Draft Ballarat Net Zero Emissions Plan

The City of Ballarat's Draft Net Zero Emissions Plan (via CoB)

The City of Ballarat has passed a motion to come up with a plan for the whole municipality to reach net zero emissions by 2030. This is an incredibly ambitious goal, and it's fantastic to see this level of ambition from the council. They've released a draft plan - so how'd they do? 

Firstly, I really want to commend them for pursuing this. 2030 is a hugely ambitious target, and although a lot of community advocacy led them to do this, it's great to see them responding in this way. Even so, it will be hugely important for people to support the plan through the feedback process - we need to reaffirm this is something the community wants. 

But 2030 is so ambitious that there's no room for business-as-usual; it will require serious changes in budget priorities. They talk about it being a "community target" and there are action items for businesses and the general public, but let's not mince words - council (and other levels of government) will need to do A LOT of the heavy lifting to get us there in time. 

I want to encourage everyone who reads this to make a submission to council, supporting the 2030 target, and putting forward your ideas. There's a lot of different areas I don't know as much about, but hopefully I can give people some ideas about transport they can include in their submissions. 

Norway's nearly at 100% of new car sales, but most kms driven are still dirty (via @robbie_andrew)

First, some background. As I said in Clean Transport 101, relying on electric cars is the slowest way to decarbonise, and we cannot get even remotely close to zero transport emissions by 2030 if we do that. Council can't do much, and even if the state and federal governments do all the right things, we'll be lucky to get to 100% of new car sales by 2030 (1). Which means we'll still be putting brand new ICE vehicles on the roads in 2028 and 2029, each of which typically lasts up to 20 years. The average car on Australia's roads is about 10 years old, which for starters means that half the cars are more than 10 years old, but it also means the average car on our roads in 2030 will have been built in 2020 - a year when 0.78% of new car sales were electric. Different parts of the country will get rid of their ICE vehicles faster than others - rich areas like Toorak don't have many 10-year-old clunkers in their driveways, so they'll get there first - but Ballarat is likely to be around the middle of the pack. Odds-on, in 2030, at least 75% of the cars on Ballarat's roads will still have a combustion engine of some kind. That's not something we can net away with carbon offsets...if we still drive those cars as much as we do today. 

If we're to get our transport emissions within striking distance of zero by 2030, we'll have to drive less. A lot less. We'll have to walk, bike, or take the bus for as many trips as we possibly can, only driving when absolutely necessary - and that will only happen if it is made dramatically easier, safer, and more convenient for people to walk, bike, or take the bus. If we're to have a remote chance of meeting our 2030 goal, everything in the transport plan must flow from this fact. 

The draft, as it stands, does make some good references to public and active transport, but there is nowhere near enough discussion on how to shift people onto these modes, no commitment to actually fund the things which would make that mode shift happen, and way too much emphasis on helping the shift to electric cars. 

New developments can shape transport outcomes (via CoB)

Before we get to the Net Zero Transport section of the document, the Net Zero Developments section is relevant too. There's some good stuff in here about making new homes all-electric (no gas appliances), high-quality insulation and solar orientation, more green space, etc - I'm very supportive of this. It also requires new homes to be "EV ready", by providing charging outlets and so on - and again, I support this. But there's no mention of making these new developments less car-dependent - more walkable, more bikeable, more accessible by public transport. This is a huge oversight council needs to address. 

Good luck routing a north-south bus halfway between Gillies St and Dyson Dr (via Google Maps)

The urban form of squiggly streets, cul-de-sacs, and incomplete grids, makes many developments very hard to serve by bus. When buses belatedly come to these developments, they're forced into squiggly, indirect, inefficient routes. What Ballarat needs is a fast, direct, efficient grid of bus routes - and to do that, we need a simple and consistent grid of major roads approximately 1.6km apart. To this end, the City of Ballarat should plan this major road grid for all greenfields land in the LGA, and ensure any new developments don't conflict with it. Non-residential destinations (shops, schools, etc) should be on these roads (ideally next to intersections) where they can be served by buses, rather than tucked away in the middle of the square. 

A road grid something like this could protect future bus routes from development

Developers can broadly be free to do stupid curves and cul-de-sacs within that grid if they like, without affecting anyone but the people who live on those streets. That said, they should still be required to ensure easy walkability from the centre of the square to the nearest main road, so people can access their nearest bus stop (or shops) without walking a mile out of their way. 

Walking and cycling access is crucial in new developments (via CoB)

New developments should also encourage active transport, particularly cycling. People of all ages and abilities should be able to cycle absolutely everywhere in these new developments. If it's a quiet residential street, car traffic should be calmed and low-volume (which can be done through street design), such that it's safe for cars to share space with kids on bikes. If it's a busier road, infrastructure should be provided to physically separate bikes from cars (and pedestrians). Crucially, it must always be one or the other - there must be no road where people can't ride bikes safely. 

Lastly, there needs to be much more infill development, densifying areas that already have public transport and shops and schools and jobs, and much less sprawling greenfields development. 

