Sustainable Automobility

We have been trying to make cars cleaner and more efficient, but has this really made them more sustainable? This book argues, within the context of sustainable consumption and production, that we should see the car as a natural system, subject to natu

This text examines the past evolution towards car-based forms of transport - problems associated with it, the success of past and current efforts to deal with problems of pollution, congestion, safety and degradation of public spaces and amenities, and also new developments, visions and strategies.

In many parts of the world, there is a crisis of mobility. This book shows that technology may well not be enough in itself and that for a genuinely sustainable transport future far more radical change - affecting many aspects of society - is needed. It is useful for academics, practitioners, and policy-makers.

This book contains the papers from the IMechE’s Sustainable Vehicle Technologies 2012 conference. An innovative technical conference organised by the Automobile Division of the IMechE, it follows on from the 2009 Low Carbon Vehicle conference, which established a high standard with presentations primarily focussed on powertrain technology. The conference examines the latest advances in technology with a view towards understanding the consequences of carbon dioxide reduction over the entire vehicle lifecycle. Papers cover all aspects of the finite resources available for vehicle production, operation and recycling. Presents the papers from this leading conference Covers life time emissions and sustainability over the entire product life-cycle Considers all areas of environmental pollution in addition to the goals for delivering low-carbon vehicles

Tomasz Janasz demonstrates that digital technologies and new mobility concepts can lead to a reduction of the automobiles in urban areas by a factor of 10. The book features two vivid case studies of such digital mobility concepts: TwoGo by SAP and smexx. The author proposes six prototypes of business models for ‘Shared Automobility Services’. Janasz offers also the ‘Transformative Literacy’ for designing sustainable urban mobility systems of the future. The author elaborates on the socio-political patterns of urban mobility by presenting the case of the City of Basel (Switzerland). He proposes the framework of ‘Integrated Sustainable Urban Mobility’ to explain how to overcome car dependence in cities.

An examination of the process of prioritizing private motorized transportation in Bengaluru, a rapidly growing megacity of the Global South. Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the Global South. Streets once crowded with pedestrians, pushcarts, vendors, and bicyclists are now choked with motor vehicles, many of them private automobiles. In this book, Govind Gopakumar examines this shift, analyzing the phenomenon of automobility in Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore), a rapidly growing city of about ten million people in southern India. He finds that the advent of automobility in Bengaluru has privileged the mobility needs of the elite while marginalizing those of the rest of the population. Gopakumar connects Bengaluru's burgeoning automobility to the city's history and to the spatial, technological, and social interventions of a variety of urban actors. Automobility becomes a juggernaut, threatening to reorder the city to enhance automotive travel. He discusses the evolution of congestion and urban change in Bengaluru; the “regimes of congestion” that emerge to address the issue; an “infrastructurescape” that shapes the mobile behavior of all residents but is largely governed by the privileged; and the enfranchisement of an “automotive citizenship” (and the disenfranchisement of non-automobile-using publics). Gopakumar also finds that automobility in Bengaluru faces ongoing challenges from such diverse sources as waste flows, popular religiosity, and political leadership. These challenges, however, introduce messiness without upsetting automobility. He therefore calls for efforts to displace automobility that are grounded in reordering the mobility regime, relandscaping the city and its infrastructures, and reclaiming streets for other uses.

Transforming Urban Transport confronts head-on the dilemma faced by a world wedded to mobility: the danger of continuing along the fossil-fuelled path and the real paucity of viable technological alternatives which can be deployed in time. To respond to the dilemma, the ideal of urban transport must be changed from auto-based mobility to systems of sustainable transport in which public transport, and non-motorised transport work together to reduce climate change pressures, enhance urban quality and preserve life and health. The book challenges the commonly held view that a combination of urbanity and higher residential density expressed in compact cities (expected to have greater public transport use) will resolve urban transport/environment problems, instead showing that transport systems can be changed to meet the environmental imperatives without the massive spatial change implied. But the problem of change of urban transport is profoundly institutional and cultural. Changes in urban mobility and transport require local institutional policy action. To support such action, the book explores new methods of governance of transport in dispersed and concentrated cities, new techniques for assessing transport need, ways of improving childhood mobility, guidelines for political mobilization, and norms of knowledge sharing. Drawing together leading scholars from different disciplines in Australia, Japan and China, this book provides a unique fusion of Asian and Australasian perspectives and engages with the coming needs of transport planning practitioners in both high density and dispersed cities.

This work confronts head-on the dilemma faced by a world wedded to mobility: the danger of continuing along the fossil-fuelled path and the real paucity of viable technological alternatives which can be deployed in time.

Transport, and in particular road transport, represents a significant global threat to long-term sustainable development, and is one of the fastest-growing consumers of final energy and sources of greenhouse gas emissions. In this book, long-term energy economy environment scenarios are used to identify the key technological developments required to address the challenges passenger car transport poses to climate change mitigation and energy security. It also considers possible targets for policy support and examines some of the elements that contribute to the significant levels of uncertainty particularly social and political conditions. The book then builds on this long-term scenario analysis with a broad review of recent empirical examples of relevant policy implementation to identify near-term options for the passenger transportation sector, which may promote a shift towards a more sustainable transport system over the longer term. Sustainable Automobile Transport will be of particular interest to those in the policy process who are striving to address the automobile-derived challenges associated with climate change a growing rather than declining problem. It will have a worldwide audience as every developed and rapidly growing society struggles to address the dynamic growth in greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.

This book provides a wealth of information and a critically required framework for sustainable automobile policy development in major Asian countries. It also gives wide-ranging policy options, ranging from technological to institutional solutions to automobile emission problems, based on empirical case studies and comparative policy and regulatory analysis. It is a useful reference with valuable insights on how rapidly changing economies are adopting their policy and regulatory structures to cope with the progressively severe environmental impacts of automobile increase.