If we’d had Facebook in the early 20th Century, would it have been full of people complaining about these “new-fangled horseless carriages”? Perhaps they would have worried that carrying around a tank of highly flammable liquid was a dangerous new form of mobility, certainly more dangerous than a horse. Horses never catch fire like that! And maybe they’d worry about the lack of infrastructure. After all, there were coaching inns everywhere where you could feed, water and even swap your horse. Where were you going to buy petrol?

It seems ludicrous with hindsight, but for many of us, that’s the experience of going on Facebook today. EVs catch fire! (Yes, they do, but at a fraction of the rate that petrol cars do — and the worst are hybrids…) There’s nowhere to charge them! (Infrastructure sometimes lags demand, true, but availability is growing fast.) When you can find something, you spend ages charging! (True, comparative to petrol refuelling – but trade that against the months on end when you never go to a public charger because you do all your charging at home…)

These arguments are all counterable – but the problem here isn’t rationality or the need for reassurance. It’s down, simply, to fear of change. Unlike the majority of transitions, this one is being artificially accelerated by governments, and the benefits of owning EVs aren’t often clear until after you own one: the relative quiet of the drive, the lack of a petrol smell, the incredible, supercar-like acceleration from a mid-range family SUV. Like the proto-geeks that they are, my daughters call the latter “going to hyperspace”.

The fear of change

This fear of change can be seen most clearly in the longing for a hydrogen-based solution. Refuelling with hydrogen has the potential to be just as quick and easy as with traditional hydrocarbons. However, it’s less green because of the extra energy input needed to produce and transport the hydrogen:

“In simple terms, if you need one wind turbine to charge an electric truck, you need two-and-a-half turbines for a hydrogen truck,” says Professor Colin Herron, professor of practice at Newcastle University.

Its only attraction involves minimal change to the way people use their cars. Because of that, at a car level, these dreams are mere fantasies. Hydrogen might well have a role in commercial vehicles. There’s been some very interesting work done in India that points the way. And many perceive it as a good route to decarbonise shipping – but, even there, there’s competition from batteries. But it is unlikely to be the true solution for individual use.

But at the root of this fear of change is an uncomfortable fact for all sides of the debate: we’re not actually transforming mobility, simply making it more sustainable. Sure, there are changes around the edges. The coaching inn is ready to make a comeback as a charging inn – somewhere to grab a bite to eat and a coffee while the car charges. On a road trip last summer, we made days in the car much more pleasurable by finding pubs with chargers for a fun lunch break. The traditional petrol station’s days are numbered because who wants to sit in a forecourt, forlornly eating a wilting packet sandwich, while your car charges? The likely future for the canny operator is something more like the better end of the French aires.

Beyond the EV: rethinking mobility

However, there are other solutions to mobility issues that need to be explored as well. We can decarbonise mobility by offering non-car-based solutions. There are few major cities globally that haven’t at least flirted with electric scooters as a way of offering alternative methods of travel. London is expanding its scheme, which has seen some interesting results:

The initial trial launched in June 2021 and the new report, which covers the first year of Phase 2 of the trial (September 2023 – September 2024), shows that demand for rental e-scooters as sustainable transport is increasing with a 27 per cent rise in customers taking more than one ride, thanks to significant service enhancements delivered in collaboration with operators and boroughs. Since launching, more than five million journeys have been made with around seven per cent now replacing car journeys.

The critical element here is that we’re creating a new form of mobility, not forcing change upon an existing form. There is an emerging vision here of a new future for mobility, and particularly urban mobility, which is truly multi-modal. The more we can disperse the pressure on any single form of transport, the more pleasurable they all become. If scooters take pressure off the existing public transport infrastructure, it becomes more pleasurable to use. If that’s the case, more people will use it rather than defaulting to their cars.

The complexity of mobility choices

Mobility changes should not be looked at in isolation — they’re a network of interconnected choices. And people’s motivations to use them matter:

The factors determining the competitiveness of public transport can be broadly split into two categories: financial and non-financial. If public transport is not the more competitive choice in both categories, policies to encourage modal shift are unlikely to succeed. Public transport must be both the more affordable and the more convenient choice.

“It’s good for the environment” only gets you so far. And “the government is mandating this change” gets you a bit further. But, ultimately, it’s the feeling that it’s “good for my wallet and good for my life” that will actually affect the change we need.

Reinventing the (four) wheel(s)

However, there is a danger of re-inventing the wheel, or popping old wine in new bottles. For example, Uber is introducing new fixed, scheduled routes for commuters:

The commuter shuttles will drive between pre-set stops every 20 minutes, according to Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer. He noted that there will be dozens of routes in each launch city — like between Williamsburg and Midtown in NYC. The routes, which are selected based on Uber’s extensive data on popular travel patterns, might have one or two additional stops to pick up other passengers. To start, riders will only ever have to share the route with up to two other co-riders.

So, you could scale up to a couple of dozen passengers in one vehicle, eventually which… sounds familiar?

They could work on a snappier name for it, maybe using some of the letters from Uber? Reub? Breus? How about, and just go along with me here – bus?

Yes, as Charles Arthur points out above, this is just the bus, reinvented. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see an alternative direction for this. With the US experiment with self-driving taxis expanding, it’s easy to see a future where we use a fleet of self-driving electric vehicles on predictable routes. That’s a more solarpunk vision than just going to the effort of electrifying or putting hydrogen into the existing bus network. And which allows you to enjoy a glass of wine, confident of a cheap, easy and accessible ride home.

The true mobility challenge of the 2020s

So, this then is our mobility challenge for the 2020s and 2030s. It’s clear we need to decarbonise our transport infrastructure. The obvious path is taking what we have, and finding sustainable solutions. But that’s the path that’s meeting the most consumer resistance. The opportunity lies in rethinking our model of transport. How can we use new and emerging technologies to rethink how we move around? Just as the transport infrastructure of countries changed after the invention of the internal combustion engine, so, too, should it change as we phase it out.

There are other pressures at work here, too. People’s working habits have changed, post-pandemic. Many cities are seeing the “TWT” effect — where their transport infrastructure is under high pressure during Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, but much, much quieter at the beginning and end of the working week.

When multiple forces of change act on a single market, the potential for revolutionary change is great. Right now, we’re still largely proposing incremental decarbonisation approaches. What could we build – both in urban and business terms – if we built a new mobility infrastructure in an age where everything has been both digitalised and electrified?

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Picture by Sid Verma / Unsplash.