By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 28th September 2012

When politicians say that we need more runways and more airports, they invariably claim that “the economy” depends on them. They seldom specify what they mean by this, but in most cases they seem to have business flights in mind.

Both Tim Yeo and George Osborne – two of the people within the Conservative party who have been pushing hardest for expansion – suggest that main economic benefit of greater airport capacity will be more business flights. In the article in which he asked David Cameron whether he was a man or mouse, the MP Tim Yeo proposed that a third runway at Heathrow was essential “to kick-start Britain’s sluggish economy … by boosting trade with China”. The sub-heading insisted that “a third runway at Heathrow could be the start of a desperately needed programme to make Britain the most business-friendly country in Europe.”

The government’s draft Aviation Policy Framework is remarkably vague on this point. While making generalised statements about the supposed benefits, it makes no attempt to calculate the economic impacts of business travel, or to explain the economic case for expanding airport capacity in order to facilitate it.

Perhaps this is unsurprising. Business travel, by contrast to popular perceptions, is not rising, but falling – and falling dramatically.

A report by the government’s Health Protection Agency reveals a 25% decline in business flights since 2000. Sure, there has been a recession during this period, but the decline is much sharper than the fall in business profits or the reduction in the size of the economy.

(Thanks to Ed Gillespie of Futerra for pointing me to this report).

The figures suggest two things:

- that business flights are seen by many companies as a luxury, not a necessity: they are among the first items to be cut when conditions tighten.

- that companies have begun, at last, to use the excellent technological alternatives to face-to-face international meetings.

As Lloyds Bank explains:

“In 2009, we introduced a common travel policy across the organisation which supports a focus on sustainable travel. It helped us deliver a reduction of 143,000 journeys compared with 2008. Across the combined Group, the volume of teleconferences increased by 40% to over 1.1 million in 2009. We also increased the volume of teleconferences by 73% in 2010 compared with 2009, to 1.9 million.”

For many businesses, cutting the number of flights their staff take saves money, saves time and improves performance, as their employees are less likely to be exhausted.

So Yeo, Osborne and others are calling for airports to expand in order to serve a sector that’s shrinking, and shrinking for good reasons.

Only 12% of the visits abroad by UK residents, the report shows, take place for business purposes. The great majority (66%) are used for holidays, and a smaller proportion (20%) for visiting friends and relatives.

Another survey, by the British Air Transport Association, shows that, of flights in 2010, 77% were taken by people in socio-economic classes A, B and C1. Only 8% were taken by people in classes D and E, though they comprise 24% of the population.

The proportion of poorer people flying has remained unchanged since 1999 (when the figures begin), despite the steady increase in airport capacity since that date. The richer you are, the more often you are likely to fly, and the more likely you are to be a beneficiary of airport expansion. There’s nothing surprising about this: the rich can afford more foreign holidays than the poor.

In other words, the construction of new runways and new airports, which can devastate the lives of those who live under flight paths (who are likely disproportionately to be poor, as they cannot afford to move away) and which, through climate change, will devastate lives all over the world, will primarily facilitate holidays for people in the richer half of the population. The typical beneficiary is someone whose frequent visits to their second home in Tuscany or their favourite beach in Thailand will become quicker and more convenient.

The two most common justifications for expanding airport capacity are that it makes this country more “business friendly” and that it enables a higher proportion of poorer people to fly. Both justifications turn out to be false. More airports will enable people like Tim Yeo and George Osborne to enjoy more foreign holidays; they will not deliver the other benefits these people invoke.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 6th October 2011

The money has run out, or so we keep being told. There are no funds left for any but essential projects: the frontline services and the capital spending which cannot be deferred. Councils in particular are desperate for cash: so desperate that they are having to cut everything from libraries to residential care homes, Sure Start centres to Citizens’ Advice Bureaux. Every month they have to make horrible decisions whose consequences will damage people’s lives.

So why are these same cash-strapped councils now intending, alongside central government, to spend £897m on new roads, some of which were first proposed decades ago, but which were deemed unnecessary even when cash was abundant? And why is the government minded to approve this spending?

