Sustainable Transport Guide for Businesses

Good day,
thank you for the"sustainable transport guide" : it is very interesting.

In part 2-7, it's written that organisations can allowed employees to work fexible work how where pratical, "this allows to awoid peak congestion period on the road".That is a good thing for workers.

But, in the situation of an university, it is difficult to stagger the beginning of the classes because all the classrooms are used by 8 o'clock am. Therefore, all the students take the public transports which are then saturated. What make universities in Australia?
Kind regards

Paul Dereusme
administrative manager
Faculty of Science and Technology
France

This guide says not one word about the most cost-effective behavior change that many small businesses can take to reduce both their motor fuel emissions and motor fuel costs. Switch fuels.

Stop using dirty liquid petroleum-based fuels and start using much more sustainable methane-hydrogen based motor fuels. Say what? Converting light-duty fleets to compressed natural gas motor fuels gives business owners the bang for the buck; a 25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions at lower cost than gasoline, diesel or non-sustainable liquid biofuels. The planet is awash in cheap natural gas; use it wisely. If the business wants an even greener fleet, those NGV pickups, vans and trucks will run very nicely on renewable biomethane made from waste biomass. If the business wants to be ultra-green, blend a little renewable hydrogen, made from solar or wind electricity and water, in with the compressed natural gas and biomethane.

Change behavior and save money. Stop buying liquid hydrocarbons; start buying proven, reliable low-carbon motor fuels (methane) that create commercial pathways to eventual widespread use of zero-carbon motor fuels -- electricity and hydrogen.

David Bruderly
President
Clean Power Engineering
United States
www.bruderly.com

I can almost see the camera panning along as this pure white pickup truck cruises silently by a neat black top road bordered by bright green fields. A startled deer looks up as the truck passes by, fueled by super green liquid natural gas. Kinda heartwarming.

Mel Tremper
United States

David

Thanks for your comment. The guide was developed for Australia, designed to show businesses what they can do with existing technologies - as yet, there is no large scale availability of the technologies / fuels you discuss in Australia. And the because there is no large scale production process, the embedded energy required to produce some of the biofuels in Australia is still extremely variable - in some cases it may be a better option than existing fuels, but in others there can be more energy and carbon consumed in the production process of supposed 'cleaner' fuels, than is saved by the fuel being used by the end user.

But we do definitely hope things will progress rapidly and we will need to review our guide soon.

Merryn Coutts
Greenfleet
Australia
www.greenfleet.com.au

Was having trouble logging in to FSB digest last week, so was unable to post response to Paul in this forum and emailed him directly. But realise that others are also probably interested in the response, so now that things seem to be working for me again, here it is...

Unfortunately there is no quick fix for this, but some things worth considering are:
Improved bicycle facilities both at the universities (secure bike storage, showers, etc.) and on the major routes to get there (safer bike paths) to encourage more students to cycle.
Australia has a programme called Open Universities (www.open.edu.au) which offers online study through 18 major universities. Perhaps Frances universities could look at developing something similar to deliver some courses online to reduce the demand for students to be physically located at the university campus.
Perhaps you could deliver some content for existing courses via video or web-conferencing where students have to log in to the session (so you know if they are in attendance and can keep a record of it) and then perhaps use twitter or another social media tool to take questions at the end. Again this would mean students dont have to be on campus for every part of their study lectures and tutorials could be delivered online, and only practical classes and maybe exams would need to take place on campus thus reducing the pressure on the public transport system and the university facilities.
Maybe look into the scheduling of classes is there any opportunity to group certain classes together to reduce the number of students on campus at any particular time? i.e. humanities in the morning and sciences in the afternoon.
Can improvements be made to the public transport offering? is there any capacity to increase the frequency of services during peak periods; or reconfigure the seating / standing capacity of the public transport currently on offer?

I hope this helps. If you have some success in tackling the issue, wed love to hear about it and share it with other people in a future edition of the guide.


Merryn Coutts
Greenfleet
Australia
www.greenfleet.com.au