Global pandemics and transport systems in an age of disruptions

International Transport Forum All Transport, Aviation, Maritime

The Coronavirus is the most recent in a list of global pandemics – and it is the most impactful. The human and economic costs of Covid-19  go far beyond those of Sars, the Swine flu or Ebola. Its immediate impact on transport activity has been nothing short of dramatic. Will it also change human mobility and freight transport in the long run?

By Francisco Furtado

Arriving passengers are tested for Coronavirus symptoms at Bologna airport in Italy | Source: Shutterstock

It is still early in the cycle of this global pandemic and care needs to be taken not to draw rash conclusions. But some of the striking effects of the Coronavirus on transport and related sectors are evident.

Air travel demand decreased for the first time in a decade from mid-February, according to estimates by IATA, the global association of airlines. In the Asia-Pacific region, air travel is forecast to fall by 8.2% in 2020 compared to 2019. Worldwide, the sector will shrink by 0.6%.

The bulk of this reduction is associated with the domestic Chinese aviation market, which is set to contract by USD 12.8 billion in 2020. Foreign airlines reduced capacity for flights to and from China by 80%, and Chinese airlines by 40%, according to ICAO, the UN aviation body.

More container ship tonnage is idle now than during the global financial crisis. Port operators in China say that volumes for container shipping were 20 to 40% less than last year. On the land side, warehouses and factories are unable to receive or send goods as imposed quarantine exacerbates the existing shortage of truck drivers.

Cancelled and postponed

Supply chain disruptions have led to factory closures and the shutting down of assembly lines – from Hyundai in South Korea to JCB in the United Kingdom – mainly because of the cessation of activity in China and the lack of components sourced from there.

Tourism is another highly visible victim of the Coronavirus. Up to 90% of tourism-related bookings for March are cancelled in some parts of Italy. Preliminary estimates for France point to a 30 to 40% drop in the number of tourists compared to what would be expected for this time of the year. The practically complete absence of Chinese tourists in Europe since the outbreak of Covid-19 points to lost revenue in the order of EUR 1 billion per month.

Rail passengers wearing face masks in Bangkok, Thailand | Source: Shutterstock

The cancellation and postponement of events worldwide has hit big-ticket meetings from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks, or the US-ASEAN summit in Las Vegas. The cancellation of the Berlin Tourism Fair ITB, scheduled for early March, meant 160 000 expected visitors did not travel, use their hotel rooms, or visit the German capital’ s restaurants. Where organisers maintain events, attendance drops dramatically as big employers like Amazon take steps to limit staff travel.

Will things get worse?

Much of this activity should pick up towards the end of the year. To what extent that probable resurgence can make up for the first-quarter plunge is an open question. Some of the above figures, for instance for the aviation sector, were published before the virus reached Europe and other regions outside China. So while they take into account the impact on China, the effects of the global spread of Covid-19 are not yet included. Worse may be to come.

The economic impact was most vividly reflected on the stock markets. The week of 24-28 February was the worst week for stocks since the 2008 crisis. Covid-19 could shave 0.5 percentage points to 1.5% of GDP growth in 2020 compared to previous estimates according to the OECD’s Interim Economic Outlook published on 2 March. In a more severe “downside scenario” global economic growth would halve.

Unlike 2019, NO2 levels in Wuhan did not rise after Chinese New Year | Source: NASA

Nasa images show the dramatic extent to which transport activity and industrial production came to a grinding halt across China – not just in Wuhan province – as drastic anti-virus measures were put in place. The levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in the air were 10 to 30% lower in January and February 2020 than the average of the same period for 2005-19. Such a dramatic drop across such a vast area has never been registered before – an indication to how much drastically reducing transport and industrial activity can impact emissions.

Figure 2. Pollutants in early January 2020 across eastern and central China compared to mid-February

Pollutants across eastern and central China in early January and mid-February 2020 | Source: NASA

Are telework and virtual meetings the new normal?

The contraction of transport activity is twofold: Right now, restrictions on travel and voluntary cancellations of trips compound the impact of reduced economic activity that is beginning to be seen. Later, when transport activity resumes towards the second half of 2020 – which is not a given – the bounce back to compensate for the earlier stoppage might lead to congestion on certain nodes of the transport networks, with increased costs and travel times as a result.

Most likely, Covid-19 will also have more long-term effects on transport systems and the demand for their services. Widespread cancellations of business trips and global events could drive the wider adoption of remote meetings and virtual conferences. Rather than an exception, virtual attendance might become a standard practice or even the norm. Improved digital connectivity and changing corporate cultures could work in the same direction.

The same is true for teleworking. The cost to organisations of having staff members in quarantine to contain the spread of Covid-19, is being considerably softened where those concerned can telework. The likely effect is that this form of work will become more widely accepted, reinforcing an already existent trend.

Will virtual meetings become the new normal?

A boost for re-shoring and resilience?

The tendency for nations to trade relatively more with countries of the same region than with the rest of the world is another trend this health crisis could reinforce. The disruption caused to supply chains by events on the other side of the world highlights security, safety and strategic concerns associated with off-shoring industrial production. The 2008 crisis triggered a rise in protectionism and the regionalisation of trade. In recent years, shutdowns of factories resulted in shortages of components “Made in China”, resulting in a push for the diversification of supply sources, including re-shoring.

A third relevant issue for which the pandemic could become a turbo-charger is resilience. The interest in strengthening transport networks’ ability to absorb shocks, deal with slumps and peaks, or to adapt to shifting trade flows was originally stimulated by extreme climate events, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. The rise of global trade disputes in recent years further nourished it.

Resilient transport networks feature different transport modes that can be used alternatively, they offer multiple route options to circumvent stoppages, and possess built-in flexibility –  for instance to easily mobilise resources to deal with activity peaks and repurpose them for other needs during slumps. More resilience reduces the costs of shocks to the system and increase safety and security of supply – but it also comes with a price tag.

There is still a great degree of uncertainty about this pandemic’s long-term legacy with regard to the mobility of people and the transport of goods. What emerges more and more as the situation evolves is that it could be significant and long-lasting.

Francisco Furtado is an Analyst and Modeller at the International Transport Forum. He is currently working on a project on Decarbonising Transport in Emerging Economies.

Read more about disruptions to the transport system in the ITF Transport Outlook 2019

The case for a 30km/h speed limit in cities

International Transport Forum Road , , ,

As urban populations grow, city streets will overtake rural roads as the major scene of fatal traffic crashes in many countries. The evidence in support of a 30 km/h speed limit on all mixed-use urban roads is undeniable, and mounting.

Written by Stephen Perkins


International Transport Forum’s Safe Speeds YouTube Video

A lot has happened to sharpen policies for preventing deaths and serious injuries on our roads in the build-up to the Third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety that will meet in Stockholm on 19/20 February. The results of bold safety initiatives in a number of countries and cities have clearly demonstrated that aligning safe speeds to the design of infrastructure and the mix of road users lies at the heart of Safe System policies. Marshalling evidence on what works and what doesn’t is the key to getting public and political buy-in for these policies.

