Place-based Estimated Advantages of Shared Electric Mobility online tool
PLEASEM is a basic tool using open data and conservative assumptions to visualise place-specific benefits from electric car clubs.
For each upper tier LA, DfT data on total car VMT on the roads is divided by total cars registered, and then multiplied by the emissions from an ‘average’ car, as derived from the proportion of vehicles of each fuel type in the registered car fleet. PLEASEM shows the reduction in carbon emissions if this average mileage was instead driven in a fully electric or hybrid car. Although shared cars usually record greater annual mileage, they tend to reduce the annual VMT of multiple drivers of private cars, likely resulting in greater carbon savings. The source code file is LAOutput.R, which results in the processed data file df_county.csv. This code only needs to be run when DfT raw data updates are released, usually annually. The current source code includes extra lines to aggregate vehicle registrations from the lower tier authorities in Cumbria to the unitaries of Cumberland and Westmorland and Furness, created in 2023, and not yet included in the VehReg data. This is likely to be unnecessary in future updates.
We also use total cars and EVs registered per LSOA from DfT data (which uses 2011 boundaries) and households per LSOA from the ONS census 2021 data from England and Wales to calculate changes in car ownership rates and electric vehicle (EV) uptake by households. The maximum households per LSOA is just under 2000, so the number of registered vehicles per LSOA is capped at 4000. The source code file is MSOAOutput.R, which results in the processed data files df_msoa.csv and df_lad.csv. As these files both aggregate LSOAs into larger geographic areas, the changes in car ownership rates and EV uptake are calculated as weighted means.
The app.py code in the dashboard folder is required to create the dashboard and push it online. This pulls the processed data into the maps, pie chart and interactive features. EV uptake is shown in deciles for easier visualisation.