The climate challenge of this century encourages to rethink our mobility. Planes and individual cars, very energy-consuming, are used for a great portion of very-long-distance travels (more than 750 km). In order to progress towards modal shift to more ecological modes, massive investments for rail have been made since the 2000’s. They have been mostly concentrated on High-Speed-Lines (LGV, in French) projects. But in spite of these huge investments, these projects did not reduce of the emissions of aviation, which keep growing in France. What’s more, it is becoming very complicated to finance the expansion of the LGV network, as the most relevant lines – between metropolises separated by 400 to 750 km – have already been built. And nowadays passengers tend to prefer cheaper tickets to faster journeys. Besides, an other rail solution for very long distances, the InterCity Night train (ICN) sees its dismantling accelerated in 2016-2017. As for the classical railway network and the daytime Intercity trains (ICJ for “InterCités de Jour”), they have suffered underinvestment during all these years. Neglected for the last decades, the ICN offer now has problems of visibility, unattractive timetables, and too frequent delays and cancellations: it seems that its use has been – willingly or not – discouraged. SNCF and the French State have kept repeating contradictory justifications around the “alleged deficit” and “empty” night trains, but they have high occupancy rates. The ICN has in fact quite many advantages
Recently, city officials from London to Manchester to Amsterdam and Melbourne have been wrestling with the appearance of Singaporean oBike and similar bike-sharing schemes in their streets. These dockless variants of the public, pay-by-use bike models being launched in major cities around the world allow users to pick up, pay for, then leave a bike anywhere within an operating city, with no organized storage system per se, just free range. As seamless as this might sound in theory, in practice it’s causing headaches that may be yet another signal of a complicated mobility future that’s emerging as societies transition to new mobility models. New public two-wheeled platforms, like many complex systems, carry cultural values, and those carried in some of the latest bike systems speak to what we may experience in an autonomous four-wheeled future.
In Europe, electric vehicles are not just a low-emission way of getting from A to B, they are also being built as mobile generators. Newly designed Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) models can both receive electricity from the grid and supply excess power right back during peak demand. Notably, the Parker Project in Denmark—carried out by grid integration specialists such as Enel, Nuvve and Insero, as well as automakers Nissan, Mitsubishi and PSA Groupe—has allowed V2G drivers to actually earn money just by parking the car at two-way charge stations. Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports that fleet operators in Denmark are earning up to $1,530 annually at these charge points.
A rail company with a small-scale, experimental approach like this is possible thanks to German rail reforms in the 1990s that separated rail transit companies, who run train services, from railway infrastructure companies, who own rails. This has opened up Germany’s market to some competition between smaller companies such as Transdev and Deutsche Bahn, though the latter still dominates. The relationship between Locomore and DB is close but somewhat uneasy. Deutsche Bahn will not sell Locomore tickets from station ticket booths, making them available only online. What’s more, the project was apparently too unusual-sounding for most conventional investors, so Locomore has relied on crowdfunding to get its start-up capital. So far over €640,000 has been raised, and the amount is still rising. This alone sounds like a rather low investment threshold to start a new train line, but a Locomore representative wasn’t available to comment on what this sum covers and whether other funding sources are being used. (We’ll update when we learn more.) Germany is nonetheless going through an interesting period of small-scale rail innovation that’s worth paying attention to. Locomore’s current service is just the first of three more planned for 2018, to Cologne, Munich, and the Baltic vacation island of Rügen. Meanwhile the world’s first ever hydrogen-powered passenger train is coming this month. It also won’t replace Germany’s currently dominant model, but provides a small-scale and invaluable alternative.
“One key reason why air pollution kills 400,000 citizens annually is that carmakers cheat the tests for diesel cars, causing many times more pollution on the road,” said Greg Archer, the clean vehicles manager for Transport and Environment. “The development of a new real-world driving emission test is an important step forward to tackling urban air pollution. EU states should now support the Commission’s proposals and ignore the whinging from carmakers that the rules are too tough.”