First of all, nobody any longer fatalistically regards increasing numbers of deaths on the roads of lower-income countries as the inevitable, “normal” result of increasing motorisation. The myth that death rates would only start to come down once incomes rose sufficiently has been debunked through careful review of the data by the Independent Council for Road Safety International: There is no correlation between income and peaks in road deaths.

Instead, all OECD countries saw improvement from around 1970, when their road safety policies began to be based more systematically on evidence-based, proven interventions. The powerful message here is that all countries can cut the number of deaths and injuries on the roads, regardless of GDP per capita. It also means that there is no longer an excuse: all countries must urgently implement those road safety policies that have been shown to work in their specific economic context.

Lessons from India, Colombia, France

Convincing examples of effective policies can be found in all parts of the world. Often, they were introduced in the face of vocal opposition. Pune was awarded ITDP’s Sustainable Transport Award in 2020 for doing what seemed impossible in Indian cities: establishing a sensible allocation of street space to motor vehicles to replace the chaotic free-for-all and building simple sidewalks for pedestrians.  This is the basis for safe streets and may indeed be basic. What was remarkable was creating the necessary political will by convincing the public this should be done.

Pune at night

In Colombia, the capital city Bogota is similarly making a growing number of its streets radically safer by implementing comprehensive interventions in school, residential and commercial zones, and reducing the speed limits of arterial corridors. These initiatives to promote safer interactions between all road users include the reallocation of space from cars and parking to pedestrians, often just using bold paint. But the biggest achievement has been turning around public hostility to reducing speed limits from 60 to 50 km/h on the corridors bisecting the city. By publicising the number of lives saved on these arterial roads, citizens and some of the administration’s stronger critics have accepted that speed reduction is an effective measure to save lives. 

Bold paint: pedestrian crossing in city centre

France has been in the headlines because of protests over its latest efforts to save lives by curbing speed. The policy to reduce speed limits on the fast secondary road network from 90 to 80 km/h is an outstanding example of basing policy on evidence: Evidence that shows rapidly diminishing survival rates in crashes at higher speeds; evidence that shows lower speed limits do result in lower speeds because drivers do not simply ignore limits; and evidence that shows lower average speeds always result in fewer fatal crashes.

The Safe System in action

Protests led the French Senate to modify the law, delegating responsibility for limits to Department councils. At the same time, Senators applied the Safe System principle to their decision, setting out quality and design standards to be met for 90 km/h roads. Only one Department has reinstated the 90 km/h speed limit.

This interplay between speed and infrastructure is a perfect example of the Safe System approach in action. The system has to be designed to protect against death and severe injury even when humans make mistakes. This can be achieved through controlling behaviour, improving vehicles or enhancing infrastructure, or all three – but it must be done in concert to ensure all users can use the roads safely.

Infrastructure enhancements: road works in Bogota

The basis for effective interventions is good data and analysis. The ITF supports national and city safety agencies enhance their capacity and compare their performance with our IRTAD and Safer City Streets databases. These show that the majority of traffic fatalities currently occur on rural roads, hence the importance of France’s new speed limits. Other countries need to look carefully at similar measures. At the same time, as our populations become more urban, city streets are soon set to account for the majority of casualties in ITF countries.

Safe urban mobility needs a 30km/h speed limit

The success of sustainable mobility policies will see increasing numbers of pedestrians, cyclists and electric micromobility users on our streets. This will require a redoubling of efforts to allocate space for protected cycling and pedestrian infrastructure and create mixed use roads with low speed limits. This is the front line for the safety targets under the UN Sustainable Development Goals and is taken up in Recommendation 8 of the Academic Expert Group convened to support the 3rd UN Global Conference on Road Safety. The Group recommends implementing a speed limit of 30 km/h for all mixed-use roads in urban areas. This is a true life saver, and it should be a primary focus of discussion at the conference.

An increasing number of cities have moved in this direction. Starting with 30 km/h zones in the early 1990s, almost all of Helsinki is now subject to a 30 limit. Oslo has followed suit as part of its Vision Zero policy as have Munich, Grenoble and a rapidly increasing number of cities in Europe and on other continents. With 19 cities in the 30 club, Spain is now pioneering the move at national level, with a proposal before Government for all cities to limit speeds to 30 km/h. The policy works, with Toronto reporting a two thirds reduction in serious and fatal injuries from crashes since it reduced speeds from 40 to 30 km/h in 2015. The case for making 30 km/h the default speed limit for all vehicles in urban and residential areas is clear.

Stephen Perkins is Head of Research and Policy Analysis at the International Transport Forum (ITF). The ITF runs the International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD) and the Safer City Streets network.

“Gender is One of the Most Robust Determinants of Transport Choice”

International Transport Forum All Transport , , , , , , ,

What has gender got to do with transport? A lot, but few people know it. That needs to change, was the message from a consultation on gender and transport organised by the ITF with 34 transport stakeholders.

Mary Crass at ITF Summit 2019

Mary Crass, the ITF’s Head of Institutional Relations and Summit sat down with Emma Latham Jones to discuss female representation in the transport industry, women’s personal safety and how gender influences travel behaviour.

ELJ: Is it still necessary to focus on women in transport in 2020?

MC: Without a doubt! Women represent the largest share of public transport users around the world. In France, for instance, two-thirds of passengers on public transport networks are women. A study that we’ve recently done here at the ITF reveals that gender is often a more robust determinant of modal choice than age or income. So it’s really significant, especially since transport services and policies are still not gender neutral.

ELJ: If gender is so important to journey decisions, why is it so often overlooked?

MC: Data collection and analysis very often do not include gender to reflect differences in travel behavior. This means that transport policy is potentially not accounting for 50% of travelers’ needs. It’s a huge missed opportunity for transport authorities, planners and operators to ignore the specific trip patterns and access needs of women— a market that represents over half of public transport clients. Clearly, gender needs to be better taken into transport policy consideration.

ELJ: Are travel policies not gender neutral because women are not well represented in the transport sector?

MC: I think this certainly plays a part. The transport labour force remains heavily male-dominated. Only 22% of transport employees in the European Union are female. In the Asia-Pacific region, women are typically found in fewer than 20% of transport jobs. There are relatively few women working as operators, drivers, engineers, and similar positions. A survey of ITF member countries also found that only 13 out of 60 member countries currently have female transport ministers. As a result, women’s voices in decision-making are under-represented across all levels, which leads to a lack of incentive for transport services to respond to the particular needs of women as users. It also contributes to the fact that gender considerations are largely ignored in transport data collection and analysis, and therefore in policy decisions. We need to change this to ensure that the voice of women is heard in public transport decisions.

ELJ: Does this mean female representation in the transport industry is a priority of the ITF?

MC: Absolutely – the lTF is working alongside its members and stakeholder organisations to better understand the questions related to gender in transport, both on a travel-behaviour level and in terms of representation in the sector. Our consultation on women in transport just now in January brought together 34 stakeholders to explore these questions. We hold this consultation annually, and our understanding of the importance of a gender-diverse transport sector is advancing year to year. We greatly appreciate the insights of our partners and we feed the findings to our summit in Leipzig in May. There we’ll examine how innovation in the sector is impacting women, in terms of their travel and mobility choices.

