Jo on Radio Bristol re CAZ feasibility study

Jo was up early this morning for a live studio interview with Claire Cavanagh on BBC Radio Bristol talking about the £500k Defra Air Quality Grant that Bristol City Council have just been awarded to undertake a Clean Air Zone feasibility study. The programme will be available to listen again shortly for up to a month: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04s1bjb

Enda nominated as UK representative to LivAGE Cost Action

Enda has been nominated to be the UK representative on an EU COST Action on Ammonia and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Animal Production Facilities. http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/ca/CA16106. The main objective of LivAGE Action is to enhance international discipline cooperation for exchanging ideas and knowledge, sharing good practices, assess technologies that could result in reducing the emissions of GHGs and ammonia from livestock buildings and thus to lead to a more environmental friendly and sustainable livestock production. Some secondary objectives are the estimation of emission factors, the impact of the applied diets, prevailing microclimate and ventilation schemes on emissions, the assessment of integrated monitoring systems, the improvement of CFD applications, the assessment of mitigation techniques and the environmental analysis of the proposed techniques and solution. This action links with the recent work that Enda has been undertaking with University College Dublin for the Irish Environmental Protection Agency on the emissions of ammonia and its impact on Natura 2000 sites.

Media storm over EU 'final warning' on NO2 exceedences

Following the European Commission's announcement that they are progressing their legal proceedings against the UK government (and Spain, Italy, France and Germany), Jo was called upon to speak to the BBC on three occasions last week. First up was a live interview at the BBC Bristol studios for the Radio 4 Today programme, where Jo was interviewed alongside Matthew Pencharz (former Deputy Mayor of Environment) by Nick Robinson. The interview can still be caught on iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08g96yn#play) at around 2:38 for the next 25 days. That evening, Jo was back to the BBC studios to record a TV interview for the regional evening news programme, Look North, as Hull was one of the areas listed in the 16 zones and agglomerations for which the government are in breach for not preparing action plans. The next day it was a pre-recorded interview via Skype for BBC Click on the use of personal monitors and the government inaction on air quality, which will be going out at Breakfast on 4th March (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08gml61).

New paper on Financial Implications of Car Ownership

 

Tim has just had a new paper published in Transport Policy in a special issue on Transport Poverty.

 

The paper is called “Financial Implications of Car Ownership and Use: a distributional analysis based on observed spatial variance considering income and domestic energy costs

 

Chatterton, T., Anable, J., Cairns, S. and Wilson, R. (2017) Financial implications of car ownership and use: A distributional analysis based on observed spatial variance considering income and domestic energy costs . Transport Policy. ISSN 0967-070X [In Press] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2016.12.007

 

The paper is an output from the Motoring and vehicle Ownership Trends (MOT) project led by Jillian Anable at ITS, Leeds www.MOTproject.net

 

·         If the paper is of interest, there is also a ‘follow-on’ conference paper with some additional analyses considering travel to work costs, and a segmented analysis based on  ONS Output Area Classifications. Chatterton, T., Anable, J., Cairns, S. and Wilson, R. (2016) Financial implications of car use and the drive to work: A social and spatial distributional analysis using income data and area classifications . In: DEMAND Conference 2016, Lancaster, UK, 13-15 April 2016. Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/28729

 

Abstract

This paper presents a new perspective on assessing the financial impacts of private car usage in England and Wales using novel datasets to explore implications of motoring costs (principally Vehicle Excise Duty and road fuel costs) for households as part of the overall costs of their energy budget. Using data from an enhanced version of the Department for Transport ‘MOT’ vehicle test record database, combined with data on domestic gas and electricity consumption from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (formerly the Department of Energy and Climate Change), patterns of car usage and consequent energy consumption are investigated, and the costs of Vehicle Excise Duty and road fuel examined as a proportion of total expenditure on household direct energy consumption. Through the use of these new datasets it is possible to analyse how these vary spatially and in relation to levels of median income. The findings indicate that motoring costs are strongly regressive, with lower income areas, especially in rural locations, spending around twice as much of their income on motoring costs as the highest income areas.