UK: Do we need more transport or less?

[John Ashworth]

Do we need more transport or less?

By Christian Wolmar August 10, 2009
Transport Times

The fundamental question that governments, both local and national, are never able to answer is whether they want more transport or less of it. Remember Prescott’s promise in his ten year plan published in 2000 that rail journeys would increase by 50 per cent over the next decade. Well, that’s one politician’s target that has been met but so what. Its effect on road congestion is imperceptible and while the trains are now fuller and less comfortable, the subsidy to the train companies and Network Rail is far higher than it was then.

What exactly has that increase achieved and, in any case, what government policy has contributed to it, apart from GDP growth. After all, regulated fares have been rising for the past six years at RPI plus one per cent, hardly an encouragement to travel by rail.

In truth, the question about whether society would benefit from more or less transport is one that I find difficult to answer and couch my reply in terms of what transport we are talking about. Some may be a good thing, while some may not, but it is a very difficult area. Clearly stag nights in Cracow by plane are not to be encouraged but what if your football team is playing there? It is tough for politicians to make hard and fast statements in this regard, but I think it is time that they started examining these issues in a coherent way.

While, broadly, train travel can be encouraged provided the alternative is less environmentally sustainable, aviation is so unequivocally damaging that it seems remarkable that any politician claiming Green credentials can support its continued expansion. However, the mode that really paralyses the politicians’ brains is the car. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the car scrappage schemes which have spread around Europe far faster than swine flu, with 12 countries adopting them, and several more considering it.

Why on earth are these countries encouraging more cars on to already overcrowded roads with all the consequent congestion and carbon emission? The pretence is that this is a Green measure because new cars are less environmentally damaging but even the government does not emphasise this side of the scheme very much, knowing that the argument can be shot down as easily as Obama swats flies.

So, instead, in a recent press release claiming that 60,000 cars had been purchased through the scheme, No 10 boasted that it helped not only ‘hard pressed consumers’ but protected ‘British jobs by stimulating demand for new cars’.

Oh God, this is such crass economic dyslexia that one wonders how on earth the man ran the economy for a decade. First, as Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson must know, while cars are assembled in the UK, most of the value is created elsewhere and therefore subsidising the purchase of new motor vehicles is, at best, of marginal value to the British economy, though many Korean and Japanese workers must have put the pair on their Xmas card list.

Secondly, while there will be a small environmental benefit, the £2,000 of government money that the replacement of each old car costs is a poor investment. The cost of every tonne of carbon saved through this measure is far higher than if it were spent on any other environmental measure from roof insulation to funding new technologies for Green energy.

As an aside, I am not sure I trust the government figures anyway. Is 60,000 credible? Who on earth trades in a ten year old car to buy a new one? Like most people I have never bought a new car in my life since it loses a fifth or more of its value when you drive out of the showroom and people who have cars a decade or more old are likely to be of similar mien. I no longer possess a car but my girl friend’s is an N Reg, but we have no plans to claim our £2,000.

Transit magazine points out, too, that if Gordon Brown really wanted to keep automotive jobs in Britain, he would have spent the money on supporting the purchase of new fleets of buses, many of which are still genuinely manufactured, as opposed to assembled, in the UK. It is a good point but does not go far enough. The scrappage scheme money could have supported a wide range of transport measures which, again, would have been far more environmentally beneficial.

Surely, the time has come for politicians to begin to say something like: ‘Actually folks, the act of driving cars is so damaging, not just in terms of CO2 emissions but also in relation to the built environment, using up a scarce resource, the countryside, the health of the population and so on that we are sorry but we are going to have to try to shift many of you out of your cars and onto other methods of transport, or even suggest that you do not make the journey at all.’ Poor old John Prescott was naïve enough to make a promise along these lines in his early days as Secretary of State for Transport (and many other things) and was never allowed to live it down by the media or transport professionals.

The truth is that we have got a few years before these decisions are going to be taken out of the hands of politicians and made by the market in any case. When we reach peak oil, there will be a catastrophic rise in the price of fuel that will end up determining who can travel through the price mechanism, as was starting to happen last year. It would be better for the politicians to begin to consider the implications of this, rather than merely pouring money down the throats of new car owners in order to maintain a status quo that we all know is doomed.

[John Ashworth]

Lord Adonis: no need to cut travel to save the planet, says Transport Secretary

Personal sacrifices are not necessary in the fight against global warming, according to Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, who promised that greener technologies would mean Britons should have no need to cut back on travel.

By Peter Foster in Beijing
Published: 6:32AM BST 18 Aug 2009
Daily Telegraph

“We don’t need to have a hair-shirt approach,” Lord Adonis said on a visit to Beijing to review China’s high-speed rail network and the latest developments in electric and hybrid cars.

“If you can radically cut emissions as a result of new transport technology it is not necessary to face people with an ‘either-or’ choice between a low carbon future and big cuts in travel.”

Green campaigners have argued that sacrifices will be necessary if the world is serious about cutting carbon emissions, with conscientious consumers facing tough choices between "saving the planet" and, for example, enjoying low-cost flights to Europe.

However Lord Adonis, a former Liberal Democrat who switched to Lbaour to become head of policy for Tony Blair, said it was not realistic to expect people to curtail their travel habits in the name of global warming.

Instead Briton could meet green targets through technology such as ultra low carbon cars, new generations of low-emission aircraft and electrified rail lines that cut rail carbon emissions by a third compared with using diesel locomotives.

“We’ll never sell a low-carbon future to the public if it depends on a deprivation model. I’m convinced that there’s no necessary trade-off between a low carbon future and more or less transport,” he said.

“The critical factor is the deployment of technology and the intelligent use of pricing and policy mechanisms to regulate emissions.”

This December the world will meet in Copenhagen to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Treaty in an attempt to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels, the benchmark set by the UN to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Lord Adonis, who recently returned from holiday where his beach-reading included The Politics of Climate Change by Professor Anthony Giddens, is currently pushing for Britain to build a £20bn high-speed north-south rail link.

A decision on whether to build the 185mph line, which would significantly cut journey times between London and the North and reduce the need for domestic air travel, is expected to be taken early next year, before the General Election.

A Government-commissioned study by Booz Allen Hamilton, a consultancy, recently raised doubts over whether a high-speed link would be more environmentally friendly than flying, particularly over short distances such as London to Manchester.

However Lord Adonis said that green considerations were only a small factor in arguing for the high-speed link which would follow the lead set up European countries like Germany and France and now being actively investigated by the US.

“The primary reason for a high-speed rail link is not the environment but the need to build capacity on our rail network. Carbon reduction is one argument, but building capacity is by far the most compelling one,” he said.