ELJ: How else does the ITF support women in transport?

MC: We’re looking at gender in transport within the context of inclusive transport and we examine the question from three different angles: travel behavior, safety and security, and representation in the sector. We look at how the gender balance in the industry can be more effectively pursued by understanding the distinctions between how men and women navigate the transport system as users – and how they evolve as workers and professionals serving transport operations and activities.

ELJ: I am a young woman, and sometimes on public transport I find myself concerned about my personal safety. How do issues like these influence women’s decisions and their lives more broadly?

MC: Women are more likely than men to be dependent on public transport. Yet they face personal security challenges that hinder and often deter them from using transit systems. As a result, women’s access to jobs, services and amenities is severely compromised. A Reuters survey of 16 major cities worldwide found that women in Latin American cities faced the highest rates of harassment, with about 60% of women reporting physical harassment on public transit systems. Even under conditions where infrastructure is considered to be safe, women’s perception of that security can influence their willingness to use collective means of transport. Simple, low-hanging fruit can go a long way to improve perceptions of security – including better lighting, clear signage and presence of security personnel. Our work has shown that if women do not feel safe and secure using transport, they will switch to taxis or private vehicles faster than men. So ignoring gender impacts of transport infrastructure and operations is a disservice to the sustainability agenda as well.

ELJ: February 11 is International Day of Women and Girls in Science. How can we increase the number of women in transport related science, technology and engineering roles?

MC: If we look at this question from the perspective of education and training, then I’d say employment in the transport sector needs to have greater visibility in higher education. Too often, opportunities in the transport sector for women are not properly understood.

ELJ: What about the more practical aspect of being a woman in a male-dominated sector?

MC: For operational jobs in the sector – driving vehicles for instance – the conditions of employment need to ensure that the needs of both genders are met. Too often required clothing, equipment and even facilities are not appropriate for women in the sector. This can be rectified by ensuring that upstream purchasing and planning of the worker environment take into consideration the presence of women in these jobs.

Thank you so much for your time, Mary.

Mary Crass is Head of Institutional Relations and Summit for the International Transport Forum. She is responsible for the ITF’s relations with member countries, international organisations and associations, and the Annual Summit of the International Transport Forum. The next Summit will be held from 27-29 May 2020 on the topic of “Transport Innovation for Sustainable Development” in Leipzig, Germany.

My year of train-bragging

International Transport Forum Aviation, Rail , ,

In 2019, ITF shipping expert Olaf Merk decided to live up to his own recommendations on cutting transport CO2. So for all his professional trips, he tried to avoid air travel and use the train instead. Did he manage, and what did he learn?

By Olaf Merk

For many years I was a frequent flyer, with an average of 35 trips annually. Then three things happened: Greta showed how to walk the talk; I had an accident that made it impossible for me to take a plane for four months; and Paris suffered a record heat wave that once again illustrated the urgency.

It was time to live up to my own recommendations. As a transport expert, I have been advocating drastic reductions of transport CO2 for a long time.  Now I decided I would no longer take the plane for travels within Europe.  And so, of the 17 international trips I took for my work in 2019 (of which 16 were within Europe), I made 13 by train.

What did I learn from this?

Welcome to your comfort zone

The first lesson: taking the train instead of a plane is not that hard. Expect more space and more freedom to move around. Some trains also have very pleasant dining cars. On a more metaphysical level, train travel offers the feeling to be connected to the countries that you cross. You are actually travelling, not just being moved from one place to another.

Of course, a train ride often takes longer. To get from Paris to Copenhagen took me 15 hours, and 11 hours to Rome. The links could be faster – astonishingly, relatively few European capitals are directly connected by rail connections.  

And there are quite a lot of weak links: taking the train to Copenhagen meant in practice taking three different trains, a ferry and a bus. It would have taken me two full days to get to Tallinn by train and bus from Paris, so I decided to fly instead. My excuses for the other non-train trips also somehow illustrate the vulnerabilities of train travel: a national strike and flooded rail tracks in southern France.

Travel longer, lose less time

Trains take longer, but I did not have to waste time going shuttling to and from airports. For obvious reasons most airports are located outside most cities, far from where you need to be, whereas train stations almost always lead directly to city centres. No need either to factor in time to work my way through gigantic airport shopping centres.

Changing trains is also less time-consuming than changing plane, too – not to mention that trains (usually) don’t require queuing at the security check or for boarding. Of course a ten-hour train journey wears me down. But, on balance, I find it is less stressful than air travel. The prospect of spending more than a working day travelling – even if you can actually work more effectively during train travel than during flights – makes you think twice whether you really need to make this trip, or whether tele-conferencing would not be a better option.

The price is not right

Lesson number three is that the price is not right. The main drawback of train travel is that it is often more expensive than travelling by plane. There are some noticeable counter-examples, but not enough. And as an employee, I am obliged to pick the most economical travel option – and in that logic, train travel involves extra costs that the organisation I work for needs to avoid. The same is the case for many other organisations.

I paid the difference in price between the train ticket and what an airline would have charged me. But I fear we cannot depend on the altruism of frequent flyers to see a massive shift to rail.

Bragging is contagious

The nicest part of train bragging is that it is contagious. There is a whole online community of co-braggers that are more than happy to support their peers. And so your example might well inspire others. I was excited when a German executive told me about his own shift to train travel a few months after I had shared with him my own conversion. All these small behavioural changes are starting to become visible at the macro-level: in countries like Sweden and Germany, air travel volumes in 2019 were down.

Yet, not everyone was equally enthusiastic: I also encountered sceptics when I outed myself. Some denied that planes have bigger carbon footprint than trains. Just to get this out of the way: in almost all circumstances, train travel is less carbon intensive than air travel. In the parts of Europe where trains are still dirty, they can be electrified; and electricity is becoming quickly cleaner in Europe. This in contrast to aviation: there are no immediate solutions to reduce aviation emissions except reduced demand. The most direct option that frequent flyers have to limit their carbon footprint is to fly less and shift to rail travel.

Picking up speed

What is my personal conclusion? Employers should encourage staff to travel less, and if they have to travel, travel by train. The costs of greenhouse gas emissions should be taken into account in the price comparison of travel modes, not as an afterthought via a carbon offset from a separate budget. Ideally, it should also cover other climate change impacts, such as radiative forcing, high for aviation. Employers should also make sure that flights for work reasons won’t be counted towards personal frequent flyer cards, which will incentivise their staff to fly more.

Train operators can also do better. More attention to customer service rather than on stacking as many people as possible in a train will make train journeys more attractive. They can improve service in train stations for frequent travellers; maybe develop a pan-European frequent rail traveller programme. There is huge potential in better integration of rail services with airports and aviation networks, too. Some airlines have started to realise this.

Competition among railway operators also helps, as do governments committed to a modal shift towards rail. They should accelerate the upgrading of missing links: I found Hamburg-Copenhagen, Lyon-Turin and railway connections to the Baltic states a pain. In parallel to investing in high-speed rail, governments should close loop-holes that keep the price of flying so low – aviation fuel, for instance, is not taxed at all.

