How to Move Faster Toward Sustainable Mobility

With every passing season, we witness with greater certainty the impact of global warming. Meanwhile, all climate summits see governments, companies and NGOs agree upon the urge to decrease world carbon emissions.

How can a global transportation provider do its part in 2022 to reduce CO2 emissions? It’s a particularly interesting question since global mobility is one of the biggest polluters today, accounting for 37 percent of CO2 emissions within end-use sectors.

The industry was greatly affected by the pandemic and this opened a special opportunity to take a step back and redesign the global mobility vision and urge a radical change: move from particular and private transportation to shared mobility, reducing emissions, and making mobility safer and more efficient (the Shared, Electric and Autonomous triad) 

However, while the post-COVID-19 recovery is fast, especially in developing countries, it is not heading in this direction. Instead, we see more people in individual cars, with an embedded dismay of contagion due the pandemic restrictions before an obvious lack of public focus and resources to reduce emissions.

From this perspective, MOBILITY ADO — one of Mexico’s biggest mobility companies — operates hundreds of clean vehicles (hybrid, full electric and recently, some hydrogen) mainly in Spain (Madrid, Malaga, Zaragoza) and Mexico (Mexico City, Merida, Puebla, Queretaro), so we have acquired some experience in the use, maintenance, investment planning and public collaboration for every kind of operational need, city size and service level. The leading issue in Latin America, however, is that a lot of cities cannot dedicate the necessary resources to renew their fleets. It is even worse to interview if they have the hombre-camión (men-bus) scheme in place.

Let us talk about what we have learned.

First of all, the new electric propulsion vehicles offer a new world of passenger experience. New clean buses combined with BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) are a very efficient mobility solution with no need for expensive infrastructure. In fact, while subways and tramways are undisputedly best-in-class in terms of transportation efficiency, they demand huge infrastructure and are generally not adapted to small or midsized cities, which explains their absence in a lot of Latin American or European cities. 

The new clean buses, combined with other solutions that adapt to local needs (bikes, on-demand transportation, car-sharing, car-pooling) offer a great alternative to tramways, subways, and private cars, while opening an opportunity for transportation operators, given that these modes of transportation might soon become a lot cheaper to operate than fossil fuel vehicles if the cost of oil follows its current rising path.

Furthermore, the design of these new vehicles also fulfills modern-day user-experience standards. Some technologies, such as full-electric or hydrogen, even allow the allocation of principal components, such as the “energy” tank, motor, and drive chain, to liberate space for more natural light and a better view of the environment. They are also less carbon intensive, quieter and efficient (acceleration and braking), therefore helping to improve urban air quality, noise reduction and service reliability toward better living conditions in cities. Improving the overall experience is crucial to attracting and converting people to public transportation: the excellent customer feedback mobility industries received in Spain and Mexico point to a long-awaited improvement in commodity and user experience aboard.

However, some strong constraints do exist that are slowing the transition.

The cost of these new vehicles is the first drawback. 

Acquisition costs are higher (from 1.5 to 4 times that of a fuel vehicle), which makes a significant difference when the time comes to renew fleets totaling hundreds or thousands of vehicles. A general transportation operator cannot support such costs alone, considering the thin margins in the industry. Indeed, these costs can hardly be afforded without the help of public banks or the authorities, which is why the transition is a lot faster in Europe operations, where national and local public funds are massively invested to accelerate the renewal of urban fleets. The transition currently it's only possible on short-distance services, given that the autonomy of current batteries reaches its limits on larger distances (interurban or long-distance services). In Latin American countries, the situation is more delicate given the lack of public funds and the difficulty of applying unique strategies to decentralized transportation systems, such as the hombre camión.

The lack of infrastructure for these new energies is a second problem.

We realized that it is not easy to transform a maintenance facility from a gas-based station to its electric equivalent when we introduced 10 electric buses on Mexico City’s Line 3 in 2021 (the first electrical BRT in Latin America). On the one hand, operational facilities need to be adapted to park and charge the vehicles when not in service. On the other hand, the supply network needs to support this new significant demand and adapt its capacities. Hundreds of buses charging between 12 a.m. and 5 a.m. would be the equivalent of the electric consumption of a whole district in Mexico City. After these first steps, Mobility ADO is now preparing its maintenance facilities to receive 40 more electric vehicles, in partnership with Santander to fund the electric buses. 

Speaking of infrastructure at another level, and this is not exclusive to sustainable vehicles, it is necessary to adapt public infrastructure to rebalance the space between private and shared vehicles. Increasing public transport speeds and reducing the number of individual car lanes and parking lots are key to improving overall urban efficiency and well-being.

Another key topic to add to the list is that new knowledge, technologies, solutions, capacities and business models need to be understood and agreed upon by all stakeholders. Customer experience needs to be designed for the full multichannel and multimodal journey in the digital and physical world, maximizing complementarity and integration of various transport modes. The right combination depends on local urbanism and needs but the good news is that for most combinations, a hybrid vehicle is cheaper than a fuel vehicle, and the advancement of innovative technologies is so fast that the winning option is permanently evolving. Again, we do not consider in this scope of investments any mass transit system (train, subway) but even then, there are important initial investment decisions that require finding new innovations to become a reality. 

The impact of such investments goes way beyond the mobility sector. From a social perspective, for example, these investments rebalance spaces, build safer, more resilient, and less contaminated cities where there are fewer road accidents, where it is easier to move around to study or for a job, and where people are in better health. In the end, it is about deciding what kind of cities we want to live in and raise our children.

Finally, how can we really be sure that a mobility solution is actually clean?

One needs to evaluate the overall impact of such a solution, from the production to the recycling of every part of the vehicle and infrastructure, from component extraction and processing to energy production and other external factors. Just think of something we use every day in all of our electronic devices: batteries. These contain lithium and rare minerals that are difficult to find, extract, transport, transform and recycle. Once installed into your device, they have already consumed a great deal of energy, and could leave quite a bit of waste at the end of their useful life if not recycled. The energy source used to charge the battery is also central: if it is not clean, the overall emissions are still through the roof. Charging batteries using energy from a coal or gas plant is pretty much the same as putting fuel in a car tank. 

In fact, taking a step back, the way countries produce their energy has a massive impact on the journey of sustainable mobility. This factor overpasses the operator’s scope and involves national governments and global trade agreements. As we saw recently in Mexico with the energy bill, it is not an easy journey.
 

To conclude, from my personal point of view, I would say there is no magical recipe to implementing clean mobility solutions but the global “Avoid, Shift, Improve” policy is an effective way to approach them. They require smart collaboration and trust between public and private actors, communities, associations, and organizations to collectively build the best solutions able to meet local needs. Everyone needs to participate, on every level, to impact rising emissions and temperatures.