I mentioned these weird priorities in my column this week, but I didn’t have space to spell out the full implications of the new road-building programme. What is happening here should provoke equal outrage among those who oppose the cuts, those who want to protect the environment and those who are still waiting for the rational, integrated transport system we were promised 15 years ago.

To receive government approval for their major transport schemes, this year local authorities have submitted them to something called the development pool. The Department for Transport then decides which ones should be funded. It now has a shortlist of “best and final funding bids” and will make its decisions in December. If you want to comment on any of these bids, you have until 14 October to do so.

The Campaign for Better Transport has worked through these applications and found schemes first proposed during the bad old days of the last Conservative government, which slashed public transport and started what it called the “biggest road-building programme since the Romans”. That ground to a halt in the face of some of the most widespread and determined protests the country has seen in the past half-century.

Among the development pool bids are some useful schemes, which will boost employment, take pressure off the roads and meet economic needs without trashing the environment. They include some sensible, small-scale public transport projects. But, the campaign’s analysis shows, by far the largest section of the bids is for new roads, many of which will do little but provide lucrative contracts for construction companies.

Some of them have been fiercely opposed by local people for years. Here are a few examples:

The Bexhill-Hastings link road: 6km in length. £86m.

The Norwich Northern distributor route: 14km, £113m.

The Kingskerswell bypass in Devon: 6km, £108m.

The South Bristol link road: 5km, £43m.

The Lincoln Eastern Bypass, 8km, £96m.

The cost of these roads will be shared between the government and the council promoting them. Any overruns will have to be met by the council. If previous form is anything to go by, these extra costs could be stupendous. The Campaign for Better Transport has calculated the overruns for 19 recently completed bypass projects. It found that the average starting cost of these roads was £20m. The average final cost was £33m.

Here are the job cuts being made by the councils part-funding the five unpopular schemes I’ve mentioned:

East Sussex County Council, which wants to build the Bexhill to Hastings road, is cutting 200 jobs.

Norfolk County Council, pushing the Norwich Northern distributor route, is cutting 750 jobs.

Devon County Council and Torbay unitary authority, promoting the Kingskerswell Bypass, are cutting 1740 jobs.

North Somerset Council and Bristol City Council, hoping to build the South Bristol link road, are cutting 870 jobs.

Lincolnshire County Council, lobbying for the Lincoln eastern bypass, is cutting 2000 jobs.

All of these county councils are also making sweeping cuts to their funding of bus services, in order to save money. So two things are happening. Vast sums are being squandered on road schemes which will simply shunt the congestion problem on to the next bottleneck – by councils cutting a wide variety of essential services. And a massive reallocation of cash is taking place from public transport to private transport.

For a number of good reasons, these roads were not funded when the country was swimming in cash. So why, when we’re now so short, are they being put forward, and favoured?

It seems that the door to new roads has swung open again. The Conservatives have long had an interest in getting people off public transport and into cars. Public transport is often unionised. It pools resources and encourages social mixing and collective action. Car driving, by contrast, isolates us from other people and encourages us to see society – pedestrians, bicycles, other cars, speed limits, traffic calming – as an obstacle. The car drives us to the right. It is a powerful but overlooked agent of political change.

But aside from the political gains, this is madness. Oil isn’t getting any cheaper or any more abundant. There’s a desperate need to switch to public transport to take the pressure off the roads and off the environment. The money we should be spending on essential services is being frittered away on projects which could defer but cannot solve our national transport problems.

Even as the government intends to build more roads, it intends to excuse new developments, through its disastrous national planning policy framework, from the obligation to minimise congestion and the need to travel, except where the impacts are “severe”: a term it fails to define. One government department will build more roads, ostensibly to relieve congestion. Another will exacerbate congestion by loading the roads with more cars. And these, mind, are the people who claim to be the champions of fiscal responsibility.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 6th August 2011

What distinguishes the BBC from the rest of this country’s media? There’s the lack of advertising, and the lack of a proprietor with specific business interests to defend. But perhaps the most important factor is its editorial guidelines, which are supposed to ensure that the corporation achieves “the highest standards of due accuracy and impartiality and strive[s] to avoid knowingly and materially misleading our audiences.”

