Transport and travel

Cut your transport footprint dramatically while rebuilding the local, low-energy mobility patterns our future will demand.

This 10-page chapter delivers hard-won behavioural and mobility wisdom covering:

• Reducing needless travel: Practical shifts—working, learning, shopping, and socialising at home or within walking distance—cut car dependence without sacrificing quality of life.
• Using cars radically more efficiently: Car-sharing, hitchhiking, back-loading, multi-purpose trips, and neighbourhood ride networks that outperform any tech fix.
• Relocalising food and daily life: Treating fuel as precious pushes us toward gardens, local networks, and reducing the “food miles” hidden in supermarket convenience.
• Human-powered transport: Bikes, trailers, cargo systems, and well-designed routes that turn your own body into the most reliable, resilient transport “engine.”
• Viable low-energy alternatives: From electric-assist bikes to micro-EVs, waste-oil biodiesel, wood-gas systems, and even animal power for fringe-suburban contexts.

Real examples—from shared-car households, hitchhiking teens, bike-based material collection, to biodiesel home systems—show how ordinary people are already cutting fuel use, strengthening community ties, and regaining freedom from the fragile global transport web.