If I can take the train most of the time, I guess almost everyone else can. After one year of bragging I know one thing for certain: The train with destination “low-emission transport” has left the station. For now, its pace is accelerating but still too slow. Together we can turn it into a high-speed train.

Paris: Managing the Shared Mobility Révolution

International Transport Forum Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , ,

Shared Mobility in Practice

In Paris, the shared mobility revolution is well underway. We examine how Hôtel de Ville, Paris’ town hall, is trying to get a grip on the situation.

By Emma Latham-Jones and Will Duncan

Over 20,000 dockless trottinettes eléctrique, or electric scooters, have sprung up around the French capital since June 2018, quickly becoming a common sight on the city’s Haussmannian streets. Renting one is as simple as downloading an app and punching in your credit card details. With the scooters seemingly available everywhere – on sidewalks, squares, and by the banks of the Seine – it’s become easy to whizz around the city at a silent speed.

Parisians have been quick to recognise the potential of these new shared vehicles. The novelty of the electric e-scooter has swiftly given way to it being seen as a mainstream and significant mode of transport. As James Tapper wrote in The Guardian, “they’re cheaper than cabs, less effort than a bike and more convenient than buses.” They have a lot going for them.

Never have their benefits been more apparent than during December’s period of grèves – transport strikes – across the capital city. Zipping past tense car drivers stuck in traffic stretching out miles down Paris’ boulevards at rush hour, e-scooters defy both the public transport strikes and the increase in car traffic that’s accompanied it. For those otherwise stranded during the public transport turmoil, these e-scooters seem to be an early Christmas blessing.

But the sudden success of these new networks of scooters has created a dilemma for the city government. Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, ran on an especially green platform and has implemented a number of reforms to combat the city’s pollution levels and traffic congestion. While these new scooters appear to offer Parisians a greener way to get around the City of Light, their sudden arrival has been chaotic, prompting critics to label it an “invasion”.

From Bolt to Lime, the takeover of one-syllable brand names running e-scooter fleets is causing some serious problems. Tourists fly by silently through busy pedestrian areas. Disorganised clusters of scooters block sidewalks and doorways. The less-fortunate can be seen vandalised or discarded in an ugly heap. Tragically, Paris saw its first electric scooter-related death in June 2019, after a truck collided with a rider in the city’s 18th arrondissement.

The transport revolution is taking hold, but it’s causing some serious headaches.

Photo: martin_vmorris (CC), Flickr

Taking back control

In June 2019, Hidalgo declared an “end to the anarchy”. Her government established a new set of rules for shared electric scooters operating with Paris city limits, necessary “to assure road safety and to calm the streets, pavements, and neighbourhoods of our city.”

Riders were banned from rolling along the footpaths or through parks and gardens. Speeds were capped to 25km/h. The number of service operators would be reduced from twelve to an approved (and more manageable) three, and operators have been requested not to increase the number of scooters in circulation while the new national mobility law creates a more appropriate legal framework.

Perhaps the most significant intervention: scooters can no longer be abandoned on the sidewalks – possibly the biggest gripe amongst Parisians towards the new vehicles. E-scooters must be parked in legitimate parking spaces, the same used by cars or bikes. Paris will soon experiment with dedicated shared scooter and bicycle parking spots around the city.

The official Twitter account of the city of Paris

While Paris is in some sense, “cracking down” — these actions don’t really represent the big blow to shared mobility innovation that some may have expected, or feared. Free-floating scooters are in no way banned from operating in the city (like they are in London and Barcelona, for example). Clearly, Paris recognises the potential of free-floating shared vehicles. In fact, by calling for an end of the anarchy, the Parisian government has elected to take a leading role in the responsible management of shared mobility in its city.

“Under no circumstances should this mode of transport be pilloried,” assures a city press release. “[E-scooters] represent a new form of transport mobility and contribute to reducing the use of polluting cars. However, the City of Paris wishes to regulate this mode of transport more effectively to ensure road safety and calm streets and pavements.” 

According to Philippe Crist, Innovation Policy Analyst at the International Transport Forum, “Paris has established an ambitious regulatory framework in less than twelve months.” And in only 16 months, e-scooters were added to the Code de la Route. As a result, they are subject to the rules of the road, and there is now a ban on more than one person per scooter.

With the tender process well under way, the contracts for the three wining e-scooter service operators will be awarded from January 2020. This has prompted scooter companies to share more ambitious approaches to sustainability, declaring the creation of extra scooter repair facilities to extend the notoriously short lifespan. As they race to win the favour of Hôtel de Ville, they also rush to ditch gig workers and instead hire staff on permanent contracts.

Re-imagining the city street

“Why do these scooters often feel so anarchic? Because they’re whizzing down roads that aren’t designed for them,” says Crist.

“We devote a very large part of the road to a wall of steel — parked automobiles. If we managed public space better — if we adapted it to the needs and possibilities of today — it could be quite different,” he says.

Cities must look at how they can effectively regulate — and also benefit from — this kind of innovation. Like other city halls, Paris’ Hôtel de Ville recognises the extraordinary potential of shared mobility to reduce congestion and pollution, by encouraging the idea that owning a private vehicle is not necessary to have high-quality access to the city.

Disruptions like this invite us to imagine how cities could be. According to Crist, “we’re living in a very interesting time — something of a crossroads. We suddenly have so many more options in how we can get around, with an even greater promise for the future. But we haven’t yet thought about re-allocating space in the city to fit these modes.”

“Today’s roads are based off a 100-year-old model,” he points out. “How can governments adapt and lead to re-think the model for the next 100 years?”

ITF work has indicated that if widely adopted, some forms of shared mobility could halve the number of vehicle-kilometres travelled in urban areas, and reduce urban transport CO2 emissions by 30%. Free-floating e-scooters and other forms of micro-mobility can help achieve these outcomes, but it’s crucial that governments take them seriously and recognise the potential they represent.

Cities such as Paris are well-placed to imagine and invest in the future of transport at this exciting time.

This article is part of a series on Shared Mobility in Practice, which looks at how cities around the world are incorporating innovative transport solutions in real life, today. See also: Los Angeles: Harnessing Data for Transport Innovation, and: China: Explaining Ride-Hailing’s Rapid Rise. Shared mobility is one of the transport disruptions explored in the 2019 ITF Transport Outlook.

No Big Bang on the High Seas

International Transport Forum Maritime

Maritime transport is dominated by shipping line consortia and alliances that are exempt from European competition rules. The EU wants to keep it that way, but its case does not look too strong.

By Olaf Merk

On 20 November, the European Commission released its proposal on the “Consortia Block Exemption Regulation” for shipping lines. What sounds like some obscure bureaucratic rule of little interest managed to upset almost everyone in the maritime logistics chain – from shippers to freight forwarders and the towage sector to port terminal operators. The latter qualified the proposal as “alarming and bewildering” and even threatened court action.

What is the fuss about?

Liner shipping has traditionally been organised in so-called “shipping conferences”, de-facto cartels. Within the European Union, conferences are no longer allowed. But shipping companies can co-operate in the form of consortia, or in bundles of consortia called alliances.

