I attended this meeting in Bristol on Weds 15th May. Jointly hosted by the Bristol Civic Society and the University of the West of England, it gave an interesting if slightly less-than-optimistic view of the future of travel.
I am not much of a note-taker, so I apologise for the sketchy nature of this report. Bristol Civic Society should be putting up the slides on their website shortly; I will keep a lookout for them and post a link when they do.
The first speaker was
Douglas Sole, of the Go Ultra Low West project. He spoke of the difficulties (such as traffic planning and grid capacity) and expense of rolling out public EV charging points in the kind of urban environment where they are most needed. Up to now many have been installed where it is cheap and easy to do rather than where they are likely to be used, and consequently they have been neglected. The project is in the process of installing four rapid-charging hubs across the West of England region (i.e. former Avon), and is encouraging businesses to install charging points.
Dr Nick Small, Head of Strategic Development and the Built Environment at Stagecoach
UK▸ then spoke about Transport on Demand. He gave details of the
Lincolnshire CallConnect demand-responsive service, which uses minibuses operating in an area rather than along specific routes (there is also a less-flexible variant of this which just deviates from route on demand). These services are expensive to operate (the minibuses themselves are surprisingly expensive) and there are capacity problems in the peaks.
Sue Arrowsmith of First West of England then spoke about the
MyFirstMile project, which was recently trialled in north-west Bristol (I was surprised that this slipped below my radar!)
Finally,
Professor Graham Parkhurst of The Centre of Transport and Society, University of the West of England, Bristol attempted to look ahead in terms of modes of transport, pollution and congestion. Traffic is growing at around 1% per year, and is likely to continue to do so well into the future. This can only lead to greater congestion, and hence electric cars are certainly no magic bullet. His answer to the need for modal shift, disappointingly, appeared to be MetroBus.
Other speakers then related their personal experiences of owning electric vehicles, and of using on-demand and sharing services such as Slide, blablacar and MyFirstMile. In general they were all very positive. I particularly liked the little detail that blablacar allows you to set a preference of bla, blabla, or blablabla - depending on how talkative you are!
During questions at the end, all the speakers seemed to agree that rail would be nice and could help, but gave a gallic shrug at the prospect of ever getting funding to do anything about it.
I travelled to the venue by electric car, and walked home.
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