Here’s a few of the things they say:

“Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.”

“We will be rigorous in establishing the truth of the story and well informed when explaining it. Our specialist expertise will bring authority and analysis to the complex world in which we live.”

“We will be open in acknowledging mistakes when they are made and encourage a culture of willingness to learn from them.”

Woe betide the producer or presenter who breaches these guidelines. Unless, that is, they work for Top Gear. If so, they are permitted to drive a coach and horses – or a Hummer H3 – through them whenever they please.

Take, for example, Top Gear’s line on electric cars. Casting aside any pretence of impartiality or rigour, it has set out to show that electric cars are useless. If the facts don’t fit, it bends them until they do.

It’s currently being sued by Tesla after claiming, among other allegations, that the Roadster’s true range is only 55 miles per charge (rather than 211), and that it unexpectedly ran out of charge. Tesla says “the breakdowns were staged and the statements are untrue.” But the BBC keeps syndicating the episode to other networks. So much for “acknowledging mistakes when they are made”.

Now it’s been caught red-handed faking another trial, in this case of the Nissan LEAF.

At the end of July, an episode of Top Gear showed Jeremy Clarkson and James May setting off for Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire, 60 miles away. The car unexpectedly ran out of charge when they got to Lincoln, and had to be pushed. They concluded that “electric cars are not the future”.

But it wasn’t unexpected: Nissan has a monitoring device in the car which transmits information on the state of the battery. This shows that, while the company delivered the car to Top Gear fully-charged, the programme-makers ran the battery down before Clarkson and May set off, until only 40% of the charge was left. Moreover, they must have known this, as the electronic display tells the driver how many miles’ worth of electricity they have, and the sat-nav tells them if they don’t have enough charge to reach their destination. In this case it told them – before they set out on their 60-mile journey – that they had 30 miles’ worth of electricity. But, as Ben Webster of the Times reported earlier this week, “at no point were viewers told that the battery had been more than half empty at the start of the trip.”

It gets worse. As Webster points out, in order to stage a breakdown in Lincoln, “it appeared that the Leaf was driven in loops for more than ten miles in Lincoln until the battery was flat.”

When Jeremy Clarkson was challenged about this, he admitted that he knew the car had only a small charge before he set out. But, he said, “That’s how TV works”. Not on the BBC it isn’t, or not unless your programme is called Top Gear.

Top Gear’s response, by its executive producer Andy Wilman, is a masterpiece of distraction and obfuscation. He insists that the programme wasn’t testing the range claims of the vehicles, and nor did it state that the vehicles wouldn’t achieve their claimed range. But the point is that it creates the strong impression that the car ran out of juice unexpectedly, leaving the presenters stranded in Lincoln, a city with no public charging points.

Yes, this is an entertainment programme, yes it’s larking about, and sometimes it’s very funny. But none of this exempts it from the BBC’s guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts.

The issue is made all the more potent by the fact that Top Gear has a political agenda. It’s a mouthpiece for an extreme form of libertarianism and individualism. It derides attempts to protect the environment, and promotes the kind of driving that threatens other people’s peace and other people’s lives. It often creates the impression that the rules and restraints which seek to protect us from each other are there to be broken.

This is dangerous territory. Boy racers, in many parts of the countryside, are among the greatest hazards to local people’s lives. Where I live, in rural mid-Wales, the roads are treated as race tracks. Many of the young lads who use them compete to see who can clock up the fastest speeds on a given stretch. The consequences are terrible: a series of hideous crashes involving young men and women driving too fast, which kill other people or maim them for life. In the latest horror, just down the road from where I live, a young man bumped another car through a fence and into a reservoir. Four of the five passengers drowned.

Of course I’m not blaming only Top Gear for this, but it plays a major role in creating a comfort zone within which edgy driving is considered acceptable, even admirable. Top Gear’s political agenda also persists in stark contradiction to BBC rules on impartiality.

So how does it get away with it? It’s simple. It makes the BBC a fortune. Both the 15th and 16th series of Top Gear were among the top 5 TV programmes sold internationally by BBC Worldwide over the last financial year.