The difference between a cartel and a consortium is that cartel participants collude to improve their profits and dominate the market. Consortia, on the other hand, are tools for co-operation in practical matter, for instance for sharing ship capacity.

The EU’s Consortia Block Exemption Regulation (BER) for liner shipping sets the rules for such co-operation. It exists since 1995 and was revised in 2010. Since then, it has been renewed, without modifications, every five years. The Commission’s proposal that created such a storm is to once more renew the BER without modifications.

Cartels in disguise?

So what caused the backlash now, when in the past the extension of the BER was a mere formality?  At the heart of the controversy is the fear that a cartel-like constellation might be re-emerging under the guise of the current regime. For consortia could, in practice, act like cartels if they effectively co-ordinated not just schedules and other practicalities of operation between competitors, but also the price or the available capacity.

And indeed the cost calculation models in the three global shipping alliances allow carriers of the respective alliance “to develop a fine sense of the costs of other carriers”, according to a recent ITF study on liner shipping alliances. And the European Commission raised concerns that carriers might have engaged in price signalling via their announcements of general rate increases.

Joint capacity planning for “adjustments in response to fluctuations in supply and demand” is allowed by the BER. But there is evidence that carriers might have co-ordinated orders for new mega-ships as well as the timing of ship dismantling within alliances.

Also, most of the so-called blank sailings – the cancellation of a scheduled weekly service – are done simultaneously by different consortia and alliances, as shown in Figure 1. While some interpret this as joint “capacity adjustments in response to fluctuations in supply and demand”, others might suspect concerted action to influence freight rates. Because the different shipping consortia and alliances are heavily intertwined (Figure 2) even detailed co-ordination between them is not particularly difficult.

Figure 1: Blank sailings per month per alliance (2012-2019)

Figure 2: Overlapping consortia links between carriers (for trades to/from Europe)

Will there really be legal certainty?

For many observers, renewing the BER without modifications in this context raises three major questions. The first relates to legal certainty, which the BER is said provide for carriers. Without the BER, consortia would need to carry out self-assessments to ensure they meet the EU’s general competition regulation.

Yet an unmodified BER may not provide this legal certainty, because it is unclear which consortia are still covered by it: it applies only to consortia with a market share below 30%, which is difficult to monitor in practice. The reason is that the Commission uses the “combined market share”, which takes the cross-linkages between consortia into account (illustrated in Figure 2).

That is the right benchmark to look at in principle, but also creates uncertainty as to which consortia fall below and above the ceiling (Figure 3). The Commission recognises that it does not have the data. Collecting it would help to provide legal certainty, but that does not seem to be on the cards.  

Other updates would also provide added legal certainty. It is not quite clear whether alliances are still covered by the BER, for instance. And the definition of “relevant markets” no longer reflects the reality of today’s port competition.

Figure 3: Ranges of uncertainty on combined market shares on consortia covering Europe

Diapositive1.jpg

A matter of market share

The second question is about economic concentration. Consortia were invented as tools to allow smaller shipping lines to achieve scale and compete. Since then, consolidation in the shipping sector has surpassed any previous expectations. The market share of Danish shipping giant Maersk alone was 19% in 2018, larger than the share any alliance had until 2012. So consortia have not been the alternative for market consolidation, they have in fact come on top of consolidation and provided an additional tool for an increasingly consolidated sector to benefit from scale.

The result is that a few alliances have huge buying power and can play off their service providers, such as ports, against each other. For the alliances’ customers the result is reduced choice to transport their goods, because the ocean transport offers are mostly similar.

These aspects are mostly absent from the considerations by the European Commission, which concludes that service quality has remained stable. But the number of direct port-to-port connections has fallen, as have weekly service frequencies. The Commission paper also finds no indications for market power of carriers vis-à-vis ports, yet several examples are documented, including the ports of Malaga, Taranto, Gioia Tauro, Zeebrugge or Genoa.

The politics of liner shipping

The third question being asked is about the transparency of the process leading to the decision to extend the BER. The Commission’s stakeholder consultation ended in December 2018 but the document was not released until almost a year later, in November 2019. This was only days before a new Commission took office. Some might think the continuation of the BER will protect European liner shipping companies. But in fact the BER has arguably done the opposite, by helping the emergence of Chinese liners. Asian liner companies have ordered large numbers of mega-ships recently (see Figure 4) and to fill that capacity they will need the alliances and consortia more than the Europeans. Interestingly, the Chinese liner company COSCO submitted a document to the European Commission arguing for extending the BER.

Figure 4: Mega-ship deliveries for Asian and European carriers (2013-2022)

The BER might benefit global liner shipping companies, a few of which are headquartered in Europe. It will do less for European shipping companies operating exclusively in Europe, such as feeder companies and tonnage providers (i.e. ship owners who charter out their vessels to liner companies).

Evolution or Big Bang?

The agenda of the new European Commission that took office in December 2019 emphasises industrial policy, geopolitics and a European Green Deal. How the extension of the current BER aligns with these priorities is not so clear. But if it is deemed essential to keep a shipping-specific exemption from EU competition rules, maybe this is the time to re-imagine its conditions.

One could think of a block exemption that only applies to liner companies that pre-dominantly operate in EU waters, or only for consortia on intra-EU routes, or for types of ships (“Europe class” vessels) that meet certain criteria, for instance with regard to energy efficiency, shares of EU seafarers and use of EU-approved ship recycling facilities. Not exactly a Big Bang, but at least some steps that could help implement the agenda of the new Commission, as exemplified by the Green Deal, and give the blanket exemption a new legitimacy that is currently in some doubt.

Olaf Merk is ports and shipping expert at the International Transport Forum. He is the author of Container Shipping in Europe: Data for the Evaluation of the EU Consortia Block Exemption Regulation (ITF, 2019). This article draws on research for this report. It does not necessarily represent the views of ITF members

China: Explaining Ride-Hailing’s Rapid Rise

International Transport Forum Uncategorized

Shared Mobility in Practice

How ride-hailing has gone from nonexistence to a mammoth industry in the space of a few years in the People’s Republic of China

By Emma Latham-Jones and Will Duncan

Along the Champs-Élysées of Shanghai, Huaihai Road, a woman is hovering on the pavement’s edge with her smartphone in hand, as she glances from her screen to the road and back again. Suddenly an anonymous car pulls up. A name is shouted out from the driver’s seat, which is received with a nod and a smile. The passenger seat door opens and closes again, and the car seamlessly continues on its journey.

Only a decade ago, no one had heard of app-based ride services. Today, ride-hailing is valued at USD 61.3 billion globally. By 2025, that number is expected to almost quadruple. So what’s causing this explosive growth in shared mobility?

The place to start looking for an answer is the giant of Asia, China. A stunning 62% of Chinese regularly hail a ride with their smartphone, according to a recent survey by Bain & Co (PDF). China’s operator DiDi alone carried out 10 billion rides with 550 million users in 2018.

