The smart answer is to buy bicycles, and small cars just for when it's too far to pedal
I'M AFRAID it isn't good news. If you run a car you're going to pay, and if you haven't you're probably going to pay as well.
This July's Transport Strategy White Paper looks set to recommend a range of measures aimed (depending on who you talk to) at getting us to use our cars less, or at extorting yet more money out of Britain's motoring middle-classes.
Proposals so far aired by Ministers include urban road pricing, taxing the provision of company car parking, giving road tax discounts on small economical cars and increases for larger cars, and revising the planning regulations to discourage out-of-town developments far from bus and train links.
Good news? Few would disagree that Britain's traffic jams are getting worse or that city smog is perilous. And at last year's Kyoto Earth Summit Britain signed up to reduce its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by around 20 per cent to reduce global warming. So will any of these measures help? Yes, and er. . . no.
A by-product of burning any fossil fuel is CO2, but only three per cent of the total yearly worldwide CO2 emissions come from mankind, and 10 per cent of that three per cent are from cars. Clearly, then, reducing car use will have a limited effect on global warming.
Inner city smog levels will certainly benefit from fewer cars. Hydrocarbons, carbon monoxides and oxides of nitrogen create grey, photochromic smog, contribute to global warming, and are implicated in lung disorders. Catalytic converters have helped to clean car exhausts in recent years, but there are still some 14 million cars on Britain's roads without them. This has not gone unnoticed at the Department of Transport, Environment and the Regions.
Retro-fitted (as opposed to factory-fitted) cats have been discussed, as have Government incentives to scrap old cars. It seems likely, however, that natural wastage of old bangers, together with the banning of leaded four-star fuel in 2000, will speed their replacement with modern, safer and more environmental vehicles.
But will Government measures reduce city traffic jams? Difficult one, this. Take London: Just over a million people commute into the centre each day. Public transport carries around 75 per cent of them (nationwide, the equivalent figure is 13 per cent) and just 16 per cent go by car (nationwide the figure is nearly 70 per cent).
London's public transport is stretched already, and is not capable of carrying 160,000 disbarred motorists as well at peak times. If you take the country as a whole, though, the situation is reversed; the problem is how to fill those expensive empty bus and train seats.
It is a subtle game of supply and demand and carrot-and-stick. With train fares set to rise to pay for much-needed modernisation, a Government wanting to discourage car use will have to increase the cost of car use by a commensurate amount - maybe more.
So what can concerned motorists do to reduce their environmental effect? The smart answer is to buy bicycles and small modern petrol-engined cars with very good fuel consumption which they drive only when it is too far to pedal and there is no reasonably-priced efficient public transport alternative.
"Diesels," to quote one industry insider, "are economical, but their tail-pipe emissions are more scary than you want to know."
The main problem is that the more modern and efficient the diesel engine, the smaller it chops up the exhaust particulates, and the more likely they are to work their way to the bottom of your lungs.
There is a school of thought which holds that if you already own a car, you should consider keeping it on the road, since the environmental cost of building it is already spent. This makes even more sense if you convert to a favoured "environmental" fuel, like liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
The Queen recently converted the cars in the Royal Mews to dual-fuel petrol/LPG operation. The outlay is around £1,500 per car.
