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The roar of engines has long been part of a city’s soundscape.
For a century, for billions of urban people around the world, getting around meant getting on a diesel-powered bus, or a gasoline-powered auto-rickshaw, or a car among the wealthy.
A silent transformation is taking place today. Berlin, Bogotá and several other cities are taking creative steps to cut petrol and diesel from their public transport systems. They do so despite the striking differences in geography, politics, and economics that make transformation difficult.
Berlin is reviving its electric tram lines, which were destroyed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bogota is building cloud-cracked cable cars to connect working-class communities perched on distant hills. Bergen, a city on the edge of the fjords in western Norway, is moving its public ferries from diesel to batteries – a remarkable change in a petrostat that has for decades enriched itself from the sale of oil and gas and now seeks to become a leader in naval vessels for the electric age.
Bergen’s buses are also now electric and are supplied by Chinese bus manufacturers, who have taken over the market in remote cities such as Los Angeles and Chile and Santiago. The change can be heard. “You can still hear voices in the streets,” said Jon Askeland, mayor of the district, which also includes Bergen.
Urban transport is at the center of the effort to slow climate change. Cities, which are home to more than half of the world’s population, account for more than two-thirds of global carbon dioxide emissions. And transport is often the largest and fastest growing resource, making it imperative not only to get more people out of their cars and into public transport, but also to make transport itself less polluting and more efficient.
According to C40, a coalition of nearly 100 city governments working to address climate change, transportation accounts for an average of one-third of a city’s carbon dioxide emissions, leaving behind other sources such as heating, industry and waste.
All was not smooth sailing. In Costa Rica, for example, private bus operators are divided over national efforts to electrify public transport. In Chinese cities like Shenzhen, which have fleets of all-electric buses, the electricity itself still mostly comes from the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal. And it’s expensive to switch everywhere.
Right now, only 16 percent of city buses worldwide are electric. The electric switch will have to speed up and cities will have to make public transport more attractive so less people will rely on cars.
“It has become a reasonable position to advocate providing less space for cars,” said Felix Creutzig, a transportation expert at the Mercator Research Center in Berlin. “Ten years ago, it wasn’t even allowed to be said. But now you can say it.”
The biggest challenge was faced by the cities that had to transit: the most populated and polluted metropolises in Asia and Africa, where people rely on informal public transport such as diesel minivans or motorcycle taxis.
But where cities are thriving, they find that electrifying public transport can solve more than just climate problems. It can clean the air, reduce traffic congestion, and ideally make it easier for ordinary people to get around the city, which is why some politicians have attributed their reputation to renovating public transport. In many cases, city governments were able to take climate action faster than their national governments.
“It requires political influence,” Bogota mayor Claudia López said in an interview. “For the last 25 years, Bogota has been doomed to depend on diesel buses. In the 21st century, that makes no sense.”
Bringing back the trams
Ingmar Streese called it a “historical mistake”.
When the Berlin Wall rose, half of Berlin’s electrified tram lines collapsed.
By 1967, when Mr. Streese was three years old, West Berlin had dismantled almost all parts of Die Elektrische – The Electric in German. Cars took over the roads.
Now, 30 years after the wall came down, there are increasing demands for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users to reclaim roads from cars as Germans face the dangers of climate change.
Enter Die Elektrische. Again.
The mistake of the 1960s “is now being corrected,” said Mr. Streese, a Green party politician and Berlin’s permanent secretary for the environment and transport.
Berlin, along with many European cities, including Lisbon and Dublin, is reinvigorating trams not only to clean the air, but also to reduce emissions. Legally binding climate targets of the European Union. These targets require a 55 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels.
Still, the policy of reserving cars is tough. With 1.2 million cars, Berlin has introduced a congestion tax, but that only applies to a small slice of the city. It’s all part of something wider effort Improving public transport, including electrifying all buses by 2030, expanding subway and commuter trains, adding bike lanes, and building nearly 50 miles of tram lines by 2035.
Trams are not universally loved. Critics point out that they are noisy, bobbing through crowded streets day and night. They’re slower than subways and are old-fashioned in the age of rideshares and electric scooters.
Tram fans note that they are cheaper and faster to build than subways.
Like so many other things in Berlin, the story of the Berlin trams is the story of a divided city. While the electrische dwindled in the West, they continued to run in the poorer, communist-ruled East.
Today, one of the most challenging tram projects involves the extension of a line called the M-10 across the historic Oberbaum bridge connecting former East and West Berlin.
Inga Kayademir, 41, welcomed a westbound extension by boarding a packed M-10 late one Wednesday. “Anything that reduces cars in the city is beneficial,” he said. “If it connects to the west, that’s a good idea. It will give it a second meaning.”
But building a new tram line across the bridge means moving the lanes away from cars or bikes. Or the city would have to build another bridge altogether.