Another section of the editorial guidelines tells us that “our audiences should be confident that our decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures”. But in this case we can’t be. I suggest that it is purely because of commercial pressures that Top Gear is allowed to rig the evidence, fake its trials, pour petrol over the BBC’s standards and put a match to them. The money drives all before it.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 20th May 2011

The experiment is over and the results are in. In April, Thames Valley police switched Oxfordshire’s speed cameras back on. They had been off for eight months, as a result of the government’s decision to cut the road safety grant. Then the police began assessing the damage. In the 31 days before the cameras were switched off (July 2010), the machines caught 2,286 speeding motorists. In the 30 days after they were switched back on, they caught 5,917.

As many residents of the county complained, between July 2010 and April 2011, Oxfordshire became a racetrack. The effect of the switch-off seems to have been felt far from the camera sites: as soon as motorists received the message that they were unlikely to get caught speeding anywhere in the county, they appear to have felt empowered to drive recklessly everywhere. Or so a more important set of figures might suggest.

In the eight months without cameras, there were 18 deaths on the roads in Oxfordshire, compared to 12 in the same period in the previous year. This was the first time the number of deaths on the county’s roads had risen in four years. Serious injuries rose from 160 to 179.

These are not just numbers: they are real people; some dead, some who will have to live with devastating injuries for the rest of their lives. Reading the contents of websites which celebrate excessive speed – pistonheads.com for example – you would think it was just a game: evading the police, vandalising cameras, using clever lawyers to avoid getting fined. It’s not. The consequences are real and horrible.

So far, the sample size is too small and the period too short to be sure that the deaths and injuries around the county are linked to the switch-off. The experiment would have to run for longer and be conducted over a wider area. Any volunteers?

Perversely, there are plenty. Undeterred by the results of Oxfordshire’s grisly experiment, Staffordshire has now switched off almost half its cameras, for the same reason: a lack of funds, caused by the government’s determination to end the mythical construct it calls “the war on the motorist”. What it is really doing is allowing speeding motorists to conduct a war against everyone else: cyclists, pedestrians, children on their way to school, other drivers.

Worse still, the destruction of speed cameras by people who describe themselves as vigilantes continues unabated. Sixteen of Lincolnshire’s 52 cameras, for example, have been destroyed by vandalism, in many cases by fire. In the Scottish borders, 19 have been burnt out since 2004. These acts are raucously celebrated on the boy racer sites.

Here’s what a spokesman for the Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership had to say about one of these burnings:

“That camera is protecting the standing traffic that mounts up at the A57 roundabout. At certain times of the day the traffic is backed up and people come down the hill at high speed and run on a bit. The idea of the speed camera is to slow them down so they can stop in time for the standing traffic that’s ahead of them. And to burn that camera is just crazy – they’re putting people’s lives at risk by doing this.”

So why are people burning cameras? Because journalists and others have promulgated a powerful and dangerous myth: that speed cameras are useless, and exist only to tax the public.

It doesn’t matter how often or how comprehensively this myth is disproved. A study for the Department for Transport, involving more rigorous scientific methods than those just deployed by Thames Valley Police, shows that 19% fewer people were killed or seriously injured at accident black spots after speed cameras were introduced, above and beyond the general decline in accidents on the roads.

As for the stealth taxation story, the last figures I’ve seen, from 2010, suggest that the cameras cost slightly more to run than they make. The Treasury took £85-80m in revenues, with an outlay of £110m a year. This may have changed by now. (Why shouldn’t reckless driving be taxed?).

Yet speed cameras are a much cheaper means of preventing speeding than any other. The Department for Transport reports a cost-benefit ratio of 2.7:1. The House of Commons Transport Committee found that “a more cost effective measure for reducing speeds and casualties has yet to be introduced.”

But never mind the facts: the tabloid myth is what the people who have been snapped by the cameras want to hear. Instead of being a danger to the public, they are, journalists tell them, innocent victims of a government mugging.

At times the press coverage is so extreme that it amounts to blatant incitement. Here’s what Jeremy Clarkson wrote in the Sun in 2007.

