Redemption: Sustainability in transport, the Scania way

Scania CV AB has the answer to problems facing Kenyan cities.

22  hours ago

Sustainability 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "sustainability" as a derivative of the word "sustain": to give support or to uphold.

A sustainable transport system is one which strives towards environmental and economic benefits through efficiency. Do we have that at the moment? Hardly.

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"I believe that as a species human beings define their reality by misery and suffering"

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you are not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease; a cancer of this planet. You're a plague..."

- Agent Smith,

The Matrix, Warner Bros, 1999

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The earth has a problem, and that problem is Man. Allow me to explain:

As the dominant species on earth, it is only natural that mankind should be the custodian of the well-being of the planet, but as Agent Smith so eloquently puts it, we defy this responsibility and act unnaturally and detrimentally to  our own welfare.

Capitalism and consumerism has driven mankind to new levels of environmental plunder and abuse with a complete disregard to the effluent that stems from this elevated consumption and the attendant side effects of uncontrolled expansion; and now... now the chickens have come home to roost. We have a decade to undo our mistakes, or else... tick tock. #GetTheStrap

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1. The Biosphere: Climate Change & The Environment 

"Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals."

-Old Major

Animal Farm, George Orwell, Secker & Warburg 1945

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United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: The Paris Agreement

Location: Le Bourget, near Paris

Date: July 2018 (signed December 2015)

Environmental scientists say the absolute upper limit of global warming is an average increase in temperature of 1.5 degC, beyond which the planet will become uninhabitable for a large number of plant and animal species (including most members of H. sapiens), not forgetting a rise in sea levels from the melting of polar ice caps; a rise that will drown out quite a huge chunk of coastal infrastructure.

To cap it all off, the oceans will turn into acid. Yikes! However, the reality we face is that the earth will warm up by an average temperature of 1.7 degC (or as high as 2 degrees if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is anything to go by) if we do not immediately stop and give serious thought our actions as the human race; and they do mean immediately.

So we come face to face with our own extinction as food supplies disappear, potable water evaporates and ecosystems crash from being thrown out of whack by the looming "delta theta": as we called temperature differentials during the Thermodynamics class back in university.

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So where exactly is the problem?

There is such a thing as the carbon cycle in which carbon in the form of its oxides exists in the atmosphere, some of it gets removed by the biosphere (flora, oceans) while some more of it gets looped back into the atmosphere (fauna) in a balanced cycle. Man's activities in the form of pollution disrupt this cycle.

The earth's atmosphere can only tolerate a limit of so many tonnes of carbon dioxide at a time, beyond which the greenhouse effect becomes a clear and present problem and global warming ensues while oxygen-reliant organisms slowly begin to choke. We are currently pumping in 40 billion tonnes annually.

Scientists like to express the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere as a concentration of parts per million (ppm) rather than absolute tonnage. These scientists started charting atmospheric CO2 levels in 1958 at Mauna Loa Mountaintop Observatory and plotting them in what we call the Keeling Curve (named after the scientist who got this brainwave).These are the numbers we are looking at:

Preindustrial Level: 280ppm

At the start of the Keeling Test, 1958: 316ppm

January 2017: 406.58ppm

Estimates are it will reach 500ppm in less than 50 years; but 500ppm will lead to a temperature rise of not 2 degC but THREE degrees, which is intolerable, given that 2 degrees is already bad enough.

"Quick mafs" (using elaborate formulae that I cannot go into here) reveal that we have only 10 years left before we cross the threshold most call "the point of no return" - the 2-degree line, since we are currently dancing on the 1.5-degree mark - after which we will now have to deal with the consequences of industrialization and mechanization.

Limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees overall does not mean we will go scot-free.

There will still be tangible effects, it's just that these we can live with... somewhat.

Instead of losing all the coral in the seas, we will lose (only) 90% of it... only, haha.

Low altitude islands will become inhospitable - RIP Mombasa and Wasini.

We have to cut all emissions by half before 2030 to keep the warmth at bay; because if we don't there'll be hell to pay, quite literally.

Long story short? We have exactly eleven and a half years before we cross over to the point of no return.

That is scary.