Mr. Streese was not prepared to tell how the tram could be placed. But he said one way or another, a tram would pass through Oberbaum by 2027 at the latest. “It won’t be very soon,” he said. “But it will.”
Electric ferries in the fjords
Heidi Wolden has spent 30 years working in Norway’s oil and gas industry. Today, he is working to bypass oil and gas in his country’s waterways.
Ms. Wolden is CEO of Norled, a company that is increasingly running public ferries with batteries rather than diesel.
Eventually, Miss Wolden hopes to take her ferries far beyond the fjords. It wants to make Norled a leader in electrified shipping.
It’s part of Norway’s ambitious effort to electrify all forms of public transport. It’s an even more remarkable plan, as Norway is a very small, very rich oil state.
“Personally, I am extremely happy that we are moving in the right direction,” said Ms Wolden as the Hjellestad, a Norled-operated car ferry, departed from a dock near Bergen.
Norway has set ambitious targets to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. Almost all of Norway’s own electricity comes from hydropower. But what to do about its own oil and gas industry is at the center of a vigorous national political debate. Elections in September brought a centre-left coalition to power, including small parties pushing for an end to oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.
Bergen wants to accelerate the process of moving away from fossil fuels. City buses and trams run on electricity. Taxi operators have been told they must switch to all-electric vehicles by 2024, and subsidies are provided for drivers to install chargers at home. Ferry operators were offered longer, more profitable contracts to offset the cost of conversion.
Unlike some other countries, including the United States, where climate policies are deeply polarized, there hasn’t been much backlash in Bergen. Mr Askeland said politicians on the left and right have agreed to cut the budget for other expenses to pay for the more expensive electric ferry contracts.
After all, the mayor said voters in the region are conscious about addressing climate change. “This of course affects us politicians,” he said.
Ferry operators are not the only private companies profiting from the electricity conversion.
Corvus Energy, which produces batteries for all types of marine vessels, including oil tankers in Norway, is engaged in producing batteries for electric ferries. “Government that uses its purchasing power to change the world is also very important to us,” said Geir Bjorkeli, CEO of Corvus. The company’s eye is now on electric ferries in the United States.
Corvus batteries sat comfortably under the Hjellestad’s deck.
On the shore, cables hung from two long poles that a passerby might mistake for lamp posts. Arild Alvsaker, the ship’s chief engineer, grabbed the cables with both hands and inserted them into the ship’s battery pack. The 10 minutes it took for the cars to board the ferry was enough to power it up for the roughly 45-minute journey up the fjord and back.
Mr. Alvsaker was skeptical at first about operating a battery-powered vessel. It took him less than a week to change his mind. “I was dirty up here before breakfast,” he said, pointing to his upper arm. “I don’t want to go back to Diesel.”
He has since bought an electric car.
The water was calm as the ship left the dock almost silently that morning. There are no roaring engines on an electric ferry.
Gondolas with Wi-Fi in the sky
TransMiCable is a loop of fire engine-red gondolas that glide from the valley through the hills surrounding Bogotá to clustered neighborhoods.
The city has plans to build seven lines as part of efforts to clean up public transportation. About 500 Chinese-made electric buses are on the road, and contracts are ending to buy another 1,000 by 2022, making Bogota’s electric bus fleet one of the largest of any city outside of China. The mayor, Ms. López, a cyclist, wants to add about 175 miles of bike paths.
But for Fredy Cuesta Valencia, a teacher in Bogota, what really matters is that TransMiCable has given him his time back.
He would spend two hours crawling up the hills in two slow buses to reach the school where he taught. At one time, traffic was so congested that no teacher could arrive on time. Students waited outside for hours
Now, it takes 40 minutes to get to work, an hour at worst. There is wifi. Clouds. Roofs below.
“Much less stress,” said Mr. Cuesta, a 60-year-old folk dance teacher. “I look at my phone, I look at the city, I relax.”
For politicians like Ms. López, electrifying public transport helps the city demonstrate that it is aggressively reducing its emissions. But if it can make transportation better, not just electrified, it could attract voters, especially working people who make up the majority of the electorate.
But overhauling transportation is expensive. For Ms. López, who belongs to a centre-left political party, she must negotiate money from national president Iván Duque, who belongs to a rival conservative party.
Yet their parties managed to find common ground. Mr. Duque helping Ms. López Build Bogota’s first subway, anything Mayors have been struggling for years.
The case against him: What’s good for the city good for the country.
If Bogota can’t change its transport system, Colombia won’t be able to meet its climate goals, he said. “You are interested in having a more competitive city. “It is in our common interest to achieve Colombia’s climate change goals,” he said.
Sofia Villamil Contributing reports from Bogota and Geneva Abdul from London.
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