Transport Economist
I am very proud that the latest ITF report “High Capacity Transport: Towards Efficient, Safe and Sustainable Road Freight” has been published today.
The work on this report has taken three years with involvement of the Working Group members and external experts who have provided content and organised seminars for this project.
The car manufacturers today are still far from European CO2 emission targets. There seems to be still a lot of work needed according to De Tijd.
The European Parliament elections are approaching and I was invited to participate in the Latvian Radio 1 discussion on voting when living abroad.
A report “Towards Road Freight Decarbonisation: Trends, Measures and Policies” has been published by the International Transport Forum. I have had the opportunity to contribute to this report in the section on High Capacity Transport.
The report highlights policy areas that need adjustment for effective decarbonisation of road freight and points to fields where more robust evidence through further research is needed. It collects insights held at a workshop organised by the International Transport Forum in June 2018 in Paris and features the results of a survey among experts.
You can read the full report here: https://www.itf-oecd.org/towards-road-freight-decarbonisation
Why would Volkswagen have to protect the next generation of gasoline motors? Shouldn’t a true “next generation” technology be better than any technology that exists today and therefore succeed naturally?
The ITF/OECD has published a Working Group report on “Policies to Extend the Life of Road Assets”.
This report presents policy options for extending the life of road assets by mitigating deterioration caused by trucks. Beyond traditional engineering responses, it considers the role of trucks in road asset deterioration from a broader, demand-oriented perspective.
It often would be nice to be able to plug in my car when I park on a city street. In those cases a fast charging speed is not needed, and I would be more than happy with 16A three phase AC power (this results in charging speed of ~50km/hour) . An interesting solution is proposed by a British company Connected Kerb.
One of the first autonomous ships is a ferry sailing in Finland.
It is able to navigate, avoid obstacles and dock on its own, and in an emergency it can be controlled by humans from dry land using satellite and internet communications.
Rolls-Royce, who have developed the technology, believe it could eventually lead to ships not needing staff. Technology like this could certainly have applications in maritime transport.
It is interesting to see that the control center approach that we discussed in our report Managing Transition to Driverless Road Freight Transport for trucks is also applied in shipping.
A short video is available here: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-46350188/the-ferry-using-rolls-royce-technology-that-sails-itself
For a while I have been wondering what it is like to drive a hydrogen car in real life. Until now I have only been on a test drive of a BMW and Honda Clarity Fuel Cell at ITF 2016 Summit. It was entertaining, and feels like driving any electric car, but it can never give an experience one has living with it.
It is the end of 2018 and in the US some bloggers are getting their hands on the Hydrogen cars that are coming to market.
It seems that driving a hydrogen car today is difficult and expensive. You can solve the first problem by adding more fuelling stations, but it seems that solving the high fuel cost is going to be hard, if not impossible. This is because Hydrogen is a fossil fuel made mostly from natural gas, coal and oil (and 4% from electricity), and those are unlikely to get much cheaper. There are also some efficiency problems, as I have mentioned in this blog before.
Enjoy the video!
I have been riding my Xiaomi M365 electric scooter since the beginning of summer and have become a big fan of it. It is an amazing mobility device that lets me move through Brussels and Paris and choose the most optimal routing depending on time of the day and traffic conditions. In early mornings when public transport frequency is low and also during rush hour when it is impossible to get into a metro it is nice to be able to avoid public transport.
I had never thought to calculate how much it actually costs to ride it. I knew it is cheap and never gave it more thought. People from Wired actually did the calculations and the results are surprising.
This is how my e-scooter puts money in my pocket every day…
