In Town Without My Car Day

My company took part in In Town Without My Car Day today, organised by our local council as part of European Mobility Week. The idea is you try to avoid bringing your car to work and explore alternative means of transport. Bus fares have been reduced for the day to encourage more people to use public transport, and buses from the "park and ride" scheme are free.

I have been impressed by the number of people who have entered into the spirit of this, especially one colleague who spent more on a train ticket than she spends on petrol for the entire week normally, to make a journey which started and 6.30 am and took twice as long as driving! There are plenty of bikes parked in our lobby, too. Altogether, half the 48 people who came to our office today did so without using their car - and we saved as much CO2 as a 32inch TV would create if used for two hours per day for three years, about 75Kg.

Today's event is a great way to draw attention to the fact that it is possible to leave your car at home, but I'm not sure that anybody found their journey either quicker or cheaper by public transport. Bus fares here are pretty high and the service fairly patchy. I doubt whether many people will continue to travel in the way they did today - but at least it gets the debate going.

Waterways revival

As a river and canal enthusiast, I've always wondered why they fell out of favour as a means of transport. So I'm delighted by news that Britain's waterways are emjpoying a renaissance as some of the UK's biggest transport firms migrate from tarmac to water. Many of our major towns and cities are located on rivers or canals - indeed the canals were created to link major industrial centres during the industrial revolution - so there's a readymade infrastructure there. And thanks to the efforts of volunteers and enthusiasts, most of the canals that had fallen into neglect and decay have already been restored to a navigable state. Companies already moving some goods by water include Sainsbury, Tesco, DHL and even the nation's favourite trucker Eddie Stobart. Tesco expects to to have saved an estimated 3,500 lorry movements by the end of 2008.

However, the rejuventation of water freight won't all be plain sailing. A proposal to build a commercial wharf near Heathrow, which would have saved tens of thousands of lorry journeys around the M25 or through central London, was recently shelved. Meanwhile, former wharves are being sold off for waterfront homes. In fact, so many of London's wharves have been sold off to developers that those that do remain have protected status; a plan to extend this protection to the rest of the country is awaiting government's response. The regulatory body which oversees the canal network, British Waterways, was founded to support their use for leisure and heritage use and a revival of their use as a transport network would require a major change of its focus and remit. In short, whilst the freight companies recognise the opportunity to cut their carbon - and their costs - by moving goods on water, the government and regulatory bodies are not rising to the challenge. Whilst we continue to subsidise the road network, the potential to revive the waterways as a transport network will probably never be realised.