No surprise, then, that the People’s Republic is the world’s largest ride-hailing market. Valued at USD 23 billion, its market is bigger than those of the rest of the world combined. America’s Uber counted a comparatively modest 95 million users worldwide in 2018 and is valued at just over USD 40 billion – DiDi’s global operations are now worth roughly USD 58 billion.

So what is it about China that makes it such fertile ground for app-based ride-hailing?

Firstly, Chinese city dwellers are rapidly changing their attitude to cars. Once thought of as a status symbol, less than half of China’s urban residents now see owning a car as a form of social progress, according to the Bain & Co survey.

China still has comparatively few cars. Only 118 cars per 1 000 inhabitants were registered in 2016. With car penetration in China at roughly 12%, compared to 74% in North America, or 53% in Europe, China has not developed the same culture of private car ownership as in the West.

The taxi features more heavily in the transport systems of big Chinese cities than in most Western agglomerations, making empty passenger seats less common. Car occupancy is significantly higher in China than in Europe: On average, 2.3 Chinese share a car ride, while the figure is only 1.6 in Europe (and as low as 1.2 passengers in some Western cities).

“China already had a culture of carpooling. With higher than average occupancy rates and lower vehicle ownership, Chinese users are more open to ride-hailing services or car sharing,” explains Jari Kauppila, Head of Quantitative Policy Analysis and Foresight at the International Transport Forum.

Incomes in China have risen steadily over the past decades. The emerging middle class is adaptable and very open to new services and products – which helped ride-hailing to quickly become mainstream.

The wild popularity of app-based payments also helped. WeChat Pay, a service offered by China’s internet giant Tencent is used by a striking 900 million people each month – a different league from Apple Pay’s 127 million users worldwide. Growth in e-hailing is, therefore, part of a broader trend across China’s cities.

A third factor is the cost of a private car in China. From taxes and insurance to parking fees, owning a car in China has become increasingly expensive, putting off many of China’s urban residents from buying their own vehicle.

Critically, the authorities have put a cap on the number of new cars that can hit the streets of Shanghai, Beijing and other cities. To own a car, you need a license. These are allocated via auctions, putting a heavy price tag even on the right to ownership.

“Car ownership in many Chinese cities is very restrictive”, explains Wei-Shiuen Ng, Advisor for Sustainable Transport and Global Outreach at the International Transport Forum.

“The price and quota associated with getting a license to own a car have quite significantly reduced vehicle growth and congestion levels, especially in the short term.”

Nevertheless, ten Chinese cities make the list of the 25 most congested cities in the world, according to the 2017 TomTom Traffic Index. Many Chinese urbanites can think of better ways to spend time than waste it in traffic jams. Hence the car is rarely their first choice for running errands and commuting to work. Instead, they order a car when conditions make that a good choice and let someone else do the actual driving, look after maintenance and bear the fixed costs.

A further element is the changing landscape for investments. China’s mobility market is strikingly dynamic. It’s full to the brim of eager-eyed competitors looking to experiment with new ride-hailing ventures: from delivery app, Meituan Dianping, and mapping service, Gaode, to traditional carmakers, such as GAC. During the three years from 2014 to 2017, this market was powered by an astounding USD 50 billion in investments. It didn’t take long for DiDi, China’s biggest ride-hailing company, to raise staggering amounts of money: indeed, in just six years DiDi has managed to raise a total of USD 20.6 billion in funding over 17 rounds.

Everyone wants a piece of the pie. Manufacturers in particular are looking to find new revenue models as car sales decline. They are setting their sights on the emerging high-end ride-hailing market, which is not yet as crowded as mainstream ride-hailing. In December 2017, BMW launched its ReachNow service in Chengdu showing that it is ready to take on the Premium ride-hailing service segment.

But European car manufacturers have Shenzhou, Shouqi, and DiDi Premium to compete with. Western companies battling it out in China’s tier-one cities somewhat resembles the Uber versus DiDi struggle of 2016, which ended in DiDi acquiring Uber China in August 2016 in a USD 35 billion deal.

“Part of DiDi’s success was that it was so familiar with the domestic market, the culture and local consumer preferences,” explains Wei-Shiuen Ng.

This article is part of a series on Shared Mobility in Practice, which looks at how cities around the world are incorporating innovative transport solutions in real life, today. See also: Los Angeles: Harnessing Data for Transport Innovation, and: Paris: Managing the Shared Mobility Révolution. Shared mobility is one of the transport disruptions explored in the 2019 ITF Transport Outlook.

Los Angeles: Harnessing Data for Transport Innovation

International Transport Forum Uncategorized

Shared Mobility in Practice

By Emma Latham-Jones and Will Duncan

An urban transport revolution is underway in Los Angeles, the epitome of a car-reliant city – and it revolves around data.

Los Angeles, California’s largest city, has long been infamous for its traffic. But now app-based services revolving around shared vehicles are taking off. The city government is embracing these new services as a way to reduce the number of polluting cars clogging its gridded streets. To regulate — and benefit from — shared mobility, L.A. has found that data transparency and data management are essential. 

The way in which Los Angeles was planned and built has made it a car-dependent city. Throughout the 20th century, L.A. grew outwards rather than upwards; residents preferred suburban-style neighbourhoods to tall apartment buildings – and urban sprawl with low population density has precipitated a car-centred lifestyle.

“The city layout is very challenging,” says Wei-Shiuen Ng, Sustainable Transport Advisor at the International Transport Forum. “It’s just not planned in a way that public transport can thrive.”

Eighty-four per cent of Los Angeles’ commuters drive – that is double San Francisco’s percentage. Meanwhile, only 5% walk or cycle. This car dependency is causing serious problems: poor air quality, constant traffic congestion, and increasing obesity. The government estimates that owning and operating a car in L.A. costs its citizens an average of USD 9 122 per year.

The promise of shared mobility

But it’s not all bad news. Los Angeles is rising to the challenge and has quickly become a North American leader in rethinking urban mobility. Mobility options enabled by new technologies are reshaping how people navigate L.A.’s 7 500 miles of streets— whether they use free-floating shared bicycles and e-scooters or ride-sharing apps like Uber Pool or Lyft. L.A. is one of three US cities to earn the perfect score on the Shared Mobility City Index (SMCI), which evaluated 20 cities. This reflects the wide range of new shared vehicles and on-demand transport services available.

“New shared mobility tools are helping our residents realise that they have choices about how they move around our city,” explains Seleta Reynolds, General Manager of L.A.’s Department of Transportation (LADoT).

The L.A.’s Department of Transportation recogonises the potential of shared mobility to reduce congestion, improve the city’s environment and enhance access to jobs and services for its less well-off citizens. In 2016, L.A. released Urban Mobility in a Digital Age: a ground-breaking playbook for transport in the digital age that charted specific strategies to be implemented by the city (available here with its implementation plan here). In 2018, it teamed up with environmental organisation NRDC and with the input from transport, technology and other experts, released the Los Angeles Shared-Mobility Climate and Equity Action Plan (available here). Another L.A. first, the Action Plan aims to leverage shared mobility as a tool to address climate change and inequitable access to transport.

