Reducing vehicular pollution and promoting the automobile industry: the twain shall probably never meet. A UK government survey too, does not green signal any major changes
THIS April, the UK government has come
out with a Green Paper (Transport -
The Way Forward) in response to a well
researched report on transport and
environment, published by the Royal
Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCFP) in October 1995 (Eighteenth
Report: Transport and the Environment).
The RCEP report clearly stated that
the threat of environmental damage was
considered serious enough to warrant a
fundamentally different approach to
transport policy, including significant
constraints on the future evolution of
the transport system by increasing the
cost of road travel. But the government's Green Paper, which was banded
"bland, contradictory and hopelessly
short on ideas" by the Labour Party, fell
far short of heralding a fundamental
change.
The Paper allots new powers to local
authorities to manage traffic demand
and reduce vehicular pollution in their
respective localities. But the Council for
the Protection of Rural England's (CPRE)
transport campaigner Lilli Matson said
that the government was passing the
buck to local authorities without providing the new measures they will
require for curbing traffic growth".
Conspicuous by its absence was any
strategy to control growing vehicle
numbers, or set any targets. "The environmental gains from the Green Paper
will be undermined by the failure to take
national action to tackle rising traffic
levels," said CPRE representatives. in fact,
the Green Paper has been criticised of
being at its evasive best on the subject of
targets.
London, in December 1991, had
experienced a concentration of pollutants in the city's weather condition. As
an anti-cyclone centered over the Al s
mountains produced low wind speeds,
low temperatures and high stability in
southeast UK, pollutants got stagnated in
the air and reportedly, 160 deaths during a single week period were attributed
to vehicular pollution by a study funded
by the department of health.
Another study by researchers
(R Buchdahl et al, 1996) at Hillingdon
Hospital, Middlesex, shows that elevated ozone and sulphur dioxide level in
the air have caused asthma cases among
children in the UK to rise phenomenally
in the recent times .
While agreeing that the RCEP targets
are "a very helpful tool for emphasising
the general direction of policy more formally than an unqualified statement of
objectives", the Green Paper states
that they may not be a good idea for controlling traffic growth. "Although
traffic growth tends to increase environmental damage, the effect is not straight
forward. Many environmental impacts
can be substantially reduced... without
affecting traffic levels," the Paper says.
The Paper, however, does not specify how this can be achieved, given the
fact that any increase in personal transport on the roads will negate other benefits brought about through technology
or clean fuel. The Paper, in fact, assures
the automobile industry that its market
would remain safe.
Understandably, the automobile
industry had attacked the RCEP report
a year ago, with the Automobile
Association claiming that the survey had
shown that 82 per cent of the motorists
11 would still use their cars if the price of
petrol doubled over 10 years", and that
over half of the drivers would "vote
against politicians who try to price them
off the road".
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