Volts podcast: Kimberly Nicholas on the best ways to get cars out of cities

In this episode, Kimberly Nicholas discusses her published
research on the most effective policies to reduce car use in
cities.


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transcript)


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transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


In the US, the movement to get cars out of cities is … what’s the
nice word? … nascent. But in Europe, where many cities were built
before cars and big-box sprawl never completely dominated, there
is growing agreement that cars need to be reigned in. It’s partly
about fighting climate change, but beyond that it’s about quality
of life — living without air and noise pollution, using your legs
to get around, and enjoying public spaces.


More and more European cities are discovering what Copenhagen
found when it studied the problem in earnest: every mile traveled
on a bike adds value to a city, whereas every mile traveled in a
car subtracts value.


The pushback against cars in the Europe has been going on for
decades now, but there has been little effort to catalogue and
rank the various policies and initiatives involved. What works
and what doesn’t? What should other cities prioritize?


Into that breach came a recent research paper in Case Studies on
Transport Policy that dove into the academic literature
(surveying 800 papers) to rank the top car-reducing strategies.
It was co-authored by Paula Kuss (based on her master’s research)
and Kimberly Nicholas of Sweden’s Lund University Centre for
Sustainability Studies. Nicholas later wrote a summary of the
research for The Conversation that received an enormous amount of
attention.


As it happens, driving cars out of cities is one of my enduring
obsessions, so I eagerly accepted Nicholas’ offer to review the
research, discuss the themes evident in the top-performing
policies, and ponder whether such policies could ever take hold
in the US. Our conversation was enlightening and heartening,
despite making me want to move to Europe.


With no further ado, Kim Nicholas. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for
coming.


Kimberly Nicholas


Thank you so much. Long-time listener, first-time guest.


David Roberts


I want to talk about your study, but before we jump in, there's
just a couple of kind of background things I want to establish.
One point, which you emphasize a couple of times, which I don't
feel like is super well understood. I feel like a lot of times,
in my experience, when we talk about declining cars, or trying to
get rid of cars, or blocking cars, or anything that inhibits
cars, it strikes people, I think, intuitively as a punishment to
the poor. And the point you make, at the top of your post about
your paper, is that this is not in fact, the case.


In fact, the sort of transportation sector is weighted as it is
toward the wealthier. So say just a little bit about that by way
of background.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah, I think that's so important that people understand that it
is overwhelmingly the rich who drive the most, and it's very
important to design climate and transport policies that
simultaneously tackle the very serious and increasing problem of
inequality. But that's fully possible to do. Some of the people
who benefit the most from active and public transport are
lower-income folks. So our study focused on Europe because Europe
actually has a policy to ...


David Roberts


Study.


Kimberly Nicholas


Exactly. The European Union has promised to deliver 100
climate-neutral cities by 2030. And those cities have just been
chosen. And in order for that to actually happen, cities have to
reduce the number of cars.


And when we look in Europe, the data show that it's the rich who
drive the most, the richest 10%, about 21% of their emissions
comes from driving. And they take up so much more space in
cities, which is something we often don't think about. But in
Berlin, for example, it's three and a half times more public
space that goes to car drivers than non-car drivers. So the car
really is a tool to increase inequality.


David Roberts


And that's just parking mostly, right? That public space?


Kimberly Nicholas


Largely parking. Also roads and other car infrastructure. In
Sweden, it's about 100 m², roughly 1000 square feet. That's the
size of many apartments in cities, here. So you think, "Okay,
what value could we get for that land? That could be public
parks, that could be more housing where we need it in cities."
And it's just a really inefficient use of space.


David Roberts


And you make the point that EU is doing fairly well on some
climate metrics, but its transportation sector is actually kind
of a little bit of its Achilles' heel. It's not on a good
trajectory.


Kimberly Nicholas


No. And I think that this is really something that it's important
for the world to take a look at because to get down to zero
emissions and actually stop climate change, the first thing is to
produce a lot of clean energy. And I think listeners to your
podcast are well aware of that, and you talk about that a lot.
But then you have to electrify everything to run on that clean
energy. And transport is the next sort of phase. And you see in
some of the earlier leaders at the national level, Sweden is one
of them, where emissions have been declining too slowly, but they
are on the way down.


