Government greenwash?

[Martin Cassini]

There is some good material in the DfT's grossly overdue Greener Future charter, but reform in one vital segment is missing. The segment accounts for a king-sized slice of the carbon cake. It is responsible for waste on a prodigious scale, and is run by unelected, unaccountable technocrats. It criminalises the citizenry, and turns our public realm into a stage set for conflict. The segment that needs reform? The traffic control system itself. It is built on a fatal flaw - directional priority - which imposes unequal rights on different road-users and makes roads dangerous in the first place. When things go wrong, the technocrats blame us, while they duck responsibility. Most of their high-tech, high-cost interventions are doomed attempts to solve problems which they originated or over which they preside. What we need is a change in culture, from priority to equality. This would enable all road-users to do what is natural, civilised, safe and sustainable: proceed carefully and filter, as is customary in all other walks of life. Only on the road must we fight for survival on an uneven playing-field, and compete for gaps and green time. Enabling drivers to glide through on opportunity, the FiT (filter in turn) solution would eliminate much of the wasteful stop-start drive cycle occasioned by traffic lights. Journey times, fuel use and emissions would fall, as quality of life and fellow feeling would soar. The electricity alone that's required to power our galaxy of 24-hour traffic lights produces 57,000 tonnes of CO2 every year. Add the manufacture, delivery, installation and maintenance costs, and is it surprising that polar bears are running out of ice? The carbon footprint of the traffic control industry is colossal, and the energy savings from cutting it down to size and freeing us to use commonsense to go about our business unmolested are correspondingly huge. On FiT Roads - Roads FiT for People - we wouldn't need to produce so much energy, so people's fuel bills could go down instead of up. Is anyone listening?