Is transport IT on the right road?

The focus of transport technology policy should be on improving efficiency, not monitoring journeys.

Last year we all learned about “food miles” and the carbon emissions generated when we eat foods that are transported from other parts of the planet. Now, just last week, I found myself telling a Lisbon conference on airline IT to expect all aspects of hardware procurement – air traffic control consoles included – to be metered for CO2.

Regulators, already subjecting flights and payloads to the strictures of what might be called Air Carbon Control, will demand nothing less.

Who could object? Certainly not Sir Rod Eddington, whose December report on UK transport insisted that road pricing at up to 80p/km, rather than traffic jams, is the best way “to ration transport capacity”. Indeed, Sir Rod believes that without “a widespread scheme” for road pricing by 2015, the UK will require “very significantly more transport infrastructure”.

Sir Rod estimates that road pricing will lead to an 80 percent cut in major road-building projects by 2025, and overall annual savings of £28bn. Yet he also admits that road pricing on his scale has costs that are “unknown”. Nor is such one-sidedness the only defect of the penny-pincher’s charter for transport IT.

According to Sarah Murray, author of Moveable Feasts: the Incredible Journeys of the Things we Eat, to be published in May, aircraft beginning their descent from 35,000 feet can tilt downwards by three degrees, put engines in idle mode until 10 miles away from touchdown, and so save on emissions by three percent. No doubt, too, much of this will be organised by sophisticated avionics. But putting a plane into neutral at 35,000 feet doesn’t sound very safe to me. Nor does it seem to allow for dealing with today’s endless holding patterns, themselves a result of under-capacity in airports.

Anyway, why should we want to ration transport infrastructure? And when it comes to rationing journeys, we can be sure that those with private jets, just like the more criminally inclined motorist, will find a way to evade whatever policing system is put in place.

We can also be sure that efforts to manage our movements with IT will detract from efforts to use IT to bring about more efficient energy use. IT can still do a lot to improve fuel injection and engine performance, for example.

Sir Rod believes that policies to influence transport demand must come before those that influence transport supply. IT is his weapon of choice to police what he calls the “behaviours” of a population he, the government and the Greens see as merely selfish in its desire to move about.

Vendors beware! In the role of traffic cop, you have nothing to lose but all your friends.