Charity Sustrans accuses the Chancellor of delivering a disastrous budget which focuses on short term gains to get popular support. His measures to reduce and limit the cost of fuel mean that once again we are incentivising people to use their cars while failing to offer alternatives that would provide a transport lifeline to poorer households without access to a car.
Jason Torrance, Sustrans' Policy Manager says "Mr Osborne has missed a golden opportunity to invest the £2bn from the oil companies in providing alternatives to car travel. People are now being encouraged to drive in a 1970's dream that could soon evaporate with a change in the price of oil.
"Sadly he has delivered the budget from behind the steering wheel of a Ford Focus and ignored the opportunity to provide alternatives to car use and much needed support to those suffering from the high cost of fuel.
"We do ourselves no favours by continuing to ignore the obvious - oil is a finite resource and will become unaffordable long before it finally dries up. Unless we invest in low carbon alternatives to car use we are facing a divide in society with the majority of people living in transport poverty."
4 comments:
Oil is going to be around for a good time yet, but it’s just the amount of it and the price that will cause a few problems?
I don't think the majority are ready to hear that their way of life is going to change when the drug of oil becomes ever more expensive?
I don't really care what the politicians say, or what they believe (often quite different), it's about what they do. Sooner or later they are going to realise that we will need some of the rail infrastructure destroyed during the 60's 70' and 80's. I think £6 a gallon is certainly doing it and when it hits £10 and higher the panic will set in?
In the meantime, that’s a very impressive amount of work going on at Midford.
Keep it up
Be very careful with Sustrans.
http://onthelevelblog.com/2009/01/26/the-problem-with-sustrans-how-a-grassroots-phenomenon-has-turned-into-a-private-unaccountable-corporation/
Sustrans has a huge remit with a budget to match - which can result in all the outcomes and problems that the article addresses.
At the same time we have to allow Sustrans to move with the times, and that takes a large organisation a lot longer to do because of the vested interests and bureaucracy.
But it will change. It's obvious now that the reason Sustrans was gifted with so many resources was because government saw them as a holding operation to preserve railway trackbeds in the short to medium term. To suggest that governments are unaware of Peak Oil would be naive, and a lot of planning has been done to make the switch from oil (and from road to rail) easier. When the time comes the old cycleways will be resited to allow the trains to run and I suspect even Sustrans is well aware of this. There will be plenty of abandoned roads available to convert to formal or informal cycleways so, at least for the future, any conflict over use of trackbeds will be quickly forgotten.
Where is the picture taken?
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