After all the election excitement, I’ve been enjoying some glorious (if skint) ‘resting’ time over the past few weeks, getting some fresh air in the Lake District and having long lunches with everyone I’ve not seen in months.
Last week, I went to a preview screening of a new film about climate change called ‘The Age of Stupid’. Part sci-fi, part impressive documentary, this is a much more interesting piece of work than Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. My colleague Jim Killock has reviewed the film properly, and I’d encourage everyone, from teachers to trekkies, to see it.
And of course I couldn’t stay away from campaigning for long. This week, I have helped launch a new cross-party, cross-NGO initiative to ask Boris Johnson what the dickens he’s going to do about greener transport in London.
There was so little information on this subject provided during his election campaign that campaign group London Living Streets was forced to leave a blank space next to Johnson’s name under two of their policy areas when they compared the candidates for Mayor in April. With admirable understatement they concluded, “Living Streets is disappointed at the lack of policies on this issue”.
The key problem with all this vagueness is that it’s very unclear how he’s going to balance the transport budget, when most of his published plans actually involve taking vital money out of Transport for London’s revenue stream.
Add up the cost of cancelling the CO2 Charge scheme (£50m a year), ditching the Western Extension (£65m), cancelling the deal with Venezuela that gave people on income support half-price fares (£16m) and swapping bendy buses for a newly designed and built routemaster (think of a large number, then double it), and you get a very big fiscal hole indeed. In the absence of a magic wand, this can only be filled with cuts to other programmes or by higher fares.
Green transport activists are now understandably worried that our favourite schemes, among them the £50 million a year cycling budget, walking initiatives, school and workplace travel plans, the Paris-style bike scheme and the hybrid bus programme, are going to see red lines drawn through them in the near future. Along with the loss of the CO2 Charge, all this could spell real problems for air quality and road safety, and put a stop to people in London switching from cars to public transport, walking and cycling.
Given the excellent progress we’ve seen since 2000 in all these areas except the stubborn problem of air quality, this is all very worrying. So, please join us in writing to Boris and asking him how he’s going to sort this mess out – you can download a stylish letter from the 4×4 campaign’s website.
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