Just as the refrain reduce, reuse, recycle has been adopted by environmentalists worldwide to prioritise sustainable practice, so the transport engineering sector has its own equivalent – the Transport Hierarchy.
Developed by Duncan Kay and Daniel Kenning, engineers with decades of experience in the field, and published by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMeche), the Transport Hierarchy report is designed as a framework to ensure network resilience and the delivery of societal transport needs into the future.
The Hierarchy’s priorities place the need to minimise demand above the enabling of low carbon transport modes, provision for system efficiency and finally increased capacity. It forms a central pillar of Transition Engineering, an emergent discipline seeking to weave sustainability concerns into engineering projects at all stages, in the same way that safety requirements are currently incorporated.
Who is the Transport Hierarchy for?
Daniel Kenning, co-founder of the International Society of Transition Engineers, is keen that the model be adopted by those who design transport systems and test proposals – those with the power to ensure networks are sustainable. However, it has broader implications as a framework for anyone with an interest in the long term survival of our transport systems.
“It could also help people better understand the context of, and respond to, national transport proposals, such as HS2. Hence, that proposal only works if it doesn’t increase demand, or reduce efficiency, which mean the eventual solution must not be a ‘high speed’ system, but rather a ‘modal shift, increasing capacity’ system”, said Kenning.
Minimise demand
The first step – reducing demand – is about minimising the need to travel in the first place. This means planning communities and networks in such a way that the need for long journeys is reduced, along with the need for the more polluting motorised modes of transports that become more necessary with increased journey distance. Kenning concedes that conventional mechanical engineering may struggle with the ‘demand reduction’ step, and it is thus even more important that the voices of transition engineers are heard.
Enable modal shift
Once a framework is in place that reduces the overall need to travel, decision makers should turn to projects that enable modal shift to more sustainable transport. This approach favours transport schemes that prioritise rail over short-haul flight, cycling and walking over car journeys over 5 km. IMeche suggests a switch of all road freight to rail, for example, would result in a 70% reduction in CO2 emissions. Only once these steps have been taken and their options exhausted, should efforts towards reducing in-system deficiencies be prioritised. This means working to get better outputs from the same input through considerations of fuels and energy sources through the existing Energy Hierarchy.
Increase capacity
Then, and only then, should capacity increases be sought and actions taken to ensure maximum efficiency and sustainability in expansion projects, with IMeche’s Energy Environment and Sustainability group warning that this type of action is likely to induce new journeys and erode gains made in the first step of the hierarchy.
According to IMeche, adoption of the hierarchy can have benefits, including boons to the economy (IMeche estimates that encouraging cycling could bring Britain a dividend of £3 bn), businesses and the manufacturing sector, as well as to individual choice and wider community wellbeing.
Ethical insurance
The ETA has been voted as ethical in Britain for the second year running by the Good Shopping Guide.
Beating household-name insurance companies such as John Lewis and the Co-op, the ETA earned an ethical company index score of 89.
The ETA was established in 1990 as an ethical provider of green, reliable travel services. Twenty six years on, it continues to offer cycle insurance, travel insurance and breakdown cover while putting concern for the environment at the heart of all it does.
The Good Shopping Guide each year examines the companies behind the brands – both big and small. In some cases apparently ethical insurance brands score much lower than you might expect because the holding company is involved in less ethical practices.
Tony Williams
Hyper-utopian…or is it merely utopian? “Switch of all road freight to rail” for instance – even when our railway system was at its maximum, part of the journey for most freight was by road, such as the coal merchants who picked the coal up from the local station’s goods yard and delivered it to homes or factories. And since much of the rail system today is fully utilised by passenger services it’s hard to see how a switch of freight to rail could be achieved without increasing capacity at a much earlier stage than the transport hierarchy envisages.
It seems to me that the high priests of the transport hierarchy have much to do if they hope to persuade the rest of us to believe them.
Thomas Lankester
“And since much of the rail system today is fully utilised by passenger services it’s hard to see how a switch of freight to rail could be achieved without increasing capacity at a much earlier stage than the transport hierarchy envisages.”
This suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of hierarchies of action. A hierarchy is a order of checking, consideration and planning, not an order of doing. So a switch from road to rail would be considered ahead of capacity increase but if it was not feasible then one would more down the hierarchy to capacity increase. HS2 begin a classic example where removing the interference of express services from the West Coast mainline will free up far more capacity for the slower local passenger and freight services.
John W
Should the article read “..,cycling and walking over car journeys UNDER 5 km.”; it would make sense then. Otherwise a good article.
Thomas Lankester
The report and Transition link seem to be broken.
michael
You have used an incorrect name for the publisher – it is the INSTITUTION of Mechanical Engineers.
The ETA
Apologies – now corrected
Daniel Kenning
Thanks for publishing the article, and thanks also to the people who’ve left comments.
The organisation I co-founded is correctly called the Global Association for Transition Engineering, and the URL is http://www.transitionengineering.org.
The first step of the hierarchy is the most important, without which the other steps become difficult – in fact the difficulty of delivering a transport system that works without causing climate change is partly because of the failure to address the first step; engineers, working with other professions, must adapt the systems that depend on transport so that they deliver goods and services (better even) while reducing the demand for transport. This means spending the next decades making every spatial planning decision so that services are more evenly distributed and less centralised; healthcare, employment, retail, education, leisure…. it means understanding what society needs and how to deliver it and giving people the choice to not drive. The system-level thinking must be about access and not about mobility.