California is a state in the US that's the same, where they're
making the transition to produce clean energy, but they're not
yet, or they're just really starting to gain traction in
electrifying cars to run on that clean energy. And they're not
tackling the need to reduce cars and switch to the need for less
mobility and sustainable mobility.


David Roberts


What is that case? Because I think a lot of people, a lot of
people, especially new to this area, sort of think, "Well,
transportation runs on gas, switch it over to run on clean
electricity, and you're good." I think that lots of people think
that's most of the solution, and I think a lot of people also
think that that's faster to do that than to change cities. So
what's the case for trying to reduce overall vehicle miles
traveled alongside electrification?


Kimberly Nicholas


Well, the climate case is that we won't meet climate goals unless
we do that, and the inequality case is that we'll continue to
exacerbate inequality unless we do that. So I think that's a very
strong case because if we're serious about these goals, and
actually making cities safer and healthier and more fair and nice
places to live, we actually need to focus on reducing cars. And a
lot of cities are starting to realize that, especially in Europe,
but also elsewhere. I mean the US does have a lot of work and
activism and research showing the need to actually reduce cars.


And I think the IPCC, the UN Climate Panel, has started to pick
this up, and their latest report focused on this
"avoid-shift-improve" model, which I think is really helpful
because, for a long time, climate policy has really been focused
on just the improve. Take unsustainable tech, replace it with
sustainable tech, done. And on a finite planet that's not enough.
Because not only do we have a carbon budget, which we need to
meet to stay within Paris Agreement limits of warming, we just
have a material world that is limited. We have a limited amount
of land and water and resources, and we have to use less of them
than many of us in wealthy countries do right now in order for
everybody to have enough.


David Roberts


And a lot of new drivers on the way, in the next few decades. Or
at least a lot of people who will newly have enough money to
drive, if that's the option.


Kimberly Nicholas


I had a really interesting conversation, actually, on Twitter.
Someone from Ghana got in touch with me and was talking about
what sustainable mobility looks like there. And I mean, the
reality there is that the vast majority of transportation at the
moment is on foot. And his argument was that this kind of
approach to reduce cars can actually really benefit people in
cities in Subsaharan Africa, for example, that are growing fast,
that have a lot of transport needs, that are choked by car
traffic, and aren't designed and aren't meeting the needs of how
people actually get around.


And those cities have an opportunity to do things right from the
beginning rather than do what actually Copenhagen did, which was
be designed for cars, and then due to grassroots organizing, kind
of re-engineer itself to be a city for people instead of cars.
But that's obviously a fight and more expensive and takes more
time, than doing it right from the beginning.


David Roberts


Yeah, they could leapfrog cars in the jargon. Let's talk about
your study then. So you looked across the EU at cities that are
trying to reduce vehicle travel and looked at their policies, and
tried to sort of compare them and figure out which are the most
efficacious. And so my sort of first question is it just seems
like, intuitively, that's a lot of very different circumstances,
a lot of very different policies, a lot of different areas or
sectors. They cover just there's so many apples and oranges. How
did you find some sort of data set where you could compare across
these?


Kimberly Nicholas


It was a struggle. Thank you for recognizing that. As we write
for academics and the people doing the research that formed the
evidence base for this study, which was led by Paula Kuss for her
master's thesis, please use a standard metric and one that can
actually be linked to emissions. So if any of you listening are
in a position to measure car use, please measure vehicle miles
traveled by modal share per day. So how far do people go and what
means of transport do they use to travel that distance? Because
as you saw, we had to combine different measures, and then make
somewhat subjective assessment of "okay, how do we rank these?"


We can say, "drop in car use by commuters," or "drop in the
number of cars in the city center," or "drop in the share of
residents who have a car," and make some kind of informed guess
about, "well, how many people or what percent does this apply
to?" But it's not as good as if we could say miles traveled, but
nobody measured that in our study. We screened more than 800
papers.


David Roberts


Really? Zero cities are keeping track of that metric?


Kimberly Nicholas


They may well be doing it, but it's not ending up in the
peer-reviewed literature. And we also checked about half of our
database came from reports at the city level. So, I mean, it may
well be in PDFs at individual cities, but that weren't part of
the European Union databases that we looked at for inclusion. So
the data may be out there if you're willing to dig on an
individual level. And I guess now that we've identified here are
these couple of dozen cities where you should be looking, it
might be more feasible to go into their city council websites and
so on. But I think that's just prohibitive as a place to start a
research project.


