Global Move To Cities Speeds Electric Transport Adoption

While we will electrify everything everywhere all at once as a major lever of climate action, our exploration in this series starts with how we will move ourselves and the goods we depend on around. And that story starts with the global movement to cities, a megatrend that is continuing.

As our population has exploded in the past century, our countryside has depopulated. Once, 95% of a country’s population were involved in agriculture and now in the developed world it’s 2%. Coal miners in the USA’s eastern coal region numbered 750,000 at the turn of the 20th Century when the population was vastly smaller and now fewer than 60,000 workers produce as much coal per year as more than a century before.

Automation has freed the vast majority of people from lifetimes in agriculture and resource extraction. And it’s enabled a once relatively rare circumstance — living in cities — to become dominant.

Our cities are vastly bigger than the cities of old. While more people are living in urban settlements of fewer than 500,000 people, two-thirds of city dwellers are in cities much bigger than that. A full 60% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2030 and most of them will be in larger ones.

With larger cities comes major advantages for electrification and hence decarbonization of transportation. The more people who live in a city, the greater the justification for subways, light rail, rapid bus transit and transit right of ways to move them between homes, places of work, shopping centers and entertainment. Everything on rails in cities is already electrified in most places, in large part because diesel engines and constantly used tunnels are a bad combination for commuter health and well-being.

The future of bus transit can be seen in China, where over 600,000 electric buses serve hundreds of millions with often 24/7 service cycles. China’s Yutong and BYD are at the forefront of this, with about half of all buses delivered in the country. And they are delivering electric buses globally now. A third of Europe’s 3,400 electric bus purchases were Chinese-manufactured or delivered from joint ventures between European bus firms putting chassis and seats on top of Chinese bus drivetrains.

This isn’t just in the developed world. Nigeria has ordered 12,000 Yutong electric buses to leapfrog the west in electrification of transit.

Electric delivery trucks in urban areas are part of this trend. The 500,000 on the roads of China’s cities can deliver goods over empty roads at night as the drivetrains don’t wake people up as is the case with diesel vehicles.

With larger cities in most of the world also comes walkability and bikeability, with amenities spread broadly throughout the fabric of the urban area. The backlash in the USA and the UK against the concept of a 15-minute city is a backlash at least in part against urbanization. And, of course, the USA and to a lesser extent Canada and Australia chose a different and worse pattern, urban sprawl. Even in those countries, densification is occurring and the most populated cities are usually the densest.

One trend that’s underreported is the relationship between stagnant motorcycle sales and skyrocketing sales of electric bikes and other electric microbility devices such as scooters, skateboards and electric unicycles. Motorcycles are useful modes of transportation in sparsely populated areas, historically providing cheap, high-speed travel over long distances. In the past couple of decades, however, motorcycles in the developed world have become larger and more expensive.

Their advantages over electric bikes in dense urban areas are fewer and the barriers to entry higher. Something that is also under reported in the developed world is the very rapid electrification of the tiny two-wheeled seated scooters so prevalent in Asian countries, along with three-wheeled minitrucks and cabs that dominate in some areas.

While pure-play electric motorcycle companies like Zero and Energica struggle with their customers’ expectations of long-distance highway trips, electric disruptive innovation is eating their market share from below. Motorcyclists are an aging demographic while every demographic is using electric micromobility devices.

The recent pandemic accelerated this trend. While transit use plummeted along with commuting by car, purchases of electric micromobility devices soared. In downtown areas, all food deliveries and an increasing percentage of parcels are delivered by electric scooters and electric cargo trikes.

Cities are adapting, with longer bike lane networks and complete streets. Studies make it clear that bike commuters are willing to travel almost twice as far with electric bikes, over 14 kilometers one way, and will include more errands in the journey. Connecting bike paths across urban areas as metropolitan Vancouver has done allows far more commutes to be done on electric bikes, reducing congestion on roads and transit.

Streets in urban areas are being converted to the one good thing to come from the New Urbanism dead end, complete streets. That form of street features trees, broad sidewalks and bike lanes protected from moving cars by parking or bollards. Car lanes are narrower and top speeds are lower but intelligent road design that moves turning cars into cutout turn lanes where parking isn’t allowed maintain or even increase throughput.

Electrified transit, electric micromobility and electrified urban delivery vehicles mean vastly more people and more goods are moving through our increasingly big and dense cities with very little carbon footprint.