THE PASSENGER VIEW: SUSTAINABLE TRAVEL
While attention has been focused on the Covid crisis for the last 18 months, the climate crisis has not gone away. The upcoming COP26 summit in Glasgow provides the opportunity to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Scotland’s Climate Change Plan recognises there are unique challenges to reaching net zero emissions in transport. It continues to be Scotland’s biggest emitting sector. The plan acknowledges that COVID-19 has had a profound impact on transport. The reasons for how, why and when people travel have been fundamentally changed.
Examining both the consumer view towards travelling more sustainably and the impact that the pandemic has had on travel patterns adds to our understanding of those challenges.
In our Future Rail Commuting Survey we spoke to people who used to be regular commuters by rail, but whose jobs could be done without going to their place of work. These are the commuters who have a choice about how much they continue to work from home in future or get back on the train.
Just over two thirds (68 per cent) say they will commute by rail for the remainder of 2021. While 20 per cent say that they will not travel by rail at all, or that they don’t know about their future commuting patterns.
The traditional five days a week commute looks unlikely to return any time soon. A hybrid pattern of one to three oce days a week is emerging. This will have significant eect on levels of demand, the frequency of services and ticket revenue. With this new flexibility for passengers, it is more important than ever that train operators focus on providing attractive, value for money services.
Our recent report The Journey Towards Sustainable Travel looked at how sustainability and the environment feature in people’s transport use and how they might change their behaviour in the future.
We know from previous insight over many years that cost and convenience plus, to a lesser degree, choice and control of when and how to travel, determine how we choose to move around. There is a basic understanding of ‘sustainability’, but it is too vague to feel actionable. People don’t have a clear sense of what the core issue is, or the relative importance of different issues that come under the sustainability umbrella.
People do recognise that transport is a major cause of carbon emissions, but it doesn’t come top of mind in terms of actions they could be taking. They don’t see that there are any viable alternatives to their current modes of transport, so switch o from considering it as part of any individual actions they might take.
When people are making choices about transport, sustainability is not a primary need or driver. Safety, convenience, ease, speed and cost all rank above sustainability when people are making decisions about how they travel.
People are generally not prepared to make significant sacrifices in order to travel more sustainably – whether that is in terms of time, cost or convenience. The compromise doesn’t feel worthwhile due to the overall negative impact on them as an individual. There is also an element of fairness when it comes to travelling sustainably.
One of the main messages that emerged from the Just Transition Commission is that fairness and climate ambition must go hand in hand. The recent report by the members of Scotland’s Climate Assembly to Parliament, present a call to action to Scotland for change to tackle the climate emergency in an eective and fair way.
Fairness will be important to consumers as Government takes forward our collective net-zero ambitions.