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FEATURE
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INFUZE: A collaborative approach to reducing car ownership By Paul Day
An ambitious, five year project based in Leeds, is to consult with the public on designing a city in which car ownership would be unnecessary. At the end of March, 2024, there were nearly 34 million cars registered in the UK. We recently reported that in Manchester, 28% of the city centre is given over to roads and a further 8% to car parks. And the number of cars in the UK is growing and that growth is expected to continue.
‘encouraged’ to change their behaviour. Instead, the team will ask communities across the city to help them design mobility solutions (car clubs, responsive taxi-style bus services and shared bicycle and scooter schemes) that they think might enable them to live car-free.
“We don’t have a solution to expand capacity to deal with that,” says Greg Marsden, Professor of Transport Governance at the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds. “In some places pavement parking is endemic, we’ve got population growth, we’re not going to meet our climate targets even if we electrify. There’s all sorts of things that tell us that ‘carry on as we are’ won’t work.”
The five year project got under way in August and will eventually involve up to 400 households across the city. A call to action for suitable households will go out this month, households for which the project might represent a genuine opportunity.
Greg is heading up a £7.8m project in Leeds known as INFUZE (Inspiring Futures for Zero Carbon Mobility) which aims to address the problem by asking people to rethink the way they get around. Cars are a fundamental part of most people’s lives and given the kerfuffle over the ULEZ expansion, not to mention 20mph speed limits, LTNs and the impertinent intrusion of the cyclist, discussing cars in terms of being problematic is fraught with danger. But the INFUZE project will come at it from a different angle. Nothing is being taken away and people aren’t even being
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