David Roberts


There's an element of subjectivity here that we think it's
directionally correct. So I don't want to go through the whole
list since there are quite a few different policies here. But
let's talk about the top three, then. Let's go through the top
three, what they are, and how effective they are and where, and
who's using them.


Kimberly Nicholas


Sure. So leading the list at the top is a "congestion charge". So
London was the first to implement this. Drivers need to pay to
enter the city center. And that was, we found the most effective
overall.


David Roberts


Is that spread beyond yet London? I know New York City has beat
its head against that wall for quite a while, but has not done it
yet, right? Has any other city done it?


Kimberly Nicholas


So we only looked in Europe, and in Europe, we found Milan,
Stockholm and, Gothenburg are all using a congestion charge as
well. London's was the most effective. So city center car traffic
in London dropped 33%, which is quite a lot.


David Roberts


Wow.


Kimberly Nicholas


Other cities were not as much. The approach that we took doesn't
really let us dive into the details. I think you would need to
add some social science research to interview people who were
involved and understand, you know, the design and the actors and
the coalitions at play. And, you know, why, why exactly did it
get this result on the ground?


But even the ones that didn't see as big of a result, the fact
that it's for the entire center city, of 12% to almost 20%, was
really substantial.


David Roberts


Could you look closely enough into those policies to see whether
the main metric is just price? I mean, sort of like efficacy goes
up with price, or is it more complicated than that? Because I
know London has increased its charge a couple of times, hasn't
it?


Kimberly Nicholas


Yes, it has. I don't have an answer to say, "for every dollar a
city charges, it drops by this amount." I mean, London's, I
think, partly reflected inflation since it was first put in place
in 2003 at £5 per day, and then it's now at £15. So I guess
that's faster than inflation. But it probably does need to go up
over time to remain effective in reducing car use. But we also
know that once people change habits, they get stuck in new
habits. So if this drives people, no pun intended, if the
congestion charge drives people out of their cars, or to do
remote work, or to drive less, or to carpool, or to switch to
public transport, those new behaviors can become a habit.


And maybe the increase in charge is maybe more relevant in
affecting the behavior of potential new drivers.


David Roberts


Right. And it's also important to mention that revenue goes
toward public transportation. Has there been — I'm wondering
whether London voters are able to sort of see with their eyeballs
a notable improvement in public transport that can be traced to
this policy?


Kimberly Nicholas


That's a really critical element of policy design, and we found
that in the most effective policies, they need to combine carrots
and sticks. So you need to have something that explicitly reduces
or restricts cars and parking. That's the stick. And you also
need to have something that aims to increase and improve and
expand the alternative. So public transport, active walking, and
biking.


David Roberts


Right.


Kimberly Nicholas


A lot of people on Twitter were looking at my table that lists
interventions by a congestion charge or parking and traffic
control, and they're like, "you forgot bike lanes." I'm like,
"no, look in the carrots column. Bike lanes are there." But just
adding bike lanes alone without changing the playing field, that
right now really overwhelmingly favors cars and driving, is not
enough to shift behavior.


David Roberts


Right. And I imagine that effect is both just in terms of
efficacy, but also in terms of political economy. You need to
sort of sell some sweet with the sour or whatever, or however it
goes.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yes, exactly. I mean, I think a common theme in getting climate
policy enacted is you can expect resistance from a small,
probably powerful group of people who benefit from the current
status quo. So I wasn't there in London studying this 15 years
ago when the first congestion charge was adopted, but I'm sure it
was not a completely smooth ride.


And I think politicians need to get much more bold about
defending these climate policies on their social merits of
saying, "look, here's the data. In the UK, it's overwhelmingly
the richest households that have a car. Almost 40% of the
lowest-income households don't have a car. And those are more
likely to be BIPOC communities. Those are women and single
head-of-household. So if we care about equality, we actually need
to have some restrict over consumption as well as increase the
standards for people at the lowest end."


Number two drum roll, please. Thank you. It's parking and traffic
control. So that means removing parking spaces.


