Barry McCarthy
As I strolled around Lyon city centre it was easy to see why the area was chosen as the venue for the Global City conference on sustainable development. One of the first things you notice is how public transport is comfortable, efficient and easy to use. It includes buses powered by overhead electricity cables that wouldn’t look out of place in a science fiction film, a clean metro system where music is played to soothe the stresses of the modern French lifestyle, and modern trams.
Various collection points in the city mean you can hop on a free bicycle if you fancy a little exercise along the way. At the end of one of the sessions a delegate asked the audience how many of them had used public transport to get to the conference centre that day. The majority of the hands went up and it’s little wonder why. If public transport is good enough people will use it.
A French friend, who proudly showed me around Lyon, France’s third largest city with a population of around 1.35 million, told me how the local authority had recently removed parking facilities to install a skateboarding area, football enclosure and benches for people to relax on. Thanks to developments like this many people were still out at midnight, which created a vibrant and safe environment. But despite Lyon’s many attributes, the conference venue left one delegate disappointed.
Tony McNally, managing director of Climate Change Solutions, criticised the Palais de Congres for being unsustainable. He said the centre could have used lighting technology where bulbs turn on and off automatically when people enter and leave a room. Solar energy could have been generated through photovoltaic cells on the roofs, while hydropower could have been harnessed through the nearby river. I myself wondered if the escalators were really necessary when stairs would have done. If we are to cut down on carbon emissions to tackle climate change all the stops must be pulled out. That means even model cities like Lyon have a long way to go.
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It does seem sad that when there is a tried and tested non polluting public transport system that can be installed widely at affordable costs in medium sized towns and cities, and when childhood asthma is at an extreme level (proven to be linked to diesel fumes) we in the UK continue to persist in pretending that slightly less harmful ‘hybrid’ diesel buses are somehow clean and environmentally friendly.
It is just not so!
If you want to reduce street fumes on busy bus corridors, improve health, reduce greenhouse gases and thus really improve the environment, and reduce your dependency on dwindling oil supplies, you need electric trolleybuses as well as their more expensive tram cousins.
Leeds seems to have grasped this and gone for a new trolleybus system. Is the rest of the UK (and especially London) going to wake up or continue sleepwalking through the land of make believe ‘clean diesels’?
I agree that trolleybuses have great potential to provide many UK cities with clean, green, popular transport. Detailed information can be found at
http://www.tbus.org.uk and there is a site promoting trolleybuses in Leeds at http://www.tbusleeds.org.uk
TV footage of the Lyon trolleybuses is available from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6750000/newsid_6758700/6758753.stm?bw=bb&mp=rm#
Buses are uncomfortable to ride on because many drivers find control of the vehicle difficult. Hence bumps and jerks time after time. I remember the trolleybus well. Smooth, fast acceleration and easy to drive. It would be so easy to being them back to London and with modern light wiring the overheads would not spoil the environment. Let us have them back as soon as poosible.
Barry McCarthy’s encounter with ‘science fiction electric buses’ makes interesting reading. This form of environmentally-friendly transport disappeared from Britain’s streets in 1972, but other cities around the world are embracing the ‘trolleybus’. Indeed Athens bought several hundred to renew their fleet in time for their Olympics, Bejing is doing the same, and Rome has recently reintroduced them. However, here in the UK, there is a marked reluctance to re-establish any modern systems using trolleybuses. You would have thought that the upsurge in interest in tramways, and then the realisation that they are very expensive to install, would have created interest in trolleybuses, which provide broadly similar benefits (no emmissions on street, quiet and efficient), but which can be implemented for a fraction of the cost as there are no street works required to move utilities and lay tramtracks. Leeds is using these exact arguements since their supertram scheme was turned down. Let’s hope that at least one city in the UK has the sense to see the future of public transport!