Data management: cities’ new toolkit

So how can L.A.’s elected leaders stay in control while novel shared mobility services enter its transport market? The city government has found that the answer lies in data. On the one hand, access to the data generated by the service providers enables LADoT to gain a comprehensive picture of how shared mobility is used in L.A.. On the other hand, the technical capacity to handle data enables authorities to communicate with service providers in real time and use digital language to enforce rules and regulations. 

“We’re leveraging the innovative spirit that has defined our city for generations,” says Ms. Reynolds. “We’re using it to plan 21st century streets for all Angelenos, with a focus on creating more options and more access.”

In 2018, L.A. unveiled the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), a data and API standard that allows the city to gather, analyse, and compare real-time data from shared mobility operators. Realising the need to go beyond L.A., MDS is now governed by the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF), a multi-city-led governance body. MDS has now been taken up by more than 80 cities around the world.

“The genius of MDS is that it allows cities to put out machine-readable regulations,” says Philippe Crist, Innovation and Foresight Advisor at the International Transport Forum. “This allows much better control of these app-based platforms by public authorities. Imagine it like information from a street sign but in a more instant digital form.”

Using algorithms to manage mobility services has a lot of potential to improve cities’ ability to better enforce rules. For example, digitally-coded instructions can help ensure that e-scooters are parked properly and do not become obstacles. They can also declare certain roads off-limits to vehicles in the event of road works, a demonstration, or an on-going emergency.

“We have to create a digital set of management tools,” Marcel Porras, Chief Sustainability Officer at LADoT, told Smart Cities Drive in a recent interview: “Our Mobility Data Specification provides the foundation for [it].”

Shared mobility can do more than take pressure off the city’s roads, the L.A. Department of Transportation believes. It can also bring meaningful equity benefits. Porras describes this as a critical question for cities when it comes to managing shared mobility: “How do we equitably distribute resources?”

Access to data is the first step, as it can make the needs of citizens more transparent. The second step involves ensuring innovative transport services are not only made available to customers with deeper pockets than others. Again, algorithmic regulation may be able to help ensure that ride-hailing operators serve all of the city’s neighbourhoods, not just the more prosperous or safer ones. For example, a city government of the – perhaps not so distant – future could require a specified minimum number of automated shared vehicles to serve select geographic areas.

ITF’s Philippe Crist thinks it is likely that “machine-readable regulations could require operators to meet certain equity-based key performance indicators”. This kind of regulatory environment “requires different, and digital, building blocks than those we are used to,” Crist explains. “And all of this is ultimately in the hands of cities.” 

This article is part of a series on Shared Mobility in Practice, which looks at how cities around the world are incorporating innovative transport solutions in real life, today. See also: China: Explaining Ride-Hailing’s Rapid Rise, and: Paris: Managing the Shared Mobility Révolution. Shared mobility is one of the transport disruptions explored in the 2019 ITF Transport Outlook.

Why Flight Shaming Will Not Take Off

International Transport Forum Uncategorized , , ,

Exploding demand for air travel, low ticket prices and the simple ease of flying make it hard for the flight shaming movement to develop truly global momentum

By Emma Latham-Jones

Since 2017, there has been a surge in the number of northern European campaigners boycotting air travel for leisure. But this so-called flygskam (“flight shaming”) movement is up against the lure of low prices for air tickets, the sheer convenience of flying and a rapidly growing number of air travelers particularly in the newly prosperous Asian countries.

Flygskam has arisen from a broader concern that man-made climate change poses a serious threat to people’s livelihoods around the globe. Rising temperatures cause droughts, rising sea levels threaten low-lying regions, and ever more extreme weather leads to severe disruptions.

International aviation is responsible for only 2% of all man-made CO2 emissions. But this does not take into account the warming impact of aircrafts’ non-CO2 emissions. Planes also emit other substances such as contrails, aerosols, nitrogen oxides and particle emissions that are a major contributor to the warming impact of aircraft. Scientists have shown that non-CO2 emissions occurring at high altitudes have a much stronger climate impact than those produced by other modes of transport.

A record number or air travellers

Since 2010, international flights (measured in passenger-kilometres) have increased by 61%.  In 2018, a record 4.3 billion airline passengers were counted, up 6.1% from the year before. Between now and 2050, demand for air travel could again triple, according to the most recent projections by the International Transport Forum.

Global demand for air travel is set to quadruple over the next 30 years

If airlines were treated as a country, they would already now be among the ten biggest greenhouse gas emitters ahead of Brazil, Mexico and the UK, the Union of Concerned Scientists notes. “Even trying to stabilise aviation CO2 emissions at today’s level is challenging”, explains Andreas W. Schäfer, Professor of Energy and Transport at University College London and Director of the Air Transportation Systems Laboratory. “This is due to the strong growth of the sector, its capital intensity, the comparatively limited number of mitigation options and longtime constants—half of the aircraft introduced today will still be operating at mid-century.”

Of all transport-related CO2 emissions, aviation contributes over 10%. And transport’s carbon footprint has grown faster than that of any other sector over the past 50 years. The main reason is the rapidly growing demand for mobility – not least for air travel. In 2017, an average person flew once every 22 months – twice as frequently as in the year 2000.

Flygskam gains momentum

Flygskam was originally championed by Swedish singer Staffan Lindberg and Olympic athlete Bjorn Ferry and gained momentum thanks to social media and the so-called “Greta Thunberg effect”: The Swedish teenage climate activist made her – widely publicised – trip to the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos entirely by train.

Rather than flying, climate activist Greta Thunberg took a train to Davos and a boat to New York

This gave birth to tagskryt (“train-bragging”), soon popularised by a Facebook group in which Swedes share stories of, and tips from, their journeys via train. The group now has 14.6K followers. Greta Thunberg has since moved to on to another emissions-free transport mode, sailing across the Atlantic to New York for the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit on a sleek hydrofoil yacht, the Malizia II.

Could Flygskam kick-start change in behavior on a scale big enough to counteract the predicted boom in global air travel?  Three main reasons make this seem doubtful.

Lack of alternatives

First, the lack of more sustainable alternatives for many flight routes. Europe and East Asia have well-developed high speed rail network. All bar two of the 20 countries with the best high-speed rail links are in Europe and East Asia. Among the extensive high-speed rail networks in Europe there are now many international links across orders. In these regions, travellers can fairly easily switch from air to rail, certainly for shorter flights. Indeed, Japan’s high-speed Shinkansen train has a greater market share than air transport on domestic routes under 600 kilometres.

Europe has a densely-woven network of high-speed rail lines

The picture in other parts of the world looks much less positive. In North America, the United States have no train line that is entirely high speed. The Acela Express that links New York and Washington, D.C., has an average speed of 106 km/h, less than half the speed of most high-speed trains. California is building a high-speed rail system, but its first phase won’t be completed until 2029.

The fastest train from San Francisco to Los Angeles takes 9 hours and 18 minutes. Any of more than one dozen airlines gets you there in 90 minutes. And “even where there is good alternative infrastructure, high-speed rail often simply cannot compete with the low prices and convenience of short-haul flights,” explains Jagoda Egeland, Aviation Policy Lead at the International Transport Forum.