David Roberts


Oh, my God. Removing parking spaces? What? I just broke out into
a sweat.


Kimberly Nicholas


I said it. You mean like a fevered fantasy of delight?


David Roberts


Well, a little both, and terror at the thought of proposing this
in the US city.


Kimberly Nicholas


It can happen. It can happen, Dave. You can do it. That's the
stick, then, in this case. So that's not an economic stick. The
first one was an economic stick of a monetary charge, but this
one is a public goods and services stick, basically, of
reallocating the space in a city, the public space, to be of
higher use to people than cars. And so alongside that
restriction, and basically the carrot is, you make those spaces
really beautiful and usable, and you put bike lanes and walkways
in and add car-free streets. And then people use that space and
benefit from that space in a different way, and that creates
popularity.


And I know that US cities, as well as many other cities, have
done this, for example, with the pop-up bike lanes and bike lane
expansions starting during the Pandemic, for example.


David Roberts


I find that whole episode, you address that actually in your
post, and we might as well talk about it here because I find it
somewhat disheartening. There was a lot of sort of pop-up
urbanism during the Pandemic, with a lot of new bike lanes and
other walkable streets that excluded cars. And as I look around,
I'm not sure how much of it is sticking. It looks like a lot of
it is getting rolled back. Do you have a sense of that?


Kimberly Nicholas


You're probably right. I haven't seen a study. We know that in
the Pandemic, public policy did not seize the moment as it should
have.


David Roberts


On a number of levels.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah, yes, absolutely. I'm not an expert on the health level, but
on the climate level, only 18% globally of the COVID funds were
in line with climate goals, basically. So there could have been a
huge opportunity there to tackle some of these systemic problems,
that was largely missed, unfortunately. But we know that those
moments of disruption are an effective moment to change behavior,
that habits form in a context, and when the context changes, "so
okay, I'm not going into the office anymore." People do develop
new routines and habits. So smart city planning would have kind
of seized that and capitalized on that more.


And some cities did do that. So European cities that added bike
lanes during the Pandemic increased cycling rates by eleven to
48%. So it was a really big increase. But now, as you said, we
are seeing some rollback of those initiatives. I don't have a
number overall for how much, but I mean, at least anecdotally
some cities are returning. And I guess what this tells us is
carrots alone are not enough. You need policy change that
actually focuses on the source of the problem. So I mean, if
we're talking about fossil fuels, it's production and supply. If
we're talking about transport, it's restricting cars and parking.


David Roberts


Yes. And so then number three is one of my favorites. Let's talk
about number three.


Kimberly Nicholas


Alright. Number three is the "limited traffic zone". So that's
excluding cars from parts of the city, with exceptions for
residents. And I should say we haven't talked about this yet, but
I mean, all of this can and should be designed to make sure that
people who need cars, for mobility and social inclusion, have
access to them. And that's the really important part of reducing
the inequalities, that for disability or other reasons for people
who actually need cars, that should be possible. So certainly
those folks would get an exception. But in a limited traffic
zone, cars are excluded from a certain region.


And again, the care that's linked to that stick is that violation
fines fund public transport.


David Roberts


And is usually the city center, isn't it? I mean, that's usually
where these things start.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yes, we just looked at cities again because we wanted to have
something that was hopefully useful for this EU mission to
deliver these 100 climate-neutral cities. But there are also ways
of reducing car use in rural areas. And that wasn't the focus of
our study here. But I think that's a really interesting area
because, much like the misconception you mentioned that. "wait a
minute, the poor are really car-dependent, and we can't punish
them. Well, wait a minute, that's not what the data show."
Similarly, people have the argument that rural people are more
car-dependent, and at least in Sweden, the data show that that's
not the case.


That they may have fewer alternatives for public transit, for
example, but they don't drive more on average, or they don't
drive further than people in cities or suburbs. So in Sweden, and
I think this is repeated elsewhere, it's a small minority of
folks who do a really excessive amount of driving. It's 25% of
the population here that cause 90% of the car emissions. So it's
targeting those folks. And those folks are largely the highest
income. And then they're distributed around, geographically,
between the countryside and the city pretty evenly.


David Roberts


So who are the sort of marquee cities here? London did this,
didn't it? And didn't Paris also do this?


