The 1990s paradigm shift - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 110

measures to achieve this would 'inevitably have to include increases in the relative
prices of energy and fuel'.
To many people there was a glaring contradiction between these general expressions
of support for reversing carbon emissions and the scale of traffic growth on which the
Roads for Prosperity programme was founded. The link was fudged by the Secretary of
State for Transport, Cecil Parkinson, who declared that 'it is not the Government's aim
to cater for all forecast demand in all circumstances', using city centres and commuting
to congested urban areas as rather lame examples (since few such proposals were
being contemplated anyway). By contrast he extolled the environmental merits of
investment in the strategic road network as a means of improving traffic flow and
diverting traffic off less suitable routes.
At the 1992 United Nations 'Earth Summit' Conference in Rio de Janeiro the British
Government signed the Convention on Climate Change which required greenhouse
gas emissions to be returned to their 1990 levels. The implications for transport policy
were potentially severe. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP)
published a report in 1994 which proposed that CO 2 emissions from surface transport
itself should be limited to the 1990 level by the year 2000 and to no more than 80% of
the 1990 level by 2020 (RCEP 1994).
As well as addressing individual environmental impacts the RCEP report took a
novel line in promoting the idea of an overall reduction in car travel as contributing to
an improved environment in a more general sense. The relevant objective was
to improve the quality of life , particularly in towns and cities, by reducing the
dominance of cars and lorries and providing alternative means of access.
In pursuit of this, and complementing the proposed reductions in CO 2 , the
Commission set out a number of challenging targets for the shares of the different
travel modes. To prompt the necessary mode shift it proposed that fuel duty should
be raised sufficient to double the pump price of petrol in real terms by 2005. It also
proposed that the trunk road programme should be reduced to the construction of
bypasses where local need existed, with the financial savings transferred to public
transport investment and local transport packages:
Our recommendations complement and reinforce each other and must be
viewed as a whole …. In order to have a substantial effect on the situation after
2000 action must start now and must be vigorously pursued. We have also had
constantly in mind the position after 2020. The need is to identify and adopt a
strategy which is likely to be sustainable for as far ahead as we can forsee …
(ibid. Chapter 14 para 107)
The vision shown by the Commission contrasted markedly with the absence of any
equivalent statement on transport by the Government. Meanwhile the Government
was able to plan on meeting its Rio commitment to (short-term) CO 2 reduction
without resort to 'draconian' action on car use by virtue of the improvements it
anticipated in the other main sources of emission, particularly electricity generation
(DOE et al. 1994). The difficulties posed by the concept of sustainable development
are nevertheless evident in some rather tortuous prose in the transport section of the
strategy: