Good piece in The Guardian today about the government’s policy on the environment. Ashley Seager points out just how slowly the politicians are responding to the crisis of climate change. He points out that the widening of a stretch of the M6 will cost £3bn, whereas that is 40 times what the government is spending on its low-carbon buildings programme aimed at boosting the take up of renewable energies.
Seager focuses mainly on the failings of the government’s energy policy on encouraging use of renewable sources, which he shows is completely inadequate compared with what the Germans are doing.
On transport, he reiterates the point, which you can find often on my website, that the price of public transport has been rising far faster than the price of motoring, so therefore it is not surprising that more and more people are jumping into their cars. Price signals are available to the government to, for example, reduce the demand for air travel and boost rail use, but they are not used.
I remember Alistair Darling, then the transport secretary, arguing that the government had no role in encouraging people to choose a particular mode of travel as that was up to the market. I do wonder why people like him go into politics, apart from the fact that they must enjoy the power and the free chauffeur driven cars if they don’t feel they can change anything. As Seager points out, it is now this same colourless, unimaginative man who is preventing Britain from developing a system to encourage, through generous pricing, the production of electricity from renewable sources.
The usual argument is that putting up the price of petrol would be too unpopular and that the road fuel protestors would rise up again. But there has always seemed to me something fishy about the road fuel protest. The demonstration could so easily have been nipped in the bud since it consisted of a couple of hundred farmers and road hauliers intimidating fuel tank delivery drivers which brought the country to its knees. The protestors did not have mass support and today, with such a different political zeitgeist in relation to climate change, they would attract even fewer people.
At root, there is the fundamental issue of whether capitalism can ever be sustainable. But long before we get into that debate, there is a whole range of policies which can be adopted that will, at least, reduce the damage caused by our desire to grow the economy relentlessly. Yet, the government is so timid about introducing them that one could be forgiven for thinking that ministers are not really interested. Prove us wrong.

In all the rush created by the rail announcements and the Metronet collapse, I have had little time to write for the blog. I had a few days in Somerset, too, supposedly on a cricket tour but as play was washed out, it became a very pleasant rambling holiday with my partner, Deborah.
My interest in any transport story, however, remains undiminished. In Somerset, I was staying in the small medieval market town of Dunster, famous for its Yarn Market and castle, which surely has the worst traffic management system. The town has two distinct parts linked by a narrow road, unwidened since horse and cart days. Indeed, my friend, Graham Lamacraft, who runs the B&B where I stay with his wife Jan, remembers the days of carts carrying wood from Exmoor forests through the town and onto the local port and railway station.
Now, however, the 300 metre section through the centre of the town is controlled by a traffic light system similar to those at road works, to ensure that two buses or lorries do not meet in the middle, thus causing gridlock. However, there is no pavement, nor any road humps, and therefore many car drivers, encouraged by the unsightly double yellow lines, use this section of road to see how quickly they can accelerate up to 40 MPH. Since there is virtually no other way to get from one side of the little town to the other, pedestrians therefore have to cower in doorways as the traffic, which never seems to slow down for them, hares past. I have seen lorries thunder through inches away from hapless tourists seeking to enjoy the town.
Of course, this is not an easy problem for traffic engineers. It is a main road, the A396, to Tiverton and presumably there are regulations about not putting road humps on main roads or even imposing 20MPH limits, though the local traffic engineers could surely apply to have Dunster, a historic town, considered as a special case. The design of the single lane section seems to encourage speeding; in particular, the complete lack of paving means that the car drivers seem to think they have the road to themselves. For me, the traffic management greatly diminishes the beauty of what is a delightful little town.
There are, too, other issues. The delightful Yarn Market is surrounded by parked cars and the pavements, cobbled according to tradition, are terribly difficult to walk on. Dunster is a wonderfully well preserved town and deserves better from its transport planners. It is symptomatic of the way that we have allowed the car to dominate above all. I have been to many similar medieval towns in France and Italy, and there cars are always made to be subservient to the demands of pedestrians. In Britain, we never seem to do this.