Average speed cameras should be installed on more motorways and urban routes, and automatic speed controllers fitted to cars - all in the name of reducing the UK's carbon footprint, says the tax-payer funded Sustainable Development Commission.
A new 64-page SDC 'quango' report issued today entitled 'Smarter Moves' calls for a raft of anti-motoring measures, some of which we've listed below. If your Monday isn't miserable enough already, you can find the full report on the SDC website.
Call us biased if you will (and we won't deny it!), but a quick scan of the report's contents reveals a painfully predictable document that rehashes many of the narrow-minded arguments of the anti-motoring lobby. In fact it's all so depressingly familiar that we're staggered the SDC thinks it can justify the tax-payer cash it has expended on putting the report together at all.
From our brief acquaintance with it, the report is entirely one-sided and seems to have taken no evidence from the automotive industry itself. In fact the author/s appear blind to how technological advances are already reducing CO2 tailpipe (and whole life) emissions from the cars we are driving.
You may imagine how our despond deepened to read that one of the SDC's report's recommendations is the formation of a new 'Sustainable Mobility Innovation and Growth Team' for the nation to chuck more of its budget deficit at...
'Highlights' of the Smarter [sic] Moves report recommendations:
- The Department for Transport, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to sponsor an ICT Enabled Sustainable Mobility Innovation and Growth Team.
- Work with the Highways Agency to enforce motorway speed limits through the use of average speed camera technology
- Encourage the use of average speed camera technology to better enforce urban speed limits
- Accelerate actions to enable the widespread introduction of voluntary Intelligent Speed Adaptation technology, setting out a clear timetable for implementation of the recommendations made in the joint Commission for Integrated Transport/Motorists' Forum report.
- Consider further trials of Intelligent Speed Adaptation, fitting units to ministerial and other Government Car and Despatch Agency vehicles. If successful, the technology should be rolled out to all government, public sector and public transport operator's vehicles.
- Monitor and report on the level of public awareness of the benefits of eco-driving and further raise awareness through the "Act on CO2" campaign.
- Ensure all public sector employees who drive a vehicle as part of their job are given eco-driver training.
- Put in place actions to accelerate the growth of car clubs, working with Carplus and local authorities to identify and overcome barriers to growth.
- Department for Transport to encourage more efficient road network utilisation through better use of parking controls, tolls and road pricing.
- The Department for Transport to revise transport funding arrangements to allow local authorities increased flexibility between revenue and capital funding.