I make of my mobile telephone's internet access is to check the progress of the trains I plan to catch. Something strange has happened with the railway system in the UK in that it has quietly assembled a pretty good web-based live departures and arrivals alert service. And you can get at it through your mobile phone.

In the UK we also look wistfully at the comfort and reliability of Europe's railway system. Do they have a similarly effective live information service? I may well have a chance to find out soon as I make the railway journey from London to Florence. Then again, given the charges for using a mobile telephone away from the national network, maybe I will leave it to the announcements to report on the journey's progress.

The use of mobile phones to make transport systems more effective probably wasn't in the minds of the MEPs who recently voted to limit these roaming charges, but when their decision takes effect in a month or so it could be another small step forward for travellers who might otherwise be put off by the cost of using their mobile phones to, for example, pay for a parking space at the station.

This is just one of several applications that have cropped up recently in the constant flow of press releases about the wonders of mobile telephones. The parking payment service comes under the name of RingGo. The idea is that travellers call through with their credit or debit card number along with details of where they are parked. First Great Western seems to be an early adopter of this service. There are also trials on in some London boroughs.

There is just one problem with this idea. It doesn't seem to tell you where you can find a parking space. Add that function and drivers might even be prepared to pay a premium for a parking space. Perhaps they are already talking to Spark Parking, a parking management company that is working with ParkWhiz to feed details of parking spaces into a system that can work with a driver's GPS system to find parking areas near their destinations.

This sort of service could persuade the sceptics who see such technology as Big Brother on steroids, constantly tracking their every move. Such concerns could also deter people from using another new mobile phone service aimed at drivers. The Californian company Mobio Networks recently announced the launch of "Cheap Gas," which the company describes as "a free widget designed to let users instantly locate the cheapest gas stations from their mobile phone".

While each of these applications of mobile telephones has its attractions for travellers, it will only be when they all come together, perhaps with a few other applications, that we will see a genuine revolution in how we use the roads. Mobio, for example, can add restaurant bookings and the purchase of cinema tickets.

Even if you don't feel the need to make use of any of these mobile possibilities, how about the latest wheeze from those bright sparks at Nokia? And sparks is the name of their game. Very big ones. It seems that the company has come up with a way of getting your mobile telephone to warn of possible lighting strikes. In the report that we saw, Nokia was keeping quiet on the idea. But you can read the patent application to get an inkling of what they are up to.

There must be some sort of angle in there for travellers. Whatever it is, it beats that classic use of the mobile phone: "I'm on the train."

Galileo in a spin
By Michael Kenward

24 May 2007

In recent years it has been an act of faith, in the UK at least, that the private sector should finance and manage any project that needs a lot of money. This act of faith extends to much of the infrastructure for health care and education. Transport is certainly something that we expect the private sector to mastermind, even if it takes public money to get companies interested.

So what are we to think when the private sector changes its mind about investing in something as expensive as the Galileo satellite navigation system? A consortium of aerospace and telecom outfits was supposed to have worked out how to manage Galileo by the middle of May. They didn't just miss the deadline, one of many, they effectively washed their hands of the project.

It is not as if nothing has happened. The first experimental satellite has been in orbit since the end of 2005. But that was put together not by one of Europe's aerospace giants but by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, a bunch of nimble-footed academics-turned-entrepreneurs.

The idea behind Galileo is to launch 30 satellites so that Europe can enter the brave new world of global positioning systems (GPS). Intended as it is to make Europe independent from the USA, which now provides GPS for all and sundry thanks to its military satellites, Galileo is one of those great European ideas. But at a cost of getting on for four billion euros, it doesn't come cheap (there is a good crib sheet on the project on Euractiv.com).

The European Commission, which cooked up the idea, describes Galileo as "the largest industrial project ever organised on a European scale". Why bother with such a grandiose plan? Because, says Brussels, "By 2020, the annual worldwide turnover of these markets is estimated at 300 billion euros, with three billion receivers in operation."
Europe isn't alone in thinking this. South Korea joined the project early on. China is in there, as are plenty of other big names in technology. The Commission wants to sort out the mess, and set out its position in a communication to the EU's other arms, the Council and Parliament. It seems that taxpayers could end up with the bill for the whole venture.

Galileo could be very important for transport, which is why the EU's transport minders are in the driving seat. "Satellite navigation can improve vehicle navigation and relieve traffic conditions, guide people with disabilities or localise goods, animals and containers," says the EU. Air traffic control is just one transport activity that could benefit from GPS.

That very broad sweep shows the problem for Galileo. How the heck can the people who run it make money? After all, we can all get a GPS signal for nothing. The project also has its naysayers. A strange lobby group called the Scientific Alliance describe Galileo as "an apparently unnecessary prestige project". Then again, their anonymous observer seems to miss the point. "Galileo will not address the problem of how to get people from A to B safely, affordably and without delays," they write. "It seems a pity that the money could not have been directed towards a project which would."

This overlooks the fact that many of the ideas that will deal with the A-to-B challenge just might find it useful to know where the traveller is between those two places. The alliance might do better to stop grumbling from the sidelines and think of a few ideas that they can throw into this year's Galileo Masters competition. This "aims to encourage small enterprises in the UK and in the other nine participating European regions, to come up with new ideas for satellite navigation applications".

Last year's winner in this event was the Genesys Consultancy which beat off 200 other submissions with GeoSynch, "a unique product that utilises timing signals from navigation satellites to help predict natural disasters". This application may not be about getting people from A to B, but it seems like a pretty good use of money from Europe's taxpayers.

Roundabouts really can be magic
by Michael Kenward

25 April 2007

Anyone looking for solutions to today's ever-growing traffic problems naturally looks to the frontiers of technology for inspiration. There are, though, times when it pays to dig around in the toy box of older ideas that people elsewhere have already put through their paces. The transport research community in the USA has been doing just that.
If their findings catch on, then it could bring relief to those, from Britain at least, who have tried to get to groups with those four-way junctions that litter roads in the USA. The locals naturally know how to navigate these beasts. But for someone who has just picked up a 'compact' the size of a bus from the car hire desk at the airport, those junctions are a nightmare.
The natural response is to wonder why they don't have roundabouts. That very question has exercised the Transportation Research Board (TRB) which, through the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, has just come up with the report Roundabouts in the United States.
The TRB, a part of the US National Academies of Engineering, reveals that "traffic circles" aren't quite alien to the USA; it is just that they are suspicious of these foreign imports. As the foreword points out, "traffic circles have been used in the United States since 1905," but "their use has been limited since the 1950s because many were found to work neither efficiently nor safely".
The r