The consultation paper on Heathrow which is due to be published later today is predictably pro expansion. Already, Ruth Kelly has made clear that she thinks there should be no attempt to limit flying and that the whole focus should be on carbon offsetting, something which the cannier airlines accept as inevitable but the more bullish ones are resisting strongly.
Aviation exposes the deep flaws in our transport policy – or lack of it. The fundamental question is whether the policy should be encouraging more transport, because it is supposedly good for the economy, or attempting to limit it because it is damaging to the environment and, in any case, is often a residual outcome – i.e. it’s not the getting there we want, its what we do when we get there.
Even so, within even the limited world view of a New Labour politician, ever scared of frightening the public with statements or policies that might appear too Green, it is still bewildering that aviation should be granted such a special place in transport policy. The notion of predict and provide has long been discarded for motoring, though there is still a major roadbuilding programme that suggests the lessons of past experience have not been learnt, but at least no one is suggesting that we can accommodate the expected growth in vehicle use by building sufficient roads.
But that is the case with aviation. It’s one of those fundamentals which ultimately I do not get, like why Labour can’t just renationalise the railways, and be done with it. Or nationalise Northern Rock, to come to think of it.
What is it with aviation? Sure, we all like to go fly off to our holidays, though the experience of going through airports has made it pretty nightmarish. But this notion that if tickets or fuel were taxed, let alone aviation paying its proper environmental costs, then poor people would not be able to fly is completely bewildering. First, it is mostly the affluent who fly. Secondly, an extra thirty or forty quid on flights would not deter most people taking their annual vacation, something which has gone down in price over the years.
And thirdly, most importantly, doesn’t Labour believe in the market mechanism? After all, the way to reduce demand for a good is to put its price up. Sure, that will hurt Mr and Ms Average more than David Beckham or Sir Philip Green, but that is how capitalism works. Poorer people cannot buy Rolex watches or go to Premiership games, but no one suggests that is their right. Yet somehow, it seems that people have a right to fly, in the same way that they have access to the NHS or free education for their kids. Someone please explain this to me?

I have just received a big press release from Ken Livingstone on hydrogen fuel buses which are going to save the day. Apparently, London will be getting the biggest fleet in the world - just 10 by the way - of these buses helping reduce the carbon footprint of the bus fleet.
Ken is then quoted as saying: "Hydrogen is a fuel of the future as it improves air quality and does not produce the harmful emissions which are causing catastrophic climate change''. But that is clearly patent nonsense. Hydrogen is not really a fuel, but a means of transmitting energy. Producing the hydrogen requires electricity and, at the moment, far more energy is used in making the hydrogen than is used in conventionally powered vehicles. So while there will be a reduction in pollution in the town centre, that is simply displaced elsewehere to the plant producing the hydrogen.
Yes, perhaps ultimately cheap and non-polluting ways of producing hydrogen will be discovered. But we are nowhere near that and organisations like Transport for London should not be putting out misleading press releases on its impact on the environment.

The regular complaints from business organisations like the CBI and the British Chambers of Commerce about the weakness of the country's transport infrastructure are always peppered with estimates of the cost. This morning, when I received a missive from the BCC saying that the 'cost to business' was 'a staggering £17.55 bn per year' I decided to discover how this figure is calculated.
I discovered that it is based on a survey of 2,260 small businesses in which the respondents were asked to estimate the cost to their firm of congestion. Then those numbers are multiplied by the number of small and medium size enterprises (what about big ones?) given by government, to arrive at the global figure.
I am not denying that congestion is a cost to some businesses - indeed it may be a major one to some. But to aggregate up figures from a survey in which business people - who have a vested interest in exaggerating the cost - simply make an estimate of what congestion costs their business is a fatuous exercise at best and a very dishonest one at worst. It has absolutely no basis whatsoever, not even as an approximation.
This technique, though is effective. These figures are regularly reproduced in newspapers, frequently in headlines, without any analysis of how they are arrived at. They then get picked up by policymakers and become part of conventional wisdom.
In my youth, I was active in squatters' organisations and we used to get rung up by journalists keen on finding out how many squatters there were. We trotted out random numbers such as 40,000 in London, with little basis in fact - there were probably a few thousand at most - but these figures can now be found in learned tomes.
The BCC and other organisations pride themselves on being rather more respectable than the Advisory Service for Squatters. But in their use of statistics, they are not!