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West Midlands Climate Coalition — 5 Comments

  1. I can’t see any mention of trees. We need to stop felling mature street and woodland trees and sending them for biomass. Hope by ‘green renewables” they don’t mean trees. Mature trees store huge amounts of carbon, absorb pollution helping prevent climate change and keeping us healthy. The thousands of whips they are planting won’t serve any useful purpose for decades, that is if they survive.

  2. How does Fare Free Public Transport (FFPT) help reduce carbon emissions?

    I can image that those spending thousands on railway season tickets to London would welcome the move, but would it stop them driving up and down the motorway network at weekends in their luxury fossil fuel SUVs?

    At the other end of the income scale, what help is FFPT for someone working at a Care Home or a Logistics Centre with a 6am start? That’s long before the first bus and few workplaces are served by direct and safe cycle routes. Workers at such places have little choice but to use Taxis or run a car which they can scarcely afford.

    A serious way to reduce carbon emission would be a fossil fuel car scrappage scheme and provision of practical Walking, Cycling and (Electric) Public Transport alternatives.

    • If public transport is free at the point of use, as are other public services such as schooling, health, libraries and museums, it would greatly benefit the huge numbers of low income people who struggle to buy and run ordinary cars, let alone electric ones. It would be a major inducement to break from the private car and move towards proper public transport. The system would need to be publicly owned and run, not for profit, and operate alongside inducements to walk or cycle. It would also need major investment in terms of frequency and extension of routes of course. The system would be on a local and regional basis, as exist in about 100 other cites around the world (plus pilot schemes in Swansea, Herefordshire and Newport). You need a big carrot to tempt people out of their polluting, congesting (even electric cars emit particulate matter from tyres and brakes) and expensive cars. Cars would still be available for specialist use.

  3. Is Fare Free Public Transport the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions?

    The measure would be popular amongst those who spend a lot of public transport fares, but how would it reduce anyone’s use of fossil fuel vehicles?

    Schemes to encourage people to scrap their fossil fuel private vehicles, replacing their use with zero carbon emission forms of transport, public or private would surely make more sense?

  4. Thanks Bob Whitehead for replying to my comment.

    However, there are a number of ideas in your reply which I take issue with.

    Transport is not like education or health. Education and health are good to have for their own sake. Transport is just a means to an end. Ends such as accessing hospitals, schools and workplaces. As we saw during the Covid epidemic some educational services, some medical services and some paid work can accessed without using any transport at all!

    There is the idea of a “15 minute” city , where services so conveniently located that most people can access most of them within 15 minutes by walking, cycling or using public transport. In other words, reducing the amount of transport needed to access things.

    If more taxpayers’ money is to be pumped into Transport, every project needs to be examined to see how it decreases inequality, reduces CO2 emissions and improves public health. I don’t see the connection between making public transport free at the point of use and acheiving the best results for those three aims.

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