It is encouraging to see the work of the CCC and it’s draft recommendations. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this. It is beyond time that we were having these important discussions and enabling the opportunity to form a more meaningful strategy for our national response to the ecocidal trajectory of climate breakdown.
The proposed methods for reducing emissions from transport are woefully inadequate and disappointing.
Replacing much of the fleet of cars in New Zealand with electric private cars is a narrow, dangerous strategy. The mode share targets in the draft report are insufficient to deliver the absolute emissions reduction aims of a net zero carbon future.
Aim higher and set some absolute targets.
A doubling of the share of people cycling by 2030 is way too low. The current growth rate in cycling is already following this trend. The advice to the government from this body should supercharge efforts in this area to enable far more than just doubling what is an abysmally low amount of 1%. The target should be at least 15% of all trips nationally by bike by 2050. This target is advised in Turning the Tide – from Cars to Active Transport which the CCC references.
Cycling is ten times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities – The Conversation
Christian Brand March 29, 2021 3.59pm BST
Globally, only one in 50 new cars were fully electric in 2020, and one in 14 in the UK. Sounds impressive, but even if all new cars were electric now, it would still take
15-20 years to replace the world’s fossil fuel car fleet.
The emission savings from replacing all those internal combustion engines with zero-carbon alternatives will not feed in fast enough to make the necessary difference in the time we can spare: the next five years. Tackling the climate and air pollution crises requires curbing all motorised transport, particularly private cars, as quickly as possible. Focusing solely on electric vehicles is slowing down the race to zero emissions.
This is partly because electric cars aren’t truly zero-carbon – mining the raw materials for their batteries, manufacturing them and generating the electricity they run on produces emissions.
Transport is one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonise due to its heavy fossil fuel use and reliance on carbon-intensive infrastructure – such as roads, airports and the vehicles themselves – and the way it embeds car-dependent lifestyles. One way to reduce transport emissions relatively quickly, and potentially globally, is to swap cars for cycling, e-biking and walking – active travel, as it’s called.
Rethinking London’s Red Routes: From red to green – globalcleanair
New health index highlights need to tackle air pollution from major roads
Araceli Camargo, Lab Director & Co-Founder, Centric Lab
Oliver Lord, Head of Policy and Campaigns, Environmental Defense Fund Europe
Traffic wars: who will win the battle for city streets? | The Guardian
Niamh McIntyre Thu 25 Mar 2021
Radical new plans to reduce traffic and limit our dependence on cars have sparked bitter conflict. As legal challenges escalate, will Britain’s great traffic experiment be shut down before we have time to see the benefits?
On an overcast Saturday afternoon in December, a convoy of 30 cars, led by a red Chevrolet pickup truck, set off from the car park of an east-London Asda with hazard lights flashing. The motorists, who formed a “festive motorcade”, wore Santa hats as they made their way slowly through the borough of Hackney before coming to a halt outside the town hall a couple of hours later.
They had gathered to register their outrage at being the victims, as they saw it, of a grand experiment that has been taking place on England’s roads since the start of the pandemic. As the national lockdown eased last summer, swathes of Hackney, stretching from Hoxton’s dense council estates at the borough’s western border with Islington to the edge of the River Lea marshland near Stratford in the east, had been closed to motor traffic (with exceptions made for delivery vans, residents’ cars and emergency vehicles).
UK criticised for ignoring Paris climate goals in infrastructure decisions | The Guardian
Exclusive: scientists write to ministers and supreme court over recent ruling in Heathrow case
Prominent scientists and lawyers have said the UK government’s decision to ignore the Paris climate agreement when deciding on major infrastructure projects undermines its presidency of UN climate talks this year.
The experts – including the former Nasa scientist Jim Hansen, the former UK government chief scientist Sir David King and the economist Prof Jeffrey Sachs – have written to ministers and the supreme court about a recent ruling that the government need not take the UK’s obligations under the treaty into account when setting policy, made in a case concerning the proposed expansion of Heathrow airport.
Green campaigners took the government to court in 2019 over its decision to allow the expansion of Heathrow, arguing that the increase in air travel it would enable was incompatible with the UK’s obligations under the Paris agreement to try to hold global heating to well below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels.
Fire crews delayed by careless parking in Swanage town centre | Bournemouth Echo
August 2017) Help rescue 100s of miles of 1930s-era protected cycleways | Bike Boom
August 17, 2017 carltonreid
Between 1934 and 1940 Britain’s Ministry of Transport paid local authorities to install cycle tracks. As seen and heard on the BBC, more than 100 or so schemes were built, resulting in perhaps as many as 500 miles of cycle tracks, some of them protected with curbs. The great majority were built – 9-ft wide and both sides of the roads – next to the new bypasses of the era; a few were built on “trunk roads” through residential areas, such as in Sunderland, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford. A successful Kickstarter campaign in May 2017 enabled us to start researching some of these cycleways, and now in 2021, thanks to support from the Department for Transport and Sustrans, we’re in the process of rescuing some of them.
Shared use and covert cycleways: how cycling on footpaths came to be officially recommended – War On The Motorist
Joe Dunkley March 28, 2021
A misunderstanding in the ’00s led cycling organisations to recommend against separating
For anyone who has been missing getting together for Infrastructure Safaris lately,
I won’t try to replicate the video exactly in written form, partly because the point of an
Dec 20) Scottish Government Plans 20% Cut In Car Use Within Ten Years—And That Includes Electric Cars – Forbes
Carlton Reid 17/12/20
Many countries aim to phase out petrol and diesel cars, relying instead
on uptake of electric cars, but Scotland plans to reduce motoring in general.
Using both carrot and stick, the Scottish government plans to cut car use by
20% within ten years.
“We are not aware of any other country that has committed to such an
ambitious transformation,” writes Scotland’s Environment Secretary
Roseanna Cunningham in an updated climate change plan.
The plan, released December 16, was re-written after Members of
Feb 21) Boris Johnson urges councils to “crack on” with cycle lanes and low traffic neighbourhoods | road.cc
Simon MacMichael 03/02/21
Prime Minister says government’s research highlights majority support for active travel initiatives
Prime Minister Boris Johnson says councils should “crack on” with building cycle lanes and low-traffic neighbourhoods, and that the majority of local residents support such initiatives in areas where they have been put in place.
In May, Mr Johnson promised “a new golden age for cycling” and transport secretary Grant Shapps subsequently announced £225 million in emergency active travel funding for local authorities in England to make it easier and safer for people to get around on foot or bike during the pandemic.
Some schemes have been removed by councils following small but vocal opposition, however the Prime Minister – who was said to have gone “ballistic” when the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea removed pop-up cycle lanes on either side of Kensington High Street in early December – says that research carried out on behalf of the government demonstrates widespread support, reports The Times.
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