The Green Miles’ nine question decarbonisation challenge – Ross Phillips

Ross Phillips is the Sustainable Transport Manager at Cross River Partnership, a public-private partnership delivering impactful environmental, economic and community focused projects, based in London.

Ross has extensive experience with managing complex, multi-stakeholder projects and delivery, including the Waterloo Freight Hub, an innovative project that has transformed an underutilised arch in Waterloo Station into a road-based freight and logistics hub. Ross also leads projects focusing on improving air quality through public realm projects focused on walking and cycling through the Healthy Streets Everyday II programme, with local authorities and Business Improvement Districts in London.

9. What are the biggest common sustainability challenges facing the entire logistics sector in your opinion? 

The time and capacity to be able to innovate is a challenge. The logistics industry is extremely busy throughout [the year] and experiences seasonal demand, so it doesn’t leave lots of room for innovation, especially with the tight margins that so many operators are working with.

Electrification is another challenge in its requirements for more space and more infrastructure, particularly for logistics where you’re looking at larger vehicles that need more capacity and energy from the network. It’s these sorts of things that need to be thought through in order to enable the transition to electric vehicles.

8. What are the challenges facing the different modes of transportation? Do these vary between modes? 

The Cross River Partnership (CRP) has worked really closely with the cargo bike sector in London and it has its own challenges. There’s a huge demand for cargo bikes and production and manufacturing needs to keep up with that. We’ve seen delays with operators receiving their bikes and trying to find space for them. Cargo bikes have their own perceived challenges around charging, particularly with more scrutiny from landowners about safe charging procedures.

In the HGV sector the challenges are coping with increasing volumes of freight while there are driver shortages. There are different levels of challenges, some of which are common among the modes and some of which are specific.

7. In your opinion, what are the key levers that will help the HGV sector to decarbonise? 

The ability to charge much larger batteries, for instance, or having quicker charging available and improved battery performance are things that make it easier to support electric HGVs. Investing in these new technologies to develop them is really important.

6. With the growing emphasis on sustainability, do you see rail freight competing with road and air transport? 

We don’t want to see competition between the different modes; road versus rail versus river. There’s a real opportunity to view them as a collaborative suite instead and using whatever mode is the best option at the time. You need good intermodal transport links. Unless someone lives at a train station, you still need a way of getting the parcel from the train to people’s homes.

Rail has a lot of advantages to help, for instance a full train can take 20 HGVs off the road and that has benefits including air quality and reducing congestion.

5. Do you think the UK’s net zero goals are realistic? 

I would say they are. I think there’s an opportunity to be even more ambitious with it, with more investment to help us. Ultimately everyone wants to live in clean, green and sustainable cities and towns, and I think that should be at the heart of the ambition.

I’m fully appreciative that operators are pressed and this might end up changing operational procedures in quite a significant way. So I think there needs to be time to build that capacity in, but [with] projects like Waterloo [Freight Hub] it shows how you can prioritise and utilise space in quite a creative way that supports a number of different modes.

4. What are the best examples of positive breakthroughs you have seen in the last decade? 

Organisations are using the river again. A lot of our work is based in London, and it’s been really nice to see the river being used for parcel deliveries. It’s a way of offloading vans and lorries from our road network and making use of an underutilised gem that runs through the heart of London.

DHL has been running trials for some years now and CRP has been involved in a few projects with organisations like Speedy Services and Lyreco the office supplier.

In London you can visibly see the increase in the number of cargo bikes all with different branding and that’s another positive thing that can be taken away, there’s been so much investment in the city, and the number of vans it takes off London’s road network.

3. Who is an inspirational figure in logistics? 

Professor Alan McKinnon (Professor at Kuehne Logistics University), who I heard speaking at a conference last year in Brussels. He was championing the climate and logistics links and I found it really interesting to hear him speak so passionately about the years he’s been working on this, the huge potential it has and the risks involved in a changing climate.

Paola Cossu is central to a lot of the work that ALICE (Alliance for Logistics Innovation through Collaboration in Europe) does. She brings partners together across a number of different countries to make it a unified approach across projects and partners in European logistics. That’s really good to see and it resonates with a lot of the work CRP is doing as well.

2. How do logistics companies deal with ‘first mover hesitancy’? 

A lot of it is about trying to de-risk it as much as possible and that could be starting small, providing subsidies, providing time or providing more incentives for first movers.

Even considering the time of year that you can collect the most data, or the best time to innovate, will help.

With the Waterloo Freight Hub, that trial ended up being four months long and the aim at the end of that was to evaluate it and its success. We’re pleased that it’s going to continue developing in the future, which I think is important. But that evaluation at the end gave everyone an opportunity to pull together and establish what we’d learned over the last two to three years prior to the trial. So you don’t have to overhaul everything, you can start doing it in smaller chunks.

1. You are Prime Minister for the day – you can change/implement one thing – what is it? 

I would try and make sustainability and transport and logistics a bigger part of education through school. It’s mentioned at school but it’s about recognising how integral it is and how it helps people and goods to move around places, it has such an impact on other sectors and how cities operate.

Getting it in the education system at an early point could help bring in interesting new ideas and new voices to the sector.