TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

Our devolved structure means all our businesses can engage with their local communities in their own way.

For example, in the US our Durham school bus business originally specialised in carrying pupils with special needs. Today, its commitment to them extends beyond the school run, for the past 10 years it has been supporting Special Olympics, an organisation that helps people with intellectual disabilities to participate in sports training and competitions. Durham is the charity’s official transport sponsor for Texas, Northern California and Southern California, and last year over 500 of our people volunteered to help with Special Olympic events.

In the UK, Midland Mainline developed its wide-ranging momentum programme to help secondary school teachers engage pupils in debate on topics ranging from waste management to disability awareness. Since its launch in September 2005, it has involved 20 schools in Derby, Leicester, Sheffield and Nottingham. Pupils are encouraged to put their ideas into action: one school created a fully accessible organic community garden; another sold fruit smoothies at Derby station to raise money for Children in Need. Our employee involvement in the programme is led by 24 voluntary champions.

We continue to support and encourage community-centred projects like these throughout the business, and to tackle our environmental impacts in areas such as waste reduction and recycling. But for us, the hottest issue by far is climate change.

We are actively combating climate change in three ways: making our own operations more carbon-efficient, working with government and other bodies such as the WWF and the Climate Group to help shape lower-carbon transport policies; and directly encouraging people to switch to public transport.

We are reducing our own energy consumption and carbon emissions where we can. With vehicles, the options are limited – while newer buses and coaches produce lower exhaust emissions there is a trade-off with fuel efficiency. New safety, comfort and accessibility equipment can add to weight or energy demand. However, by raising our load factors we have been able to maintain or improve the emissions on a per passenger kilometre basis. Although the energy used by our sites is only a small percentage of our total greenhouse gas emissions we have worked at improving efficiency and last year we reduced energy use in our train depots by 17%.

Our Trains division has activated regenerative braking technology, which recovers energy during braking to generate electricity and can reduce trains’ power consumption and CO₂ emissions by about 16% in the relevant electric trains at Silverlink, Central Trains and ‘one’. By May 2007, c2c’s fleet will also have been included in this process, meaning all trains capable of regenerative braking will have been activated.

Our Spanish business, Alsa, has been trialling the use of biodiesel which reduces CO₂ emissions. Initially, the trial began in 2005 with buses on Premium intercity services. It has now been extended to 40 urban buses in Oviedo. Experience to date has been encouraging, and when the trials are complete Alsa will consider running its whole fleet on biodiesel.

Relative Greenhouse Gas Emissions Against Journeys by Car (tCO₂e)

The Coach/Bus/Train bar shows the emissions arising from our fleet operations. The car bar represents the estimated emissions if 80% of our passengers had travelled by car instead. Net Saving represents the emissions saved as a result of people travelling with our services rather than by car. Data provided by the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management.

Meanwhile, we are planning to begin trials of biodiesel on buses in the UK. And we are having positive discussions with Transport for London to trial five diesel-electric hybrid buses which should lead to a significant reduction in both CO₂ emissions and exhaust pollutants.

But the most important thing we can do to combat global warming is achieve large-scale shifts to public transport. As well as making public transport more attractive by improving our services, we are also promoting the environmental benefits: this year, for example, we are launching a new facility on our websites that enables people to calculate how much CO₂ they can save by changing their transport habits. The figures can be startling, for example, swapping from car to coach on a London to Birmingham return trip, travellers could cut their CO₂ emissions by up to 91%. Overall our services result in a massive net saving in emissions than had the journeys been undertaken by a car (see table above).

As well as saving energy, public transport eases congestion. In crowded town centres – and in some of Europe’s finest mountain wilderness. In Northern Spain’s Picos de Europa National Park in Asturias, holiday traffic on the road to Covadonga Lakes meant the 11km journey could take three hours in summer.

But not any more. In partnership with Alsa, the local authorities have established a flexible park and ride scheme involving three car parks and 40 coaches on a 25km route. During peak seasons the road is closed to cars and visitors travel quickly and comfortably by coach, watching an onboard video about the area and related environmental issues. The project has greatly improved the local environment, makes access quicker and easier, and saves an estimated 64,000 litres of fuel and almost 800 tonnes of CO₂ a year.

We will continue to explore ideas like these, and every avenue for reducing climate change. Not least because we also have to ensure that our operations are able to cope with the more extreme weather conditions that have been forecast. That’s some motivation.