INFUZE: Designing a solution for a country full of cars
INFUZE is an ambitious, five year project based in Leeds which will consult with the public on designing a city in which they feel they wouldn’t need to own a car.
At the end of March, 2024, there were nearly 34 million cars registered in the UK. We recently reported that in Manchester, 28% of the city centre is given over to roads and a further 8% to car parks. And the number of cars in the UK is growing and that growth is expected to continue.
“We don’t have a solution to expand capacity to deal with that,” says Greg Marsden, Professor of Transport Governance at the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds. “In some places pavement parking is endemic, we’ve got population growth, we’re not going to meet our climate targets even if we electrify. There’s all sorts of things that tell us that ‘carry on as we are’ won’t work.”
Greg is heading up a £7.8m project in Leeds known as INFUZE (Inspiring Futures for Zero Carbon Mobility) which aims to address the problem by asking people to rethink the way they get around.
Cars are a fundamental part of most people’s lives and given the kerfuffle over the ULEZ expansion, not to mention 20mph speed limits, LTNs and the impertinent intrusion of the cyclist, discussing cars in terms of being problematic is fraught with danger.
But the INFUZE project will come at it from a different angle. Nothing is being taken away and people aren’t even being ‘encouraged’ to change their behaviour. Instead, the team will ask communities across the city to help them design mobility solutions (car clubs, responsive taxi-style bus services and shared bicycle and scooter schemes) that they think might enable them to live car-free.
The five year project got under way in August and will eventually involve up to 400 households across the city. A call to action for suitable households will go out this month, households for which the project might represent a genuine opportunity.
At the moment, Greg isn’t exactly sure where within the population interest is most likely to lie, and considers that one of the main challenges. He acknowledges that had the project taken place in London, it would be easy to find people who don’t feel they need to own a car, but that can’t be replicated in Leeds, hence the need to engage more deeply with a community slightly less willing to give up what they’ve got because, perversely, one of the downsides of car ownership, the cost, can also represent a barrier to change. ‘I’ve spent a fortune on this car, I’m not getting the bus!’
Research by Professor Jillian Anable, Greg’s colleague at the ITS, found that for around 20 to 25% of the population owning a car is very much a part of their identity and such people would be unlikely to engage with this sort project. But Greg believes that there are a number of reasons other people might be willing to explore ways of living without a car: “There are people on quite low incomes who feel they have to own a car in order to be able to participate in the labour market, even though they can’t afford a week’s holiday. So can we provide a solution that works for them?
“Then there are households that have two cars but maybe feel it’s quite an expense. ‘We’d rather just have one, but at the moment, because of all these synchronisation problems, we’ve got a busy family life… we’ve got two vehicles.’
“And there are places where there’s chronic over-demand for parking and actually owning a car’s a bit of a hassle.”
Aside from an enthusiasm within local communities to participate, locations chosen will also be based on the political support of the local ward councillors and the City Council along with the team’s data analytics which inform them of what might work well in different areas.
When the participants are assembled, INFUZE will explore their experiences of owning or not owning cars, and how that works for them in Leeds. What do they really rely on them for? What are the emotional or practical ties that hold them to owning a car at the moment?
“But then,” Greg says, “we want to move beyond that and show them some of the new sort of shared mobility platforms and services that are available. Essentially saying ‘Design a system for us that means you would be happy to give up your car.’”
No alternatives to using a car are off the table, as indicated by the list of partners associated with the project, with car share clubs, micromobility providers, bus companies and demand-responsive transport providers, all ready to be called upon.
“We’ve been deliberately open in our partnership formations,” explains Greg. “If you ask people nowadays about the prospect of not owning a car, what they would imagine is their local bus service or cycling and walking so one of the things that we feel is really important is that we communicate to people the range of different options that could be brought to bear.
“Some of it is working with employers on how they organise people getting to work, some of it’s provided by companies. I don’t think people know what they could be designing with. So that’s one reason for having such a broad sort of partners.”
Rather than simply banging a drum about saving the planet, the project will focus on real benefits to individuals and the broader community: on what their streets might look like with a third less cars, how the neighbourhoods might be regreened, how there might be space for more play areas.
By not approaching the project with any potential solutions, INFUZE is taking a different approach to resolving the car problem: it’s not starting with a solution. Trialling a potential solution and seeing how it performs is measurable, it can be seen to be a success or a failure. However, as this five year project enters its third month Greg admits, albeit with a certain satisfaction, that no-one knows how it will go: “We’ve been designing transport systems for decades and the trends are taking us away from where we should be going. So we don’t think that this is something that can be done to people, given to them and tested. It has to be designed by them and because of that we can’t say what the answer is going to look like.
“And that was quite uncomfortable as a funding process. It’s quite tricky for people to give you money when you’re saying, ‘I can tell you how we’ll approach it, but I can’t tell you what we’ll do.’”
For an environmentally motivated transport project, INFUZE is also possibly unique in having no interest in electrification. For one thing, in terms of meeting our climate goal targets, Greg believes it’s too late: “To get back on track with what the Committee on Climate Change says we need for the sixth carbon budget, you’d essentially need 10 years’ worth of behaviour change on a scale similar to the first year of the pandemic.”
Over and above this, is the fact that electrification may increase the number of cars on the road: “Electrification is making cars easier to drive,” Greg explains, “It’s also for many – if you have your own off street parking – making them cheaper to drive.
“That in itself risks building negative cycles around public transport because the alternative to public transport, the car, for many journeys is getting better.”
INFUZE’s ambition is that by Year Five the project will have accumulated evidence that there are certain kinds of communities who might be willing to move away from car ownership. And that they can build a tool kit that enables people or companies to go through this process and to understand how it could work in their location. “If we’ve been successful by then,” Greg says, “Year Five will be about expanding this to other places and trying to demonstrate this is not a niche in Leeds.”
Greg is one of the speakers at our Northern Air Quality Conference in Manchester on 25th March.
