Towards a Sustainable Transport System

I attended a conference on a sustainable transport system today. There were politicians, civil servants, public servants, academics, campaigners and people representing companies and transport operators.

It was clear that whilst there was agreement about the threat of climate change there was a great deal of work to find a consensus on how meet that threat.

For example Tony Juniper from Friends of the Earth was hardly going to agree with Danny Bernstein from the Sustainable Aviation – a lobby group on behalf of the aviation industry. The important point is that they, and others, were talking.

We heard of the pressures: our population is increasing; we are, in general, getting materially richer; freight is expanding even faster; expectations are getting higher; and we are not investing sufficiently in our transport infrastructure.

All these pressures make the task of reaching the goal of an 80% reduction in climate change gases harder – but not unobtainable.