Kimberly Nicholas


Limited traffic zones. The example we talked about was Rome, and
they saw a 20% reduction in cars during the hours that this
restriction was in place. And even when it wasn't, they saw half
of that 10% reduction. So it shows that having policy change does
lead to pretty widespread and more lasting behavior and social
change, rather than it's not only like a light switch that people
just only follow when it's on. It starts to shift norms and
create alternatives and do other good things.


David Roberts


Yeah, seems like a huge piece of this is how to take those
changing habits and sort of reinforce them and accelerate them
and make sure they don't roll back.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah, that's true. I mean, there you start to get into some of
our other policies that we identified as effective, which have to
do with, for example, workplaces and schools, because then I
think the employers and schools and cities can do a lot to
promote new norms. I mean, to make to have the infrastructure to
shower at work, for example, or secure bike parking, but also to
kind of make it easy and accepted and even expected to cycle to
work. And I know that was in the news recently of some dismissive
comments about, "oh, people in Denmark are so poor that they have
to cycle to work."


David Roberts


And it was like the most American thing I've ever seen in my
entire life.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah, "no, they actually are doing fine financially, and they
prefer to cycle." And here's a minister in a suit on a bike, and
it's just the best way to get to work, and it's not a hardship.


David Roberts


And I think of also all those videos I'm always seeing of bicycle
school buses in Barcelona. Are you familiar with this? Just like
huge herds of children on bikes that all ride together for sort
of safety. And it also seems like the social part of it too is a
big part of habit formation. Just having it be socially accepted
and having your peers doing it too and being able to do it
together.


Kimberly Nicholas


Absolutely. I mean, my friend David Kroodsma biked from grad
school at Stanford to the tip of Tierra del Fuego, the southern
tip of South America. And he had an amazing journey. It was
raising awareness about climate. He met so many people, and
people would invite him to stay in their homes, and he slept in a
lot of fire stations. And I mean, he wrote a book, had an amazing
time. And he told me that he also did something similar across
the US, and he could never meet people because there are never
people on the street.


David Roberts


There are just no people on the street. I really don't think
Americans realize the lack. Because you kind of have to travel
overseas, and you just get used to like, "I'm in a city, of
course, there are people around."


Kimberly Nicholas


Yes. That's so much better for us as humans. And in terms of
social cohesion and trust, which is really important for
democracy, and knowing a diverse group of people, and getting to
know your neighbors, and actually having small interactions with
others in the real world. I mean, the cars are so isolating, and
David said he would have to go to gas stations or grocery stores,
was like the only moment he could grab people out of their cars.


David Roberts


Just hang out outside McDonald's. Speaking of trust, one of the
themes you sort of pull out of this study is how well-placed
local governments are to do this kind of stuff. So talk about
that a little bit.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah. So we found that the policies that worked did a couple of
things. They needed to combine carrots and sticks, as we've been
discussing, so that could be economic or city planning as tools
to make it more expensive, or difficult to drive cars and park,
and make it easier and cheaper to walk and bike and take transit.
There's also information campaigns that can be a part of that.
And then who is it that can do all these good things? Well, 75%
of the measures in our study were led by local governments.


David Roberts


What were the remaining 25%? Where did they come from?


Kimberly Nicholas


I mean, most of these interventions had more than one partner
involved. A couple of them were led by the transit agencies,
sub-NGOs, a couple of businesses, and those kind of players were
also usually involved in partnership with the local government.


David Roberts


Right.


Kimberly Nicholas


But I think what it says to me is that local government can and
should be leading these initiatives and should be making the case
for them, building the political will that we always talk about.
But in really practical ways, saying, "Okay, who can do what, and
who do I need on board to do this?" And it's not only politicians
and elected officials, but I think civil servants have a huge
role to play here. I mean, people who are working in transport,
and streets, and planning departments are really important in
making cities better for people.


David Roberts


You said you went through 800 studies, so I'm sure you've looked
at programs in a lot of different cities. Was there any
particular city or any particular program that you had sort of
not appreciated before that jumped out of you, that sort of
caught your imagination?


