Real Progress on Transport – A Sustainable Transport Network

‘A coherent, revitalising plan, which doesn’t resort to the main parties’ default option: building more roads.’

- 10% road traffic reduction by 2010
- Public transport that’s cheaper than private motoring

Sitting motionless in your expensive, polluting coffin of a car? Endless signal failures and

delays making your daily commute a living hell? Exorbitant fares costing you a fortune?

The Greens are the only party to have really risen to the challenge of increasing demand for extensive mobility with a viable, effective, and sustainable approach which focuses on improved accessibility to facilities such as shops, work places, schools and health centres rather than increased mobility.

Green transport policy is a radical change in approach to transport provision. Complacent acceptance of endless queues, jams and signal failures would be a thing of the past under a Green Government with the aim of a ‘modal shift’ from car, lorry, and plane to other more sustainable forms of transport.

Reduce dependency on the car by improving public transport

The UK has the most extensive traffic congestion in Europe. The Government spends an estimated £43 billion per year on the direct and indirect costs of road transport, which accounts for more than 20% of UK greenhouse gas emissions. Britain's buses and railways, meanwhile, are some of the worst and most expensive in Europe, due to decades of neglect and damage by Labour and Tory governments. This situation can not be left to continue.

The Green Party would:

- Invest an extra £30 billion, raised via eco-taxes and scrapping the Government’s road-building programme, into rail, bus, cycle, and pedestrian transport improvements which give people realistic transport choices.

- Target a 10% road traffic reduction by 2010.

- Return Britain’s rail and underground networks to public ownership.

- Make using public transport cheaper than private motoring.

- Introduce trams and light rail into more cities, replacing millions of car journeys every year and creating over thousands of extra jobs.

- Ensure better planning of cities, placing pedestrians, cyclists and communities at the heart of planning decisions.

- Introduce a national Safe Routes to School programme, which would cut morning rush-hour traffic by 10%.

- Ensure that disabled people’s perspectives are taken into account, with a view to the public transport system becoming as inclusive as possible.

Factor in the true cost of motoring

Road fuel prices don't reflect the huge hidden costs of road transport – its contribution to climate change, pollution-related ill-health and so on - which amount to as much as £15 billion a year. Keeping fuel prices low is simply not a sustainable option – it’s incompatible with the need for action on climate change, but also it’s detrimental to British businesses as they are continually squeezed by competition from cheaper imports that wouldn’t be economically viable if fuel wasn’t so cheap.

The Green Party would:

- Reflect the huge hidden costs of road transport in progressively increased fuel taxes.

- Instigate overall tax reform that redistributes wealth downwards so that eco-taxes don't impact unfairly on poorer people; by scrapping the car tax disc and increasing petrol duty, we would actually reduce the annual costs of a typical small car owner.

- Extend, where appropriate, congestion charges and road pricing schemes.
Increase investment in renewable forms of energy.

Tackle air transport growth

Current levels of aviation demand are unsustainable. To make matters worse, 50% of flights in the EU are under 500km and the Department of Trade and Industry anticipate the demand for passenger flights to at least double in the next 20 years.

The Green Party would:

- End the Government’s £9 billion subsidy to the air industry.

- Encourage medium-distance journeys to be made by rail instead of air.

- Resist further expansion of UK airports.

- Seek early introduction of a Europe wide tax on aviation fuel; in the meantime we would introduce a tax on domestic flights and set limits on emissions from air traffic within the UK.