Meet the Academic urging residents to reconsider how they use cars

“We have failed to grasp how serious the decarbonisation problem is and aren’t planning adequately to meet the commitments we’ve made,” says Greg Marsden, a professor of transport governance at the University of Leeds.

“We have to go back to basics and be honest about the scale of the challenge.”

This summer, Greg set about making an impact to transform private car ownership in Leeds. He has teamed up with colleagues from the university’s Institute for Transport Studies and over 20 partner organisations including Connected Places Catapult to encouraging more people to change their preferred means of travel.

The project, known as INFUZE (Inspiring Futures for Zero Carbon Mobility) aims to enrol 400 households across the city to design and try bespoke mobility solutions such as car clubs, on-demand buses and shared cycles and scooters. The £7.8 million project is funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council, and is delivered by a consortium of partners who are listed at the end of this piece.

The project is asking people to imagine what a city would look like where you did not need to own a car. It then has to try and deliver trials which get close to that vision. The aim is to see if positive alternative pathways to owning your own car really could exist.

Getting many people to think very differently about how they travel is a tall order, but incredibly important, Greg says. If the last Government’s carbon budget plan had been delivered in full, he explains, the UK would still be 221 million tonnes behind where the Committee on Climate Change said the country should aim to be by 2037.

Putting that into context, year one of the pandemic led to a welcome – but relatively small – 21 million tonnes of carbon reduction in surface transport emissions. “Basically, we need 10 pandemics’ worth of behaviour change,” continues Greg.

“The numbers we are talking about aren’t about persuading people they should use their cars a little less; there has to be systemic change. We want people in Leeds to imagine what the future of their city could look like.”

Sunk costs associated with car ownership

Greg points out that many motorists look to use their vehicles for most journeys, given the costs involved in getting them on the road. But cars are also getting larger, and more polluting.

“Ninety seven percent of journeys are less than 35 miles and could be completed in small vehicles. With access to a shared fleet, you could pick the right type of vehicle for your journey and cut emissions substantially without sacrificing mobility.

“Our society has grown up around the car,” he continues. “Households spend £80 billion a year owning, insuring and maintaining them, which is 20 times what they spend on public transport. We cannot just improve public transport a bit; we have to shift towards mobility on demand, or a shared community approach.”

Greg Marsden, professor of transport governance at the University of Leeds

He says Leeds is a good fit for the INFUZE project because a third of households in the city don’t own a car. Greg also notes that while people are being encouraged to purchase electric (and less polluting) cars, data suggests there could be another 100,000 private vehicles in Leeds by 2050 – which may make public transport investment even less viable.

And while Greg welcomes spending on large public transport infrastructure projects up to a point, “it isn’t the answer to decarbonisation, because we can’t build enough, quickly enough”.

Connecting with the Catapult

Greg has worked alongside Connected Places Catapult since its inception on projects including DecarboN8 which helped local authorities in northern England develop place-based decarbonisation policies. “I’m really pleased with the impact it continues to have; a number of research collaborations followed on from it.”

He also worked closely with Monika Büscher who recently retired from Lancaster University on a piece of work to develop a societal readiness scale for transport.

He says the INFUZE project represents a “real opportunity to build a business ecosystem around a new way of doing mobility – and that is what Connected Places Catapult does well.

“The Catapult really understands the sector, and how it can work with universities productively. Sometimes there are formal collaborations; but other times it’s about sharing ideas – which I find very helpful.”

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An early interest in active and public transport

Greg Marsden was brought up in Coventry and remembers the “freedom of riding a bike around the neighbourhood” as a child. He also recalls a two pence bus fares promotion one summer, allowing public travel for less than the price of a packet of crisps.

“Coventry was a car city, with its Peugeot and Jaguar factories, but wasn’t dominated by traffic; although you had to be careful to cross the road safely.”

Greg studied civil engineering at Nottingham University and his father, who worked for the local council, arranged a work experience placement for his son with the bridge design team of the highways and transport department, building the A46 bypass.

The city was one of the first in the country to trial a new type of traffic control system, called Scoot. “The control centre had a massive room full of enormous computers, probably with less power than the laptops we use today.”

His undergraduate course was focused on structures and soil mechanics, but he also met lecturer Professor Margaret Bell – a respected figure in the study of air quality – who had begun a piece of work looking at the impact of traffic pollution on asthma.

Greg’s studies also involved developing structural designs for a tram network which opened 20 years ago in Nottingham. He describes the city as having a “collective belief in municipal action to make a difference” with its centrally-owned bus company and levy on workplace parking to fund public transport improvements.

Greg stayed at the university to study Scoot for his PhD – using data from the system to develop real-time estimates of traffic pollution at road junctions in Leicester. He looked to see if algorithms could be designed to optimise traffic signal settings.

“It was an important time for air quality, with the UK developing leading European standards. But this was the late 90s and the promise was that we don’t need to worry too much, because catalytic converters will solve the air quality problem within a decade.”

Rising through the ranks of research

Greg moved to the south coast in 1997 to work with Professor Mike McDonald at the University of Southampton’s Transportation Research Group and got involved in microsimulations looking at controlling traffic flows on motorways, before focusing again on air quality and pollution management.

He was seconded to the Catholic University of Chile for nine months, where he worked as a research fellow, to help the university study the impact of measures to reduce chronic air quality problems.

These included restricting access for drivers into the city based on their numberplates, and closing six arterial routes to traffic on days when pollution spiked. “This worked from a societal point of view, and got me thinking about how policy is made,” says Greg.

In 2003, he joined the University of Leeds and its Institute for Transport Studies as a lecturer; becoming professor of transport governance and the institute’s director in 2011. For most of his time there, he has focused on transport policy, energy and the environment.

Early projects at Leeds involved assessing future transport technologies to improve sustainability; considering how travel is disrupted by floods, ice and snow; and the travel impact of major sporting events in cities. In recent years, he has taken a keen interest in people’s travel behaviours. When the pandemic struck, he studied the impact which reduced commuting had on the world of work.

Greg also tried to hold the previous Government to account over its transport growth assumptions and the perceived lack of impact he felt they would have on decarbonisation. For the new administration, he wants to see “positive conversations, but not comfortable conversations” about climate change.

“For most of my career, I’ve been talking about managing congestion, tackling poor air quality and improving road safety – and we’ve made some significant interventions. But it would be difficult to say we’re in a better place now compared to 30 years ago.
“We have a more congested and car dependent transport system, with less attention on public modes of travel. The UK is suffering from collective complacency – and that needs to change.”

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Partners on the INFUZE project are: 

Ahead Partnership, Arup, Beryl, Calderdale Council, Climate Action Leeds, Connected Places Catapult, Department for Transport, Enterprise Car Club, First Bus, Fore Consulting, Lancaster University, LeedsACTS!, Leeds City Council, Mobilityways, Padam Mobility, Ridetandem, Royal College of Art, Steer, Third Sector Leeds, Transport for the North, Transport for West Midlands, West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Zemo Partnership.