TRANSPORT policy is one of the biggestinfluences on the course of development and often determines how sustainable' that subsequent developmentwill be. This is especially true whereverpopulation densities are high. Yet it issubtle and is poorly understood. Eachgeneration's lessons tend to be forgotten by the next and thesame mistakes are made again. People seem to think thatwhat goes wrong in one country "can't happen here".Currently, provincial France routinely repeats the strip or ribbon development mistakes of Anglo Saxon countries in the1930s. Regularly, a new road bypasses a congested town andthen acquires a row of factories or office blocks and more andmore local traffic. Evehtually, a new bypass has to be built andsoon the whole shape of the town turns out to have beendecided by the course of a road delineated by civil engineersthree decades before.
In a democracy, how does one educate public opinion inthe basics of sustainable transport policy so that people andtheir governments can make intelligent choices- unswayedby lobbies of motor manufacturers, road building civil engineers , land owners, local government functionaries or smallshopkeepers?
Recent European experience suggests that the most effec-tive way is based on bizarre theatrical performances in whichconventional press campaigning is combined with buildingtree houses, jousting with the police, advocating the rights ofsnails and birds in court, obstructing bulldozers by lyingdown in their path and deploying pantomime cows.
All these means were used recently in the 'Third Battle ofNewbury' around a new road bypass being builtto the west of a modest market town in southern England.
In the case of the bypass the objectors hehopes of actually stop the road from being buibut that was not regardedas a reason for not trying. Oxford, the accepted home of lost causes, is only 20 miles away and lies on the A 34, a congested road,which was once itself a bypass in the 1960s.
Nobody knows just how many hours of air time and how many column inches have been given to the bypass battlePeter Stone is a UK-basedenvironmental activist andfree lance jouranlistif it were paid for at peak hour advertising rates, as is the casewith public service educational messages, the bill would becounted in millions of dollars. That is the point of the exercise- to educate the country in environmental basics at the lower cost.
The chemistry of the way the media pays attention toenvironmental protests is such that the actual views of theenvironmentalists have to be covered, not just their antics.There have to be explanations as to why they suffer beingassaulted by the police, why they sit up in trees with their ban -ners, jn shifts for weeks on end, and why they camp in thewinter by an arctic snail habitat in a bog.
I am reminded of an earlier environmental demonstration at the UN Stockholm Environment Conference in 1972.That was the first time government ministers and theirbureaucrats were exposed to the irreverence and originality ofyouthful environmental protest. The protestors parraded amore or less lifesize whale in the streets of Stockholm, carrying the message "Maybe Dick". The whale was made of blackplastic sheeting, some padding'and a double decker omnibus.It was not there for just effect. It helped to make the fate ofwhales a symbol of the success or failure of the Stockholm conference.
Another feature turned to good effect is the general lookof the protesters as seen on television, contrasted with, say,the mayor of the town or of the remaining tracts of heathlandand the defilement of the North Wessex Downs Area ofOutstanding Natural Beauty.
The exposition of the administrative and conceptual messsurrounding the government's road building policy is thusgiven a general public prominence it would otherwise neverreceive. An ammunition box of fact and case study was madeavailable in the public domain for use in the next struggleover transport policy. There is little doubt aboutwhat sort of people will find it useful nextnext time the policy will change.
Conventional democracys little influence on this:ourse of events. The wayforward is to promoteinformed environmental awareness among allthe people. If it requires young activists up trees andconniving journalistsplaying it for laughsand instruction at thesame time - so be it.