“As I drove down the M20 into Kent last Monday, I noticed that most of the speed cameras had been burned out by vandals. This is disgusting. It is ridiculous, criminal and stupid that the person who savaged these life-saving devices should target the M20 … and then stop. Why did you not keep right on going? I can think of six cameras on my way home that would be immeasurably improved with a spot of petrol and a match.”

(Source: Jeremy Clarkson, 21st July 2007. Speed cameras have been burned out by vandals. The Sun.)

It looks like good clean fun, as Sarah Palin’s placing of a gunsight over the state of Arizona did, until Gabrielle Giffords got shot. Incitement, particularly incitement which supports a false story that people want to hear, can have consequences.

More insidious than Clarkson’s have been the efforts of Christopher Booker, who, through a grossly misleading use of statistics, has tried to suggest that speed cameras make the roads more dangerous. Writing in the Telegraph with Richard North in 2007, he maintained that a sharp decline in the death rate on the roads suddenly slowed down in the mid-1990s.

They attributed this to the government’s attempt to enforce speed limits with cameras. But they failed to mention that deaths started falling sharply again in 2003, after the number of speed cameras had doubled in three years.

Similarly, they tried to argue that there was no evidence that cameras have reduced deaths even at the spots where they are deployed, on the grounds that the government had failed to account for a statistical effect called regression to the mean. The truth, they maintain, is that “speed cameras actually increased” the rate of accidents. What they failed to tell their readers is that the government had accounted for regression to the mean, and still found an average reduction of 19% for collisions which caused deaths or injuries after speed cameras had been installed.

I was reminded of this over the weekend, by Booker’s pathetic attempt to justify yet another of his false claims in the Sunday Telegraph. Uniquely, as far as I can tell, two articles of his have been the subject of a long section of a High Court judgement, which damned his journalism as “unbalanced, inaccurate and just plain wrong.”

Like all propaganda that tells people what they want to hear, Booker’s false claims are likely to change or reinforce people’s behaviour. So are Clarkson’s and those of all the other journalists who tell people that they can act as they wish, regardless of their impact on others. The rest of us have a duty to try to correct them.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 9th March 2011

Should we reduce the speed limit to cut oil consumption? Should we impose new taxes on the banks? Should we stop hawking weapons in the Middle East? The answer in all these cases is obvious, but none of these reforms will happen until we’ve brave enough to tackle vested interests.

Earlier this week, Spain reduced the speed limit on its motorways by 10kph. The British government should follow it, and then go further. Here’s why.

It’s taken a while – many years of denial and obfuscation in fact – but at last both the British government and the International Energy Agency are catching up with what campaigners have been saying for years: that petroleum cannot last forever, global demand is rising and there will soon come a point at which supply can no longer match it. A few years ago, disruption in a second-tier producer like Libya (1.8m barrels per day) would scarcely have caused a ripple. Today it spreads near-panic among the consumer nations.

The capacity of Saudi Arabia, the world’s great swing producer, to raise supply is lower than it was, even last year. The Wikileaks cables appeared to confirm a warning that some of us have been issuing for a long time, that the kingdom, in common with other OPEC producers, has wildly overstated its reserves.

The era of cheap and easy oil is long gone: future supplies will come from riskier and more destructive operations: in deep seas (to the west of the Shetland islands, for example, the British government encourages prospecting in places just as deep as, and much rougher than the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig); in the Arctic, in the rainforests. Already we are beginning to switch to supplies so dirty – such as Canadian tar sands – that they make ordinary production look green. So do we try to conserve what little remains, and use it as wisely as possible? Do we stop banging our heads against the wall?

If you listen to the petrolheads, who regard any restriction on how and where we drive as a gross intrusion on their human rights, the answer is no: we must bang our heads harder and faster, preferably on pebbledash. To hell with such piffling concerns as global supply: we should live fast and die faster. Or live fast and then roll to an embarrassing halt. Homo sapiens sapiens this isn’t.