Kimberly Nicholas


One that kind of surprised me was car sharing. So the two cities
that have adopted that and that we found had measured its impact,
had good reports. So they found that they replaced 12 to 15
private cars with each shared car. And that was, like, a
carrot-only policy. So that's having integrated into
neighborhoods, nearby where people live and work, having cars
that you can check out with an app, for example, just for an hour
or two, as opposed to a more sort of centralized rental system.


David Roberts


Right.


Kimberly Nicholas


But the thing that surprised me there, the question that was
raised in other literature, is there is a risk of that seamless
and easy use of cars drawing in more people who previously were
not driving. So, I mean, it's clearly a win for the space issue,
which we were discussing earlier, that cars need a lot of public
space to move around and park, and 95% of the time they're
sitting still, which is really inefficient. So it helps with some
of those issues. But I think the jury is still out on how
effective in the real world are they at actually reducing miles
traveled and the number of people traveling by car.


David Roberts


Right. And may this is a good time to mention that the other
thing people refer to as car sharing, which is sort of car
services Uber and Lyft and all that, as far as I can tell, the
recent studies I've seen show that they probably increase vehicle
miles traveled in cities, all told.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yes.


David Roberts


Which is a bit of a sad trumpet ending for that much-hyped trend.


Kimberly Nicholas


It's the same with E-scooters. There was just a study in
Switzerland, that there's a lot of hype and probably a lot of
very good intentions, I think, in these kind of micro-mobility
and shared mobility. But as you said in the US, there was a
really comprehensive study that found that Uber and Lyft entering
a market, increased vehicle ownership in the city overall and
also eroded took away from public transport use for the
high-income areas. So it's the opposite of the carrot and the
stick. Both things are going in the wrong direction.


David Roberts


Bummer.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah.


David Roberts


Let's talk a little bit if you have anything to say about it,
about how or whether this sort of analysis can be ported to the
US. Because I'm looking at your policies and not only just sort
of on politically do they seem challenging in a US context, but
also a lot of them are sort of premised on shifting people out of
cars and into public transit. And a lot of US cities just don't
have the public transit to absorb a very large shift. So is there
any plans for a similar study like this in the US.


Or how applicable do you think this is to the US?


Kimberly Nicholas


Well, I'm not planning to do one at the moment, so if anyone
listening wants to, please go for it and feel free to contact me
if you want some advice.


David Roberts


You can find enough policies to study.


Kimberly Nicholas


Well, I think. They're out there. And actually, I will answer
your question, but something that doing this study made me
realize is that there's a huge research need for really applied
research like this, that is not scientifically groundbreaking, to
compare apples and oranges and sift through these large number of
studies. But it's actually really important that we have this
evidence base. And this is one of the studies that I've done that
I've gotten the most feedback from citizens, from people, from
city planners, actually, around the world, saying, "I can use
this in my work."


David Roberts


Yeah, there's a lot of will out there to do this now, I feel
like, recently.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah, and for a lot of different reasons. We do need people who
like to do the work, to make the work accessible. Please measure
miles traveled, as I said, and then put it online, I mean, get it
out there and share it. And somebody needs to compile it because
we need this evidence base to help push forward good climate
policy. But okay, that was my hobby horse. Now, I forgot your
original question. Oh, "can we do it in the US?"


David Roberts


Well, just how depressed should we be about the US putting any of
this into effect?


Kimberly Nicholas


Well, I know that things are tough in the US right now, but I
will say there's so much potential, actually. And I really see
cities as leaders in reducing emissions, and actually making a
fast and fair transition to a fossil-free world happen, because
cities, we have about ten times more cities globally that
actually are on track and reducing emissions than we have
countries. There's about 20 countries that are reducing
emissions, where they're going down, which is the right
direction. All of them need to speed up and do much more. But
they've started that transition. But we have over 300 cities that
are actually decreasing emissions.


And I think that cities are a really effective place to engage in
climate work. And that's good news for citizens as well, because
it's easier to get involved as a citizen at the city level, to
show up at city council meetings, to organize your neighborhood.
I mean, those things actually do really work.


David Roberts


Yeah. You don't get into politics in the paper, but it strikes me
as this just such a straightforward reflection of politics, and
the sort of sorting of political tribes into and out of cities.
So all the willing people have been sorted into cities, which
does make them fertile places to do this. Did you, in the process
of looking through all these papers, learn anything about the
politics? Because, of course, when you rank things by how
effective they are, I'm sure there are policies we could think of
that would be way more effective than any of these, but couldn't
get past anywhere.


