Clean air campaigners have said that the UK government must stop building roads to satisfy the growing “car addiction”. This is coming after three-quarters of transport projects announced by Liz Truss’s administration were road related.
According to reports, there are now 3.1m more private cars registered in Britain than 10 years ago, an increase of 11%, with cities outside London seeing the largest increase in car ownership.
This is even as Manchester is reported to have seen the largest percentage increase in private car registrations over the last 10 years, with 38,000 more cars on the road now than in 2012, a 25% rise.
The latest vehicle licensing statistics from the Department for Transport shows that there was a 19% increase in Glasgow over the decade and 18% in Nottingham, Liverpool and Leicester.
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Reports further show that 87 out of 117 (74%) transport infrastructure projects listed in In Kwasi Kwarteng’s doomed mini-budget “growth plan 2022” are related to road upgrades.
There are also growing signs that some senior Conservatives want to move away from Boris Johnson’s public and active transport agenda to refocus on the car, with speculation looming that HS2 may never reach Manchester.
Recall that at the Tory party conference this week, the influential Conservative mayor of the Tees Valley, Ben Houchen called for an end to the “villainisation” of car drivers and suggested that within 20 years we may not need trains and buses because of driverless cars.
Speaking at a fringe event hosted by Transport for the North (TfN) – a body set up to advocate primarily for public transport investment in the north of England – Houchen launched an impassioned defence of cars.
“I am a huge believer, a huge supporter, of the car. The automatic default that we’re trying to get people out of cars … does perplex me. I don’t see why we should be pushing people out of cars, I don’t see why we should be trying to drive the narrative that trains or buses or public transport are the right way to go,” he said.
At a reception for the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a think tank started by George Osborne after he left government, the new transport secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, began her speech by raving about all the roads being upgraded in the growth plan.
In her speech at the party conference, Truss laid into the Labour leader of Wales, Mark Drakeford, for “cancelling road-building projects and refusing to build the M4 relief road”.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