No Chinese word for flygskam

A second reason why flight shaming may not take off is the soaring demand for air travel in Asia. There simply is no sign that newly prosperous Chinese, Indonesians or Uzbeks intend to forgo the pleasures of flying to Paris or Phuket.

The Asia-Pacific recorded the biggest numbers of overall aviation passengers in 2017, with 1.5 billion passengers and a 36.3% market share. The region also saw the highest year-over-year increase in traffic and had the five busiest international airline routes.  The Asia-Pacific region “will account for up to half of total annual increase in air traffic by 2020,” predicted Shukor Yusof, an aviation expert at Endau Analytics, in a conversation with Deutsche Welle.

China is the engine of much of this demand growth. The 400 million members of its relatively new middle class have an increasing thirst for exploring the world. Within the next decade, China will overtake the USA as the largest aviation market in the world. But currently there isn’t a word for flygskam in Chinese.

Passengers check in at an airport in China

Biofuels against flight shaming

A final factor that may contain flygskam are biofuels. Significantly, Northern Europe, where flight shaming originated, is now pushing hard towards making the fuel mix used for air travel less objectionable. The Swedish government has set a tax on avfuel – previously untaxed – and is contemplating to require 30% biofuels to be blended into kerosene by 2030.

Norway already requires 0.5% biofuel for airlines operating in the country and also targets 30% by 2030. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) also calls for a significant proportion of conventional aviation fuels to be substituted with sustainable aviation fuels by 2050 in its  2050 Vision for Sustainable Aviation Fuels. 

The problem is that scaling up the production of biofuels may be difficult, and that growing more of the organic matter required for biofuels can actually increase greenhouse gas emissions. Which is why offsetting emissions is important. The ICAO’s 192 member countries agreed a global deal called CORSIA in 2016 that committed aviation to achieving carbon-neutral growth from 2020 and to halve net emissions levels by 2050 compared to 2005. Any rise in international aviation emissions above 2020 levels will be offset, mostly through planting trees. While some of the largest environmental NGOs argue that the carbon stored in trees or biological carbon is not equivalent to fossil carbon, this may still help travellers to feel less guilt about flying.

Will short-haul flights be electric a couple of decades from now?

Electricity plus efficiency

Electrification of aircraft is another hotly pursued aviation innovation since explorers Bertrand Picard and André Borschberg demonstrated the viability of the concept with their circumnavigation of the globe in their solar-powered “Solar Impulse 2” aircraft in 2016. Electric aircraft are now being introduced by airlines in the US and in Canada. Norway has made the electrification of short-haul aviation by 2040 its official policy target.

This would have a truly drastic effect: Electrification of short-haul flights and more stringent carbon pricing would cut  CO2 emissions from domestic aviation by as much as 81% and those of (mostly longer-haul) international aviation by 19% by 2050, according to the ITF’s Transport Outlook 2019.

In the meantime, upgrades that increase the efficiency of conventional engines will likely continue, and the question of life-cycle emissions is also being addressed: The Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe has set itself some challenging environmental goals that include ensuring all aircraft are designed and manufactured to be recyclable.

Cancelled out

Ultimately, flight shaming remains a concept that has traction mostly in European countries with already environmentally engaged citizens. The idea is unlikely to make a difference to consumers’ travel behaviour across the globe, as it is not catching on in some of the world’s largest aviation markets and is easily cancelled out by exploding demand for air travel.

However, the aviation industry is taking note of the movement. Airlines fear reputational damage and are keen to find ways to ensure their services will be less obvious targets for being branded as “shameful” by climate activists – and they are even willing to forgo some business: In reaction to flygskam, Dutch airline KLM recently launched a platform called “Fly Responsibly”: The website invites passengers to compensate for their travel CO2 – and also highlights that getting to Brussels from Amsterdam is faster by train than by plane.

Emma Latham-Jones is a Young Associate at the International Transport Forum at the OECD.

Getting Maritime Subsidies Right

International Transport Forum Maritime , , ,

by Olaf Merk, ports and shipping expert at the International Transport Forum

Many countries support their shipping industry via maritime subsidies. The value of well-functioning maritime transport for trade is undisputed. But is this, in itself, a justification for passing taxpayers’ money on to operators? Clearly, the private sector can provide shipping services. Subsidies would only make sense if they serve a clearly defined public interest that cannot be achieved otherwise. They would also need to be designed in ways that will not distort shipping and logistics markets.

In practice, this appears to be challenging. To begin with, nobody really knows how much governments spend on maritime subsidies. Support often comes in the form of favourable tax treatment, which is largely invisible in most government budgets. Even countries that make an effort to monitor maritime subsidies, notably in Northern Europe, have difficulties in establishing the actual numbers. Many countries seem to be little fussed, perhaps even happy, that the monetary value of their maritime subsidies remains unknown.

More worryingly, maritime subsidies often do not have a clearly defined public interest purpose. The usual justification is that they support the competitiveness of the shipping industry. The standard threat evoked is the relocation of a shipping registry or of ship management activities to low-tax jurisdictions. The problem with that is that hosting these is no guarantee for good maritime connectivity or for a maritime cluster that adds significant value to the economy.

Many subsidy schemes assume specific outcomes, but do not actually make direct or indirect financial support conditional on achieving them – be it on ships flying a domestic flag, operators hiring domestic seafarers or vessels reducing emissions. Unsurprisingly then, only a few subsidies seem to actually achieve their stated goals. Despite an impressive range of subsidies, only 16% of the world fleet sailed under the national flags of OECD countries in 2019, down from 54% in 1980. The share of domestic seafarers has continuously declined in maritime countries like Germany, France and the UK.

A vicious circle is also at work. Maritime subsidies by one country provoke subsidies by others. This happened already in the 19th century, and it continues to be the case. This perverse dynamic has been fuelled by “flagging out” of vessels to countries with low taxes and little regulation. This development has led to the emergence of the tonnage tax in the European Union: a very favourable tax the shipping sector pays in lieu of corporate income tax. In some cases, regulations have been put in place to avoid a race to the bottom. The proliferation of tonnage tax schemes within the EU has prompted the European Commission to formulate maritime state aid guidelines to avoid tax competition between EU member states. Yet the tendency over time has been to allow more generous schemes that opened the door for other countries to apply similar generosity.

Finally, there is evidence that maritime subsidies distort wider logistics markets. A new study by the International Transport Forum at the OECD found that many tonnage tax schemes for shipping companies can also be applied to their cargo-handling operations in ports. The European Commission has approved this practice in its decisions when it reviewed the tonnage tax schemes of individual EU countries. This creates a competitive advantage for shipping companies that are vertically integrated with terminal operators, by allowing theses to profit from a lower tax burden compared to corporate income tax. This distorts the market for cargo handling, as independent terminal operators do not have these fiscal advantages.

How can these challenges be solved? Governments should be more transparent about the money they spend on maritime subsidies, as well as the impacts generated. And subsidies could be better justified if more conditions were set regarding those impacts, tying support closely to specific outcomes governments want to see. Distorted markets should not be among those, and subsidy schemes ought to be carefully crafted to this. Finally, governments should understand that it is in their own best interest to avoid a maritime subsidies race.

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