Listening to their inflated rhetoric, you’d think lower speed limits were the end of the world. (These are the same people, let me remind you, who call the greens alarmists). Then you remember that, for 13 years following the first oil shock (1974-1987), those commie eco-terrorist bunny huggers who ran, er, the US government lowered that nation’s speed limits to a maximum of 55mph. It didn’t exactly reduce the US to a third world country, did it?

Despite the government’s professed rediscovery of the environmental agenda in the past few days, it’s not likely to happen here in a hurry. Just a fortnight ago Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, suggested the opposite: that we should raise the top speed limit from 70 to 80mph, thus rushing us even faster towards the oil crisis. And the government seems to be allergic to enforcing existing speed limits, let alone reducing them.

But here’s what would happen if we brought down the limits in the UK (I’d suggest 60mph on the motorways, 50 on trunk roads, 20 in residential areas). We would reduce both national imports of oil (improving the balance of payments) and our own household bills. We’d reduce pressure on global supplies. We’d cut our production of carbon dioxide. The UK Energy Research Centre found that cars produce almost 10% less carbon dioxide at 60mph than they do at 70. By reducing the motorway speed limit to 60 – and enforcing it – the UK would save some 7 million tonnes of CO2 (1.9Mt of carbon) per year.

There would be fewer accidents, and fewer consequences when they happen. The roads would be quieter – as slow cars make less noise than fast ones – reducing stress levels. And life, perhaps, would be a little gentler, a little less frantic, as we stopped stampeding towards the next traffic jam. This is the hideous fate that awaits us if we reduce our speed limits. Terrified yet?

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 4th January 2011

Where is this famous war on the motorist? Can anyone point me to the battlefields, the graves of the war dead, the statues commemorating the unknown driver? Who has been waging it and when was it fought?

What I see is that driving has become cheaper over the past three decades, while other forms of transport have become more expensive. That the space dedicated to cars – both on the roads and for parking – has expanded, often at the expense of other kinds of public space. That there is precious little enforcement of either the speed limit or of other rules – such as parking on the pavement in residential areas. That when someone is killed or injured as a result of careless driving, the penalties are tiny, if there is any punishment at all. As a result, motorists are able to take space – and even life – away from people pursuing other activities.

The only places in which you can see what looks like the outcome of a war are hospital wards which treat people with terrible injuries inflicted by poorly regulated drivers. But in this case the “war” is being waged by motorists against pedestrians and cyclists.

The two men who have just announced that they will “end the war on the motorist” – Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, and Eric Pickles, the communities secretary – are living in a dream world. Or, perhaps more accurately, a media world, in which the fantasies of the rightwing tabloids are treated as if they were reality.

Yesterday they said that they are “removing national planning restrictions put in place in 2001 that required councils to limit the number of parking spaces allowed in new residential developments and set high parking charges to encourage the use of alternative modes of transport.”

http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/newsroom/1809347

There are two obvious and immediate outcomes. The first is that there will be less space for housing. Land is finite, and development land is in short supply. This means that there’s a pay-off between the amount on which you can build and the amount on which you can park. Pickles and Hammond seem to be putting the demand for second and third cars over the need for new housing. Either housing sprawls over an ever wider area of countryside (which, incidentally, makes people even more dependent on their cars) or less of it can be accommodated on existing sites.

The second is that there will be less money for local authorities, which means that services must be cut even further. Parking fees are an important part of many councils’ revenues – something has to go.

But the wider impacts are just as important. This is about private interests trumping the public interest, about allowing people to pursue their desires, regardless of the cost to society. It’s about championing the freedom to act, while ignoring the other kind of freedom: freedom from other people’s actions. If “the war on the motorist” means the puny and half-hearted measures designed to ensure that drivers couldn’t push everyone else out of the way, the government announcement that it has come to an end means that we will lose any hope of ensuring that transport is built around the needs of society. Instead, all other human life will have to make way for the car.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 27th July 2010

In every other sector, Conservatives insist that it is daft for human beings to do the work machines could do. In every other instance they demand that police officers be freed from mindless tasks to spend more time preventing serious crime. In all other cases they urge more rigorous enforcement of the law. On every other occasion they insist that local authorities should raise revenue and make their schemes pay for themselves. But it all goes into reverse when they are exposed to the beams of a fiendish instrument of mind control.