Was there a political economy sort of aspect to this study or
your other work?


Kimberly Nicholas


Not in this study in particular, but it is something that I think
about a lot because the only way for climate policies to reduce
emissions is to actually be enacted and enforced. So we have to
think about feasibility. My friend and colleague Christian
Nielsen is doing some of this work on, basically, including in
models and in the way that traditionally the people. For example,
in the IPCC, the Climate Panel, have been assembling and ranking
policies to start to include not just technical effectiveness,
but actual behavioral plasticity. So how willing are people to
actually use and adopt these things and the political
feasibility? How do we get legitimacy and actually get these
policies enacted?


So I can just say, I know these are very important issues, and I
don't have insight, because of the way we did this study, to how
did these cities succeed in getting them passed. But that could
be a next step to now that we know where these cities are that
actually worked. We could contact these folks, we could interview
them, and try to scale it up. And I know that some journalists
have actually, or at least one journalist contacted me and was
planning to do that, to try and find the people in these cities
who actually did this work. So now that we know where the bright
spots are, we can dive into that further.


David Roberts


One sort of parallel that struck me, as I was thinking about
this, is discussions over carbon taxes. I think the conventional
wisdom at this point is, "yes, in theory, a carbon tax is the
most effective sort of per ton per dollar policy, but it also
happens to be the most politically challenging policy." You're
going to face the most resistance from the most people if you
push it. So in that sense, it's not effective because it's very
difficult to pass. And I just wonder about whether congestion
charges are a little bit like that. Obviously, efficacious if you
can do it, but so difficult to do that it might be worth doing
other things instead, or alongside, or, you know what I mean?


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's smart to think about in a
local context. I mean, the other cities that passed congestion
charges after London, I actually don't know enough about the
process that London went through. Their mayor, I know, was
instrumental, but I don't know exactly how that policy got put in
place. But the other three that have it had a referendum, so
people voted on it. That's obviously a good way in a democracy,
to demonstrate legitimacy. This is the will of the people. But I
totally agree, if in your context a congestion charge is just the
kiss of death, then if you combine workplace parking charges and
workplace travel planning with mobility services for university
and school travel planning, you could maybe get just as far.


Yeah, when we did the study. So we ranked these interventions by
effectiveness, and then another part of the study was to apply it
to the city of Lund, which is where I live and where Paula Kuss
was doing her masters. And I have a project trying to help Lund
actually reach its climate goals and be climate neutral by 2030.
We have a long way to go, but in our case, for example, we didn't
recommend the congestion charge to Lund because we did do some of
that political feasibility work on the ground here. And from
interviewing local experts and civil servants and politicians, it
wasn't ranked feasible.


David Roberts


Oh, interesting.


Kimberly Nicholas


We chose the three that were the most, that combined the best
combination of feasibility and effectiveness, and everyone was
like, "oh, apps, we should do an app." And we're like, "nope,
that's not that effective." So even if it's very feasible, we're
not going to suggest that.


David Roberts


People love their apps.


Kimberly Nicholas


They really do.


David Roberts


Yeah. I wonder ... this is sort of a random thought, and it's
probably not going to be captured in your study because it's
about policies that have been in place for a while ... but I
wonder how big the working from home trend is. Are you aware of
any studies yet on the working from-home effect on reducing cars,
and what, and whether there — I've been wondering if there are
cities should be embracing that and passing policies to sort of
try and reinforce it and keep it in place, or if you have any
thoughts on that at all.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yes, I haven't seen a study about exactly that from the Pandemic.
But from earlier work, in 2018, Seth Wines led a study where we
compiled existing interventions across high-impact domains. So
driving, meat consumption, energy use at home. We wanted to do
flying at that reduction. At that time, we found zero cities that
had even tried to reduce flying, so we couldn't include that. But
the ones that we found that reduced the most CO2 were
telecommuting. So incentives to do that can be really effective.


