My contribution to the petrol crisis is to introduce National Live-Near-To-Work Day on the basis that if work is more than an hours' commute, either your workplace is in the wrong place or your house is.And while we're about it why can't we stick a few more carriages on all our (re-nationalised) trains, re-open the axed stations and reinstate the school bus system to minimise traffic? If the school bus was good enough for me, why isn't it good enough for today's precious little darlings?
Furthermore let's encourage every city and town to source as many of its goods and services locally as possible. It is ludicrous to have legions of salesmen and contractors chugging up and down the country farting fumes to offer services nationwide that could be provided more locally, greenly, and you would have thought cheaply, supporting their local economy into the bargain, (unless for extremely specialised products and services). Everyone and their dog for example sells office furniture and nearly all of it looks the same - why would anyone need to go too far afield for it?
And many of our continental cousins already have shared car lanes to encourage car sharing in the speediest most desirable lane of the highway - where are ours?
They also have more freight trains removing unnecessary haulage trucks off the roads. Where are ours?
Far from being an environmental purist, I rather enjoy driving, but I do feel we rely on our cars way too much and could try harder to reduce our number of car journeys. Being organised and getting as many errands done as possible on each journey also saves an amount of petrol I find.
The one positive aspect about being broke in the 'credit crunch' is at least it may force us to economise, automatically becoming greener and wasting less on every level, much though saving stuff and not consuming does not equate to 'sexy environmentalism' entailing the purchase of inflated eco-branded products.
My consultancy invoice is in the post Mr Brown! I think you'll find it's a fraction of what these overpriced transport infrastructure and economist fatcats charge!
*By the way I hereby decree this day a National Bank Holiday for househunting - for those who live an unsustainable distance from work!
A typical British railway line v a typical British road
