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Green, yet mean

Green, yet mean 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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