There's a newer study from the UK, I linked to it in that post in
The Conversation. That study is called "Do Teleworkers Travel
Less?" And that's based in England. And they basically conclude,
"you need to work from home three or more days per week to
actually reduce your overall driving." That there seems to be
some substitution effect of perhaps more leisure travel or
people. I think a big risk is people moving further away from
work because they don't have to be there so often.


David Roberts


Right.


Kimberly Nicholas


But we know that most emissions come from long-distance driving.
So if you're only driving to work once a week, but it's 100 miles
instead of you used to drive every day, 3 miles, that's a worse
equation for climate.


David Roberts


Interesting. Yeah. And this is another area where it just seems
like the difference between the EU and the US is so huge, because
working from home if you are living in a city, you have other
reasons to go out and mingle with people other than work. But if
working from home just means being stranded in your suburb all
day, every day, just seems like a different thing in terms of
driving and just in terms of life quality.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah, I hear you.


David Roberts


Final question, and you touched on this earlier, but another
thing I think about the US is how car dependent our rural areas
are. I think probably considerably more so than in the EU, or in
a place like Sweden. My experience of the rural US is highways,
two-lane highways with roads branching off them. And even in
little, small towns, you pass through, like in the South, where I
grew up, even tiny towns are built such that you basically have
to drive everywhere, such as to be hostile to walking. So I just
wonder whether you've heard about policies for reducing vehicle
miles traveled in rural, or even like exurban, suburban and
exurban, and rural areas, because in a sense it's easiest to do
in a city, I would think.


But have you heard about efforts to do it in the more far-flung
and less dense areas?


Kimberly Nicholas


Yes, I have and I heard about it from readers who contacted me
and discussed on Twitter and in my newsletter. So I think in my
newsletter that I wrote about this, which was "We Can Fix It", a
couple of months ago, I think I linked to the study that someone
brought to my attention. So it was a report from the UK that was
specifically about reducing driving and increasing sustainable
mobility in villages and rural areas. So there are people
thinking about that. And I do think that's really important, both
for social inclusion and cohesion. That the dynamic, in many
parts of the world, is this urban, rural divide, and people who
live in the countryside feel like, "those big city politicians
don't understand me, they don't see me, they don't care about
me."


And that's not good for democracy. So I think meeting people's
needs where they are is really important. But I guess another
thing to say there is that if we go back to this
"avoid-shift-improve" model, the most effective way is to avoid
the need for mobility in the first place, to have your needs
close to hand. So, I mean, there's never going to be a
sustainable way to travel 50 or 100 miles between where you live
and where you work. That's just too far away. And I used to be
one of those people. When I lived in California, I was commuting
70 miles from my home in Sonoma to grad school at Stanford, and
it was a nightmare and now feels like completely ridiculous.


But I did that for many years, so I know there are lots of
reasons that people get put in those positions, and those are the
things we also need to be thinking about structurally. I mean,
how do we make towns attractive places to live that have jobs, so
people don't have to commute? Or how do we make it affordable to
live where the jobs are? And that was a policy that, I think, got
mentioned briefly, that something workplaces can do is actually
support policies for affordable housing and encourage people to
live near work and incentivize that, rather than giving free
parking and incentivizing people to live further away.


David Roberts


Well, this is also Interesting, and it strikes me as promising
that you got such an enormous amount of feedback about it.


Kimberly Nicholas


Yeah, thanks.


David Roberts


It seems like the iron is hot, or whatever the right metaphor is.
Like, People seem geared up to do this now.


Kimberly Nicholas


I think so. And that feels really exciting. And I mean, I think
we need a lot more work in this direction. Imagine we lived in a
world where politicians are ready to implement bold climate
policies. What is it they should do? We really need better
answers to those questions in specific places and for specific
sectors. And "who can do what" is where I'm now shifting my
research to because we do have a lot of ideas from many, many
years of study of — we know in broad strokes what needs to be
done.


Transition off fossil fuels, have agriculture that feeds people
without destroying the planet. Big Picture. We've got all that.
We have a lot of technical solutions, but "who can do what" in
specific places to actually make that happen in a fast and fair
way, we really need more evidence base for. So I think this is
the way I'm going in the future, and I hope others will be
inspired to contribute, too.


David Roberts


Awesome. Well, thanks for doing the work, and thanks for coming
on.


Kimberly Nicholas


Thanks for having me, Dave.


David Roberts


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