Breakdown of Ballarat's emissions - buses emit basically nothing (via CoB)

In Net Zero Transport, the first item is "Decarbonising the Public Transport Network", and talks about using hydrogen buses; the only PT-related "role" they assign themselves is to advocate to state government for this. This should not be in the document for three reasons - one, even a diesel bus is an incredibly low-carbon travel option, buses currently account for less than 1% of our emissions, and our priority has to be getting people out of their cars and onto the buses. Two, the state government has already committed to only purchase zero-emissions buses from 2025 onwards. And three, the Ballarat city buses (as opposed to long-distance coaches) will almost certainly all be electric - hydrogen won't play anywhere near as big a role as its boosters claim. They seem to have chucked this in as a way of propping up their proposed Zero Emissions Fuels Hub, rather than because it makes good transport sense. 

So that whole item should be removed, and zero time, energy, staff resources or political capital should be wasted advocating for hydrogen buses. All of those resources should be put into advocating for improvements to the bus network - making it run fast, direct, frequent and for a longer span of hours. That's how we'll get people out of their cars, and instantly slash their emissions. 

The proposed 2017-25 cycling network (via CoB)

The second item is "Increasing Use of Active Transport Modes". It mentions in passing their Integrated Transport Plan, which incorporates the Cycling Action Plan 2017-25, but it mostly just talks about the YMCA's ReCranked program and similar programs to help people access and maintain bikes. This is admirable and I'm sure addresses a barrier for the lowest-income members of the community, but overwhelmingly the biggest barrier to getting more people to ride their bikes is the lack of safe infrastructure. A recent Monash study found that 65.8% of Ballaratians are in the "Interested but Concerned" category - they'd like to cycle more, but won't do so without safer infrastructure being provided. Council can unleash this huge latent demand if they invest in more safe cycling infrastructure, yet there's no indication they plan to do anything but continue business-as-usual on this front. They need to spend more money to get their 2017-25 plan done ASAP, then move onto fleshing out that network, filling the gaps and making it more robust in key areas. (More on what that might look like in a future post). 

The state and federal governments need to do a lot more on this front too, so part of council's (and the community's) role is to advocate to those levels of government to provide way more funding. But providing cycling infrastructure on local roads is core council business, and it's overwhelmingly the biggest lever they can pull to reduce transport emissions - if they won't acknowledge they need to ramp up their own investment in this, the plan won't be worth the paper it's written on. 

Chargers should go in car space, not block footpaths (via urbanthoughts11 & ClaptonAlice)

The third item is Electric Vehicle Passenger and Fleet Vehicles. It's good that this starts out acknowledging that we must arrest the growth in the total number of vehicles, and the role shared vehicles can play in this. They also indicate council should lead local planning on charging infrastructure; I don't think they should be investing in building any, there's plenty of private investment in this space, but they should plan the designs and regulations so that chargers use space already allocated to cars, rather than blocking footpaths. 

The fourth item talks about transitioning heavy fleets. This is broadly fine, though I'd like to see them advocating for more freight to shift to rails, and for the electrification of the rail network (particularly since Overhead Line Electrification can enable faster passenger trains as well as freight). 

The thing that really worries me appears right at the end of the document - a recommendation to “Provide incentives for zero emissions vehicles including through direct incentives, preferential car parking locations, available charging facilities and education, training, promotion and signage”. The education, training, promotion and signage is fine, but the rest of this absolutely has to be removed from the final document. 

Direct financial incentives would be exorbitantly expensive for a local council to provide - they would divert hundreds of thousands of dollars away from their core responsibilities (like providing more bike lanes); they would promote car ownership and use over walking, biking, and PT; and the benefits would almost exclusively flow to the already-wealthy. Definitely not a good idea. 

Research from Norway has shown that non-financial "perks" like preferential car parking, intended to get people to switch from ICE cars to EVs, also drew people away from cycling and PT into cars - increasing the car's mode share from 65% to 83% - so the Norwegians scrapped them. We have to learn from their mistakes and ditch this terrible idea. 

The City of Casey is already trialling electric garbage trucks (via The Driven)

Moving onto the Net Zero Waste section, I think there's an opportunity to switch from diesel garbage trucks to electric ones. This would have big benefits in terms of emissions and noise pollution, and any additional upfront cost would probably pay for itself pretty quickly due to cheaper fuel and maintenance. Worth looking into! 

Let's get as many submissions into this process as possible, and do everything we can to support council's ambition, while making sure the plan has teeth and can achieve real reductions. Feedback closes tomorrow, 28 August - submit yours here. 

(1) I realised a few days after this was posted that I'd gotten these figures a bit confused in my head. Norway will ban sales of ICE cars from 2025, and I had it in my head that most other European countries were going for 2030 (and that Australian thinktanks were recommending the same). Turns out Europe and most local experts are saying 2035, not 2030! So the number of EVs on our roads in 2030 will be even lower than I thought - all the more reason to prioritise public and active transport.