The moment they pass through its rays, Conservatives turn from penny-pinching authoritarians into spendthrift hoodie-huggers. They demand that a job now performed consistently and cheaply by machines should be handed back to human beings, who will do it patchily and at great expense. They urge that police officers be diverted from preventing serious crime to stand in for lumps of metal. They insist that those who break the law should not be punished or even caught. They clamour for councils to abandon a scheme that almost pays for itself, and replace it with one that requires constant subsidies.

What is this cunning device for reprogramming conservative brains? It is of course the speed camera. The government hates it just as much as the moronic petrolheads who dance with glee whenever one is torched.

It hasn’t yet announced a general policy of turning off speed cameras, but it knows that this is the likely consequence of its assault on road safety grants. After losing 40% of its government safety funding, this week Oxfordshire will turn off all its cameras(1). Buckinghamshire says it is likely to follow(2). All the other local authorities in England will have to start counting their options. The roads minister, Mike Penning, leaves us in no doubt about what he wants them to do. Local authorities, he says, “have relied too heavily on safety cameras for far too long.” By cutting the grant, he claims, the government is “delivering on its pledge to end the war on the motorist.”(3)

There is and has never been a war on the motorist. Motorists are handled more gently than anyone else: they are the only people who can expect to get away with breaking the law on almost all occasions. A war is an event in which people are injured and killed. Which circumstance most closely resembles one: an occasional £60 fine, or the daily carnage on the roads?

You can see the victims of the real war that’s being waged – the war against road safety – in every hospital and mortuary. Seven killed, 71 seriously injured, every day(4). About 120 children killed in Britain every year: 120 families plunged into lifelong grief(5).

Every two or three weeks I visit a spinal injuries unit in which a close friend is confined. He wasn’t hurt on the roads, but many of the other patients were. Every time I walk though that hospital I see the broken bodies, the shattered hopes, the endless complications, both physical and psychological, caused by the war being waged on the roads. You will see something similar in wards which specialise in the loss of limbs and eyes, the smashing of faces, the crushing of brains. This is the closest most of us will get to seeing the aftermath of war, a shattering of lives that bears no relationship to what Penning so crassly describes as the war on the motorist.

In other cases – climate change for example – the government has so far been able to resist the junk science peddled by the lunatic fringe of the Conservative party. But not here. The positive impact of speed cameras in reducing accidents is unequivocal. A study for Penning’s department shows that 19% fewer people were killed or seriously injured at accident black spots after speed cameras were introduced, above and beyond the general decline in accidents on the roads(6).

Yet the conspiracists in the Sun, the Express and the Daily Mail, on Top Gear and throughout cyberspace, insist that speed cameras exist only to tax and control us. They point to the example of Swindon, the first place in Britain in which the cameras were shut down, at the behest of a Conservative council. In the year before they were switched off, there was one death and eight minor accidents at the camera sites; in the year after, there were no deaths, two serious accidents and seven minor ones(7). “These figures”, the council’s leader, Rod Bluh, maintains, “completely vindicate our position”. They show that “fixed speed cameras are more about fund-raising than road safety.”(8) In reality they vindicate the proposition that he is innumerate, as they fail all tests of statistical significance. A study conducted by the Wiltshire and Swindon Safety Camera Partnership, across the whole county over three years, found that after speed cameras were installed there was a reduction at those sites in deaths and serious injuries of 69%(9). Mr Bluh’s hostility to the cameras might have more to do with the fact that he was banned for speeding(10).

As for the fund-raising issue, the Treasury takes some £85-90m a year from speed camera revenues(11) and shells out £110m to local authorities to run them(12): the cameras are almost self-financing, but not quite. So when Mike Penning maintains that “the public are concerned about whether they are there for safety or to raise money for the Treasury”(13) he’s engaging in a subtle deception: the public might be concerned, but he knows it’s not true.

Turning off the speed cameras, on the other hand, is a staggeringly expensive policy, if similar levels of safety are to be maintained. Oxