Policy Research Media Morhamburn

I am aware that some of the not inconsiderable traffic on this site is being generated by people who’ve applied to work for Morhamburn wisely trying to work out if we are normal, logical human beings whose company they’d like to keep for the foreseeable future.

I may be about to blow it!

The problem is that one of the things we are asked to do is to question policy orthodoxy. You can only make a case for something if first you have the evidence to back it up and, second, you understand in detail all the arguments against.

For that reason we sometimes find ourselves examining whether the traditionally accepted arguments that underpin the budgets and laws of UK and EU legislatures are really so unassailable.

Before I go any further I would like to put on record that I am NOT a climate change denier. I believe it is happening, that the science and Al Gore are scary and that I cannot carry on forever belching CO₂ and various nasties into the atmosphere without someone else’s life – chances are someone who I’ll never meet – becoming very much less pleasant because of the extremes of weather or sea level that I have helped deliver.

Which is why I felt bad driving along the M8 motorway to Glasgow when there is an exceptionally good train service that I should have been taking instead. I also felt bad things towards the politicians who for years have declined to widen one of the busiest roads in Scotland so that there now isn’t the room for anyone to do more than 40mph, two car lengths from the car in front, for mile after mile.

The justification for not investing in making existing roads such as the M8 and A9 bigger has often been that the more roads you build the more people will fill them up with their cars (there’s also the small matter of having spent lots of the money already on Edinburgh’s trams and also the fact of the roads piggy bank being a wee bit empty generally at the moment).

The reason we want fewer people sitting alone in their cars when they could be on public transport is that the motorist’s carbon and pollution footprint is far greater than the train or bus passenger.

In spite of the environmental arguments, given the choice between jumping into their cars at their front doors and driving direct to their destination, or getting themselves to the bus/train and then from said bus/train to their destination, a lot of people would prefer to take their car.

Presumably, if you could stop cars from polluting then the remaining arguments for using public transport revolve around congestion and journey times. And, of course, you can work or read or snooze on a bus or train – none of which are encouraged when you are driving.

In 2012 one big French car manufacturer says it will have a complete fleet of fully electric cars. There will be little ones and big ones and each will be affordable and have a range in excess of one hundred miles between charges. If we reach and surpass targets as a nation for generation of electricity from renewable sources, then these cars will look pretty attractive in environmental terms.

So, given that the environmental argument against investing in building them will be much weakened within the next decade, will any politician be brave enough to start talking about investing in roads now?

[The views expressed by Morhamburn people in their blogs are theirs and theirs alone. they do not represent the thoughts of the company as a whole or our clients. If you have a comment to make on any blog, please email info@morahmburn.com and we’ll put the printable ones up on the website]