We are not entitled to private cars - Cutting fossil fuels

THE Cabinet row over whether motorists using electric cars might be, along with Michael O’Leary’s taxi, allowed use city bus lanes is reassuring in that it means these issues are on something like an active agenda. 

However, the Department of Transport’s opposition to this modest proposal suggests a dangerous disconnect from the urgency of these matters. We need to grasp every last opportunity to reduce our impact on our life-sustaining climate and encourage the difficult cultural changes we have to embrace in the coming years.

The proposal must be — hopefully — just one of many under consideration about how the destructive pollution generated by transport might be reduced. However, compared to some of the plans adopted across Europe the idea of allowing motorists use bus lanes if they drive an electric car, extended tax breaks, and/or free parking for electric cars are small cheese — if not unintentionally counterproductive in that they support the idea we can always enjoy private motoring in large cities. The bus-lane proposal seems, at best, an interim one, kicking the car instead of the can down that infamous road built on a foundation of politically convenient deferral.

Paris, London, Madrid, and Hamburg — and the Great City on the outskirts of Chengdu in China, and Masdar near Abu Dhabi — are some of the cities with far more radical plans to reduce if not entirely ban private cars in the short term. Oslo has joined that list by announcing it will ban all private cars from their centre within three years. The Norwegian capital’s announcement is part of a political initiative to halve the city’s emissions before the end of the decade. As well as creating a no-car zone, Oslo will build at least 65km of cycling paths, impose peak-time levies on top of today’s congestion fees and completely close parking spaces. These initiatives, coupled with the city’s move to drop fossil fuel investments from pension funds, are all part of a plan to slash emissions culminating in a fossil-fuel free city by 2050.

Even if you leave the inevitable lobbying by the oil and motor industries aside, lobbying that will make the last stand of the tobacco conglomerates in Europe seem like a Halloween party at a creche, it is hard to imagine we might be, or even feel the need to be, so ambitious. Our neglect of public transport, our aversion to using it, and our unshakeable belief that we are entitled to use a private car how and when we wish, as well as urban planning that encourages these ideas, locks many of our urban centres in the past and makes them difficult and reluctant to adapt to a changing world. That so many children are driven to school embeds this self-destructive attitude from a very early age.

As the Independent TD Danny Healy-Rae, a man yet to accept our role in climate change, said in the Dáil yesterday, electric cars still have limited range but that will change. Once upon a time it took several days to walk the Kerry road from Kilgarvan to Cork’s Butter Market but technology has resolved that problem, but by so doing it has given us another: How do we manage the destructive impact of transport in a way that will have a minimal impact on our way of life.