Claire Walters
Claire Walters, Chief Executive of Bus Users UK, considers the risk posed by the draw of electric cars to solving wider problems of congestion and sustainable travel
The latest figures are out and while new car sales are at a 30-year low, demand for electric vehicles continues to grow, accounting for nearly a fifth of all new car sales. Electric vehicles are rapidly becoming the saviour of a flagging car industry, but at what cost?
For motorists themselves that warm glow of ‘doing their bit’ for decarbonisation may wear thin in the face of ‘range anxiety,’ charging networks that haven’t kept up with demand, and the impact of extreme cold which can reduce battery effectiveness by up to 50% (and in some cases prevent the car from starting at all).
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If you’re unfortunate enough to break down in one, it’s worth making sure your breakdown service offers roadside charging – which is not always the case. Towing an all-wheel drive is definitely not an option and some electric cars are just too heavy for a standard recovery vehicle. An HGV recovery vehicle can do the job but it could be some time before one becomes available…
The excessive weight of electric cars isn’t just a problem for owners and roadside recovery services. Heavier vehicles tend to kick up more particulate waste from the road surface which can outweigh the benefits of having no tailpipe emissions. Particulate waste gets into your lungs and bloodstream and is associated with asthma, heart problems and a wide variety of other health issues. It can also affect soil and water quality for miles.
Then there’s the issue of battery production which is energy-intensive and uses finite natural resources (often obtained in ethically dubious ways), battery charging which is reliant on a national grid that is at least in part reliant on fossil fuels, and end-of-life battery disposal which in its current form is unsustainable.
Not quite the ‘green’ transport choice it’s made out to be. But as petrol and diesel car use continues to rise, making up 52% of transport emissions, something definitely needs to change.
As many as 77% of households in Britain now own a car, clogging up our town and city centres and causing up to 36,000 deaths per year from respiratory disease, lung cancer and cardiovascular illness. With the majority of private cars transporting just one person per journey, pre-Covid figures showed that UK road users wasted, on average, 115 hours each year in congestion, going up to 149 hours in London. That’s over two average working weeks spent sitting in traffic, at a total cost to the economy of £6.9 billion.
Rather than switching people from one form of private transport to another, we need to start planning a world in which car ownership is the exception not the rule. We need to actively discourage private car use and invest in reliable, integrated and affordable public, shared and active travel with the most inclusive and accessible of these – buses – at the heart.
At the moment, the cost of an electric car along with tolls and congestion charging is widening the inequality gap and contributing, ironically, to congestion and pollution. Buses, on the other hand, take vehicles off our roads, reduce isolation and loneliness, improve health and well-being and give people access to life’s opportunities through education, employment, social and leisure activities and healthcare.
According to the Government’s own Decarbonising Transport paper, transport is something that “fundamentally shapes our towns, our cities, our countryside, our living standards, our health, and our whole quality of life. It can shape all these things for good – or for bad.”
Bad, apparently, is spending longer and longer stuck in traffic, rat-running down roads which were never meant for it, and millions of people being poisoned by the very air they breathe. So instead of heading full-speed down the rat-run of a car-led recovery, let’s create a transport system that genuinely and actually works for everyone.
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