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Cycling is considered a healthy and sustainable form of getting from A to B. The net effects of the various forms of cycling and e-biking on mobility-related air pollutant emissions are complex. This chapter synthesizes research on the potential of cycling and e-biking to reduce (and contribute) to air pollutant emissions from mode shift away from motorized transport. Life cycle analysis of greenhouse gas emissions from production, use and end-of-life of active and motorized vehicles is used to compare the most common urban transport modes and determine whether cycling and e-biking reduce overall emissions or not. By doing so the Chapter provides a summary of research on cycling as a low carbon and clean mobility option in context of the climate emergency and the air quality crisis in cities.

Reducing car use and ownership is necessary for decarbonising the UK economy. There are no plausible pathways to get to net-zero by 2050 unless the number of cars reduces. Nevertheless, in the last twenty years, car ownership has grown steadily. In this report, we explore a new and spatially detailed time series dataset about car ownership in England and Wales between 2002 and 2018. We seek places where car ownership is in decline and ask if there are any lessons that these places can teach us about how to reduce car ownership nationwide. The analysis is based on the 34,753 LSOAs in England and Wales. For each year, we compare the number of cars registered and the resident population to calculate the number of cars per person. From this data, we know that only 220 LSOAs (0.6%) experience a decline in the number of cars per person. These areas were primarily urban and cosmopolitan, while rural areas experienced the greatest increases in car ownership. Examination of historical aerial photography allows changes in the LSOA to be matched to changes in car ownership. Largely it was found that the most successful way to reduce car ownership was to build dense low-car housing such as flats within existing urban areas. This was often successful in increasing the resident population without increasing the number of cars and, in some cases, reducing the number of cars within the LSOA. An exploration of changes in car ownership around new train and tram stations produced mixed results. In some cases, such as the reopening of the East London Line, car ownership declined significantly, yet the decline began before the stations opened. While in other rural locations such as the Ebbw Vale north of Cardiff, the new rail service made no difference to the rate of increase in car ownership. Overall, it appears that new stations reduce car ownership in places where car ownership is below average but have little effect on areas where car ownership is already high. The analysis also highlighted the importance of considering key demographic groups such as children, students, and the elderly, that are less likely to own cars, so shifts in their relative proportions can skew the apparent rate of car ownership. For example, building a nursing home boosts the population without increasing car ownership. Alternatively, a new suburban housing estate results in an initial rise in both population and cars, as young couples move in. Later as the couples have children, the population increases, but the number of cars remains steady, creating the illusion of declining car ownership per person. The report identifies several opportunities for further research and makes recommendations about how car ownership and use changes could be better understood in the future. Central to these are more data on car use (e.g. kilometres driven per year) as opposed to ownership, as it is more likely that households respond to changes by adjusting their car use rather than taking the bolder step of forgoing car ownership entirely. Secondly, that contextual time series data about population, demographics, house building, public transport and more are essential to understanding changes in car use. Further work is needed to gather and understand these changes, but would likely yield significant insight into car use and place-based decarbonisation in general.