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Most people know that we cannot go on using our cars and lorries in the future as we have, in the past, always assumed we can. More and more people are taking notice of the stark fact of our present motoring reality: there are, and on all projections, there will be, just too many vehicles using our roads. This has three key effects. Firstly, traffic congestion is simply getting worse and worse. Southampton is by no means the most congested city in the country, but traffic is building up in and out of the city in peak hours and around the city centre during the day, at an alarming rate. National projections suggest that, by 2031 40% more cars will be on the roads than there are at present. Even more significantly, these will be more and more intensively used: the same projections suggest that there will be almost 60% more traffic on the roads by the same date. Secondly, the emissions of exhaust gases from vehicles now impact greatly on the quality of life in many city centres. Very high levels of these pollutants can be found in ‘hot spots’ in Southampton such as Shirley High Street, under certain weather conditions. It is true that emission standards in new cars and tighter ‘health checks’ on vehicles in general have quite dramatically reduced the impact of each car or truck on the environment, but the sheer volume of new traffic has largely cancelled the gains that have been made. Thirdly, the production of carbon dioxide by road transport is set to rise inexorably. Some improvement can be made by more efficient use of petrol, but this is cancelled out and made worse by greater vehicle use. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is, of course, the key ‘greenhouse’ gas, responsible for the likely warming of the atmosphere as a result of industrial activity. If we do not reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide rapidly, we face the prospect of runaway global temperature rises with catastrophic results for the environment and our present living conditions. Road transport currently contributes about 22% of Britain’s load of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere each year. But as a sector, it is rising fast: industry has stabilised its energy use and to some extent its carbon dioxide emissions, but transport has not. So for three reasons, each crucial in their way, we need to do something as a nation. This is not a conspiracy of our leadership against the people: it affects everyone, and the solutions involve all of us. The problem is: what do we do? One solution canvassed is to get a move on with building more roads, so that all these extra cars can be accommodated. Even if we were to disregard the effects of emissions and CO2, this is not a practical proposition. The sheer numbers of new cars predicted means that we will have to tarmac over an area larger than the New forest just to park all these new cars on, let alone drive them around. Building new roads is a race we cannot win, unless we are prepared to tolerate mile upon mile of new motorways and major roads, both at the expense of the countryside, and the ripping up of large areas of our cities and towns. Another simple solution would be to ban most cars from the road. Some cities have experimented, for example, with the admission of cars with odd or even numbered licence plates on alternate days. But many people rely on their cars, and our communications, over half a century, have been built on the assumption that, primarily, people will get to where they want to go by car. Furthermore, our distribution system. has been developed on the understanding that goods will be hauled by road– often over long distances – from port to regional distribution centre to shop or factory. The trick is to work out how we can move towards more sensible use of the car and the truck: not to prevent ownership or use, but to work out ways of using the motor vehicle when it is most appropriate, and not using it when it is not. Desirable environmental outcomes are not about making us all push handcarts around and revert to subsistence farming, but to work out how we can live comfortable urban based lives, making use of the technical advances we are used to, but in a sustainable and non destructive way. Some of these changes will come about by agreement, and some by design. There will have to be some restrictions placed on unlimited use of cars in city centres for example, and we need to discuss how best these can be achieved. Charging for work place car parking or use of congested roads is one way: people will be far more likely to support such restrictions if the proceeds are seen to be invested in public transport, and good alternative methods of getting around. Reducing car use must be accompanied by improvements in public transport so that people can get around in towns and cities almost as well as if they had driven to their destination. Other changes require some thought, but above all a change in everyone’s approach to their cars. Nowadays, almost every child is taken to school by car. Just a few years ago very few were. The challenge is to design ways of getting children to school safely, and with the confidence of their parents, but without the car. We still habitually drive very short distances in our cars - –to get the newspaper from the shop around the corner, for example. Using the car for longer journeys and other modes for shorter trips would make an enormous difference. Currently, we travel over five miles per week to do the weekly shopping: can we move away from this way of doing things and back towards more local shopping patterns? Can we shift elements of bulk loads from the road to rail or sea so that we save the diesel fuel involved and make the most efficient use of our haulage options? As we can see from the occasional letter to the ‘Echo’, some people see all this as a problem but not theirs. Government has a responsibility to get others off the road so that they can get where they want faster. In reality, it is everyone’s problem. My small contribution has been to stop driving from my home to my constituency office unless I really need my car immediately to go on a longer journey. I walk or take the bus. Between us, we need to support anything that asks us for reasonable changes in support of a goal which will benefit everyone. ends
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