They’re marvellous. I just love them.” After nearly 26 years driving a diesel-powered taxi around the streets of Dundee, James Leaburn has switched to an all-electric car, in the bold yellow livery of a classic New York cab. “They’re quiet, comfortable and the kids just love it because it’s like a New York cab,” said Leaburn as he plugged in at a council-run charging hub. “There’s no servicing, no broken fanbelts, no oil to change and no flat batteries. Just the press of a button and they’re away.” Dundee, once synonymous with industrial and urban decline, is now at the vanguard of the switch to zero-carbon transport. It already boasts the largest number of electric minicabs anywhere in the UK (134 at the last count), a council-owned network of four solar-powered charging hubs capable of taking 78 cars at a time (with sites for another 60 being built) and the highest number of rapid chargers of any Scottish city. In a few days it will open a rooftop charging hub – solar-powered, of course – at a city-centre multistorey. Fraser Crichton, the council’s fleet operations manager, is in charge of the strategy. “My ambition is to make Dundee fully electric within 15 years, which is my working lifetime,” he said. “I want my city to be the cleanest in the UK.” Dundee city council believes it has the UK’s largest local authority electrified fleet, with 117 electric cars and vans in use. It plans to buy 65 more, replacing its highly polluting diesel bin lorries and road sweepers with electric vehicles, and running subsidised electric minibuses in some of its poorest neighbourhoods. Shortly before Leaburn arrived at the council’s Princes Street charging hub, where cars charge under canopies carrying solar panels, Abdullah Kamer had pulled in for a brief battery top-up. Kamer drives for Zippy, a local takeaway delivery company that operates a fleet of 11 battery-powered, zero-emission BMW i3s. Despite these endorsements and the Scottish government’s boasts about its charging network, Scotland’s drivers have been slow to take up electric vehicles. Official sales figures show that while Scotland has 8.5% of the UK’s population, only 5.8% of the UK’s ultra low-emission cars are registered in Scotland. That’s 11,607, out of a total of 2.5m cars in Scotland. Meanwhile, bus use has been in long-term decline and CO2 emissions from transport continue to grow. Environment campaigners welcome the shift to electric vehicles, but John Lauder, the deputy chief executive of the sustainable travel charity Sustrans, said far greater effort was needed to cut overall private car use, not just to switch from fossil fuels. “Electric vehicles are not always carbon neutral, they will not tackle congestion in our towns and cities, they will not improve road safety and they will do nothing to deal with the obesity crisis facing Scotland,” he said. “We need to see a sizeable reduction in shorter urban journeys by car, and we have existing technologies that can be scaled up and rolled out in a far shorter timescale: walking and cycling.”
Guardian 16th Aug 2019 read more »