An honest look at one community’s car and bike shares

Hazel Darwin Clements, the project co-ordinator at Porty Community Energy, shares an honest look at what communities can do to share cars and bikes. She has helped start a peer-to-peer car share club and run an eCargo cycle library trial this year with the mission to help people reduce their car use and make local travel more pleasant. We hear from representatives of CoMoUk and HiyaCar as well as professor Jillian Anable, Chair in Transport and Energy at the University of Leeds, and members of the community who have been involved with the projects.   Hazel's work was supported by one of SCCAN storytelling mini-grants. They are closed to new applicants but will hopefully reopen in April 2023. Get in touch with our Story Weavers on [email protected]. Credits Production: Hazel Darwin-Clements Music: Coma-Media from Pixabay   Resources: Porty Community Energy: https://portycommunityenergy.wordpress.com/ Porty Community Bikes: https://portycommunitybike.myturn.com/library/ Contact: [email protected] CoMoUK https://www.como.org.uk/ Hiyacar https://www.hiyacar.co.uk/ 1000 Better Stories episode with CoMoUK on community bike shares: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-6we6s-104934e 1000 Better Stories episode with Hazel's story on setting up a community fridge: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-van9y-11f9eea Transcript: Kaska: Hi, I’m Kaska, one of SCCAN’s Story Weavers. In today’s episode we have a story from one of our mini-grant recipients, Hazel Darwin Clements. She takes an honest look at the community car and bike shares she’s been setting up in Portobello in Edinburgh. If you’re interested in community-run bike shares you might also enjoy our previous episode we produced with CoMoUK, released in May 2021. Our storytelling mini-grants are closed to new applicants at the moment but we’re hoping to reopen them again in April. Get in touch on [email protected] if you are interested in applying for one. Now – over to Hazel!   Hazel: Hi, I’m Hazel and welcome to this podcast about what communities can do to share vehicles. I’m going to give the first word today to Professor Julian Annabel speaking at the CoMoUK shared transport conference in December ‘22. I went along, virtually, to look for inspiration on what we can do in our community, in Portobello and this talk really struck me.    Julian: Let's focus on the fact that the UN just last month. Brought some really frightening, but I think to be frank, refreshing honesty, that really ought to be the first line that each of us are using every time we introduce our particular initiatives. They said there's no credible pathways to keeping us within safe carbon limits, and by this, what they mean is that there's no country that has come up with the right combination of measures to do this, to keep us on these pathways.   They have said there is just about time for us to do so. But the fact is that none of these packages of policies exist out there and there are no exceptions. The eu, the UK in particular, and for transport, it's very complicated obviously, but there's no pathways left for decarbonizing the transport sector without deep cuts in car use by 2030.   In half a dozen years time, and those deep cuts in car use are of at least 20% reduction in the amount that cars are used from today's levels. And this is alongside really ambitious uptake of EVs. More ambitious than, than some of us are going for it at the moment. And the the cuts are unnecessary, in part to compensate for the fact that heavy goods vehicles need a bit.   To do their thing.   Hazel: Professor Annabel’s work at the University of Leeds at the Institute for Transport Studies focusses on understanding travel behaviour and travel patterns and how we can use that knowledge to reduce carbon emissions. And here is something I did not know.   Julian: We’re talking then about a scale of change that has not happened anywhere in the world other than maybe into in some small pockets of best practice cities