Fossil Fuels

While I have long been a proponent of fossil-based fuel systems (particularly in cars), the long-held belief that these only account for less than a quarter of all global carbon emissions is admittedly myopic.

The automotive industry may contribute a comparatively smaller chunk of carbon but it is the easiest to change.

I have already discussed this matter as far as cars go; now let us go into commercial vehicles.

Let's talk about diesel.

There is diesel and then there is diesel, and I'm not referring to variations in sulphur content or how badly adulterated a sample is.

There is more to diesel fuel than what has welled up from underneath the shifting sands of the Arabian deserts.

• Raps Methyl Ester (RME) is not the name of an unsuccessful  hip-hop band, it is a vegetable oil derived from rapeseed.
• Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO) is a high quality vegetable oil that differs from "ordinary" biodiesel in that it has been catalyzed using hydrogen during production, rather than methanol for normal biodiesel. This makes HVO very expensive since hydrogen is quite energy-intensive to derive. I hope I am not losing you with all this chemistry.
• Then there is good ol' refined creosote, the diesel distilled from crude oil that splashed from underground in a fountain

Now, while I was in Sweden, I was introduced to the fleet operations manager of Scania's own inhouse trucking division.

Yes, Scania runs a truck company side-hustle that incidentally does not consist purely of Scania trucks, they have Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and MAN vehicles as well for benchmarking purposes, but that is not the point here.

The operations manager had some very interesting things to say about the diesel they use.

1. There is Danish diesel called the MK1 which consists of 93% fossil-based diesel and 7% RME. This is the cheapest.
2. There is Swedish diesel which is 60% fossil-based diesel, 7% RME and 33% HVO. This is more expensive than MK1  but cheaper than the next two types.
3. There is 100% HVO, and finally there is 90% "medium" HVO.

These three types of diesel give the exact same fuel consumption figures under test conditions, so what's the big deal? Danish MK1 is the cheapest, so I may as well stock up on it. For the same 1315km that the other three diesel types operated, it gets the same23.7l/100km to yield an overall consumption of 312 liters. However, look at my handy little table below and pay close attention to the columns on the right hand side...

					CO2
Route	Distance	Fuel Type	Consumption	Amount	Equivalent	Kg	g/km	g/ton*km
Södertälje- Zwolle	1315	Danish Diesel	23.7	312	2890	901	685	45.7
Södertälje- Zwolle	1315	Swedish Diesel	23.7	312	2240	698	531	35.4
Södertälje- Zwolle	1315	HVO	23.7	312	340	106	81	5.4
Södertälje- Zwolle	1315	Med 90% HVO	23.7	312	595	185	141	9.4

Well, well, well. Diesel is not just diesel, after all.

Cursory research on the reader's part will reveal that HVO is touted as the cleanest of all diesel types with extremely low emissions levels and the added bonus of optimized performance.

It is so clean you may not even need AdBlue (this is a whole other topic, but closely related) to run it.

The downside is that it is quite expensive and it may not make business sense for commercial vehicle operators to run on pure HVO due to the potential for massive cost overruns.

On the other end of the scale is Danish diesel which is cheap as soil but then again also is as dirty as soil as far as emissions go.

Just look at those numbers! Enough said.

We have a nice comfortable middle ground, and this is the Swedish diesel.

Not too much creosote to make it filthy, and not too much HVO to make it extremely expensive, and just enough RME to give it the kick it needs.

If I was Goldilocks, Swedish diesel would be the baby bear's porridge: just right.

This Swedish diesel is what Scania CV AB's trucking division runs on now.

Disposal of Non-biodegradable material

Derelict cars, plastics, glass... all the non-biodegradable materials that are either motor vehicles or parts thereof.

We all know about the mass of plastic waste in the watery grave that is the Pacific the size of an American state, but that is common news.

No, I want to ask what we do with the stuff that comes out of our cars (and trucks) while they are still operational. Used oil filters.

Used engine oil. Coolant.

Where do we dispose of this stuff after servicing our vehicles? In the river?

And we still wonder why the next frontier for a world war is not going to be crude oil but will most likely be access to potable water?

We still wonder where aquatic life is disappearing to?

Strip-mines: Shave The Rainforest! Jeez, They're Just Trees!

A man walks into a bar. He finds a wizened old geezer seated at the counter and strikes up a conversation with him.

In the course of their talk he asks the senior citizen what he did for a living in his younger days.

"I was a woodsman. I felled trees and was damn good at it."

"Oh, really? If you were that good tell me where you worked"

"I worked in the Sahara Forest"

"You mean the Sahara Desert? There are no trees there."

"Desert? Is that what they call it nowadays?"

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This is just a light moment, but it is indicative of the direction we have taken as an all-consuming society

Motor vehicle manufacture in itself is too a contributor to the degradation of the environment in that they have to be manufactured, in their millions, annually.

They're made of metal, plastics, glass and sometimes wood and leather.

These raw materials have to come from somewhere; and at whose expense? Nature's.

Forests have been vanishing at an alarming rate; forests which play a vital role in the carbon cycle mentioned earlier.

They are either depleted to meet a demand for wood or to pave way for mining operations and/or "development projects" which may or may not include factories.

This clearance has disturbed the balance and is contributing to the ever-increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Speaking of motor vehicles...

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2. Traffic: Gridlock & The Need For Decongestion 

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Crackdown on non-compliant public service vehicles

Location: Various urban centers around Kenya

Date: November 2018 (like yesterday, literally)

The Cabinet Secretary of Transport clamps down hard on PSVs that flout traffic rules established by the late Hon. John Michuki.

This includes a heavily resisted directive to exercise discretion in the types of paintwork these vehicles are allowed to carry - a directive that was revised following a misunderstanding.

Some saccos are up in arms over the matter but are swiftly brought to heel by the fire-breathing civil servant, who, to his credit, explains that paintwork may be decorative but not offensive and should have the sacco names unobscured or uncamouflaged against the artwork.

The crackdown sees a large number of PSVs withhold service, leading to a small transport crisis. This has a twofold outcome: commuters are delayed to work, but private motorists have a field day as the roads are temporarily free of the matatu madness. However, traffic jams do not completely disappear...

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Our transport system is dogged by lack of professionalism, inefficiency, ineffectiveness.

Allow me to paint the picture:

Most PSVs have narrow doors through which passengers have to struggle to enter the vehicle.

For non-van PSVs, this also involves ascending a foot off the ground into said narrow doorway, upon where the hapless passengers encounter a steep staircase (there may be one or two stairs only but they are designed for use by the able-bodied only) that they have to ascend.

Try and imagine the rate at which passengers board.

Now, this same doorway is used by passengers exiting the vehicle, which means one lot has to wait for the other to pass first.

They then get into a hallway where the seats are so squeezed that for one to get into or out of a non-aisle seat means the aisle-seat occupant has to stand up first and give way.

This is inefficiency manifested.

Now, a lot of inner city PSVs are of the 14-seater to 25-seater capacity.

They have to move millions of people per day, usually at the same times of day which we call "rush hour" (ironically) - early morning and late afternoon/evening. Do some quick arithmetic to calculate how many such vehicles are needed to move that mass of humanity into and out of the city, and picture the roads they are required to use.

Keep in mind that they have to share these roads with single-occupant vehicles whose owners grew heartily sick of the shabby treatment they receive from bus crews who have no sense of hospitality or customer care; and would rather take out a massive loan to organize their own transport than rely on people whose job description can be summarized into one word: boneheadedness. 

These are the numbers of cars that the city has to cope with every single day.

Operators will blame private motorists for the traffic problem in the city and they are partly right; but they too are to blame.

The use of small capacity vehicles increases traffic density greatly.

Now compound this with the reckless abandon with which these small vehicles are driven and the complete disregard of traffic laws and you can see where and how traffic jams are created.

Strangely enough, a quick poll I ran under the aegis of Car Clinic revealed that a lot of these private motorists are not  against the idea of public transport; they would gladly use it of only matatu operators stopped acting like apes and styled up a little.

So, what have we here? We have a two-pronged problem - environmental and logistical - that can be palliated (not solved) by one solution: an alt-fuel Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) system.

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Tough Decisions: The Case For a Bus Rapid Transport Network 

Perhaps it's time the government stepped back into public transport; and not over petty social media wars concerning paintwork or through poorly thought out directives, but in a tangible and realistic way that will force the hostage takers calling themselves matatu operators from becoming too big for their breeches.

Are we going to stall the economy just so that a young man somewhere can wield a paintbrush?

There is such a thing as "the bigger picture".

Having a state-run BRT system will solve two things: one, it will decongest the city (or cities) and two it will keep private operators in check by providing a low-cost, large capacity alternative to potential victims of arbitrary fare adjustments  and/or spontaneous industrial action.

The automatic response to this would be the unfair killing of investors' business aspirations by driving them out of business.

But is it ideological blue murder really?

Operators were forced into saccos once upon a time and after much hemming and hawing, they capitulated.

Now these saccos can be forced to coalesce into even fewer bodies that have to operate large capacity bus lines or wave goodbye to the CBD and be relegated to the outer fringes.

A fair number would be a maximum of three major bus lines per region, with the state-run operator being the fourth. This is what I have in mind:

Have 5 major arteries running from one central station in the CBD.

One serves Thika Road, one Mombasa Road (with a smaller, separate, dedicated service to Jomo Kenyatta International), one Lang'ata Road, one Ngong Road and one Waiyaki Way.

These could terminate at the following points:  Thika, Athi River, Bomas Of Kenya, Dagoretti Corner and the Gitaru interchange which may have to be redesigned to accommodate a bus park.

All matatu saccos that operate along those routes have to coalesce into three major unions per route; unions which will operate individual BRT lines in competition with each other and with the government.

This of course means that we will have to get rid of the lower capacity vehicles.

More than half of them are unroadworthy anyway; they should not be operational and are best scrapped and bent into kitchenware and fencing material.

The rest can be used for more distribution and deeper commuter penetration at the termini along which these BRTs will stop to pick or drop passengers; e.g a stopover at Gitaru will have smaller matatus picking passengers to head to Wangige, Kikuyu, Ndenderu, Ruaka, Thogoto and all the smaller hamlets within shouting distance of the BRT line.

Those forced to scrap their unqualified vehicles can maintain their sacco membership through buying shares in the BRT union that their sacco is a member of.

You do not need to own an actual vehicle to be a player in the industry.

Those buses are very expensive, the bus unions will need every cent they can get to acquire a fleet large enough to accommodate the rising numbers of city-bound commuters.

Sweden, Stockholm, Södertälje: Sound, Sustainable Schooling from Scania Summarily and Successfully Sussed

The picture shows a map of the transport network in and around Stockholm, both bus and train.

At first glance it seems extremely difficult to decipher but on closer look it is damn near perfect.

By studying it, you may notice that it is possible to cross from one end of Stockholm to the other without having to walk any considerable distance - as many complained that having a transport system that terminates at Westlands to the west and Nyayo Stadium to the east leaves a large part of the city unserved and compels people to walk large distances.

This is what I gleaned from it.

There is a large central station from which four main corridors start and develop outwards.

In Nairobi's case, each corridor serves a cardinal compass point (generally, as explained in the preceding section) and has its own branches and sub-branches; therefore it is possible to connect from one far end of the city suburbs to another on the other side, dozens of kilometers away. It just requires deftness in chaining the buses and trains you'll use into one neat beadwork of efficiency.

But what about the fare, I hear you ask.

Aha, there is an answer to that; and it is a card. Electronically controlled (like an ATM card or security pass), this card is preloaded with money that is then used up as you travel.

There could be two options: the fares are deducted electronically from the card per trip, but this turns out expensive if you are stringing together various vehicles to get from A to H.

The second option is even better: you pay for a time period,  rather than distance travelled or vehicles boarded.

The best localized example would be paying roughly KES 2000 per week after which you travel infinitely within the city routes during that week.

Once the week is gone, the fare expires and you have to reload the card.

Remember the Megarider system that Kenya Bus Service/Stagecoach had once upon a time?

That kind of thing, but electronic.

The amount varies according to zone and time limit (e.g KES 200 daily vs KES 1000 per week, or KES 1200 per week within the fringes of the CBD vs KES 1900 per week to reach as far afield as Thika, Limuru and Machakos, if so equipped).

It works beautifully and eliminates a lot of inefficiency and time wasting.

You board your bus or train along the route by swiping the card at a POS-esque device mounted near the driver; but this doesn't exist at the bus or train station.

You use the card to access the inner sanctum of the station and from there you are free to board any vehicle to whichever location you want, nobody will ask you anything; not even for a bus ticket or receipt. It is a very clean arrangement

What about the transport infrastructure itself? The buses and trains.

Wider, lower doorways increase ease of access and minimize the boarding times. Ramps take care of the physically challenged, as does adjustable height, what I referred to as the "kneeling function" in my previous article.

Widely spaced seats make ingress and egress easier. There are poles for standing passengers to attach themselves to

The station itself could be a paragon of engineering excellence.

Depending on whether the buses are hybrid or fully electric, the boarding points for passengers could act as docking stations with charging units for the bus batteries.

Research by Scania CV AB shows that for urban operation, batteries don't require long charging times since they operate over short distances with several stops (each stop providing a fresh charging opportunity)

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"An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it's where even the rich use public transportation"

Enrique Penalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia

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Stockholm is an advanced city. Nairobi and Mombasa too can be advanced cities if we get our minds right.

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Donald Trump 

The Donald.

I will not say much on this but it is a sad day for the environment when the US pulls out of the Paris Agreement on what can only be described as flimsy and rather selfish grounds; and leave the rest of the earth (including Iran, known purveyor and famous oil-based economy) to soak up the emissions emanating from their gigantic V8 engines. Very sad. 

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Conclusion 

The beauty of all this is that it is not purely theoretical.

Scania CV AB has existing solutions to these problems already in place - except a solution to Trump's undermining of the Paris Agreement, of course; that is not their place to comment on  - be it lowering of carbon emissions: via use of alternative fuels - or even being particularly picky about which kind of diesel to use; or through driver training to cut down on fuel consumption, or technological advancement into fuel efficient vehicles or the idea of platooning autonomous trucks (see sidebar 1); or be it decongestion of the city by use of large capacity, highly accessible bus systems that are credible enough for anybody to use.

This was explained in a lengthy seminar during the launch of the new line of trucks at KICC a few days ago, so I won't bore you with more detail (I guess you have read enough by now) and it was covered in somebody else's report anyway (see sponsored content).

However, it is a gold star against their performance appraisal that Scania CV AB earlier this year supplied 106 buses for BRT use in Ghana.

They clearly know what they are doing.

A sustainable transport system is one which strives towards environmental and economic benefits through efficiency.

Scania CV AB covers those bases competently.

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Sidebar 1: Autonomous Vehicles

Given the extent of technological advancement, it has reached a point where the weakest link in an operational motor vehicle is the bag of meat seated behind the windscreen.

In the aviation industry, most aircraft incidences and inefficiencies stem from human error.

We have autopilot systems that can take off, fly and land aircraft all on their own, but we still need the pilots anyway.

Not so with cars.

Adamancy and obstinacy in human drivers (such as insistence on using terminally inefficient manual transmissions, and use them badly) is still a contributor to atmospheric pollution which is partly why that type of gearbox is dying out.

Also dying out is the role of driver, the error-prone weak point of any car's operation and costly overhead in a commercial venture.

Autonomous cars are under swift development and Scania among other truck makers have been exploring the concept of platooning, a setup where a convoy of trucks draft each other on the highway with only the lead truck taking the brunt of aerodynamic load while the chain behind it enjoys the benefits of improved fuel economy from the swirling vortex created by the lead truck's progress that eliminates all possibilities of a head wind.

This can be done by humans too, you say, but robots are better.

They are more accurate and very obedient, they will not fall out of formation, are not easily distracted (or cannot be distracted rather) and they cost less than human beings - not in slavery terms, but in terms of operational costs. After all, truckers are in it for the profit, the fewer the overheads, the better.

Sidebar 2: Carbon Capture

(Did You Know?: Sweden recycles refuse - rubbish - to such a great extent that they actually have a shortfall in supply.

So what do they do?

They import rubbish from Italy down south).

The looming catastrophe (eleven years... tick tock) is of such gravity that recommendations go beyond reduction of carbon emissions and into the active decarbonization of the environment; what they call "carbon capture" and will be the subject for a future discussion.

For now, play your part in decarbonizing the planet. Plant a tree.