Abstract
Urban activities, including urban mobility, play a crucial role in climate change mitigation. Urban mobility is currently at a crossroads. In a business as usual scenario, CO2 emissions from urban transportation will grow by one fourth by 2050. Nevertheless, during this period, it may drop by about one third. To make the drop happen, we need to introduce comprehensive policies and measures. Electrifying urban transit is one feasible solution. This study investigates whether and how urban water transit systems have been electrified—a means of transport which has not been well researched in this respect. A multilevel perspective and the comparative case study method were employed to answer the research questions. The comprehensive study focussed on 24 cities representing the current experience in planning and operating water transport, based mainly on secondary, primarily qualitative, data, such as industry reports, feasibility studies, urban policies, and scientific papers. The primary outcome is that urban electric passenger ferries left their market niches and triggered a radical innovation, diffusing into mainstream markets. However, urban diversity results in various paths to electrification, due to the system’s physical characteristics, local climate and transport policies, manufacturing capacity, green city branding, and the innovativeness of international ferry operators. Three dominant transition pathways were identified—a comprehensive carbon neutral policy, a transport sector policy, and a research and development policy. From a multilevel perspective, cities can be considered a bridge between niches and regimes that provide the actual conditions for implementing sociotechnical configurations.
Highlights
Accepted: 22 September 2021Despite an increasing awareness of the limits to growth [1,2] and the sudden anthropogenic climate change that is its manifestation, efforts to mitigate the genuinely unsustainable way humankind exists seem far from satisfactory [3]
In the business as usual scenario, CO2 emissions will increase by 27% by 2050
The method used in this study helped to identify activities for the electrification of urban ferry systems in 24 coastal cities that have been documented in secondary qualitative data regarding the technical/economic performance reported by enterprises, policies developed by authorities, the scholarly literature, and professional media in the field
Summary
Accepted: 22 September 2021Despite an increasing awareness of the limits to growth [1,2] and the sudden anthropogenic climate change that is its manifestation, efforts to mitigate the genuinely unsustainable way humankind exists seem far from satisfactory [3]. The research on sustainability transitions explains why this shift is difficult to implement. This article investigates a shift in one of the most prominent sociotechnical systems—the urban passenger transport system. Chen and Kauppila [5] estimated in 2015 that this system, limited to cities of over 300,000 people, covers 37% of the global CO2 emissions from passenger transport, and 20% of the entire transport sector. Their modelling outcomes suggest that urban mobility is at a tipping point. The carbon impacts of urban mobility plans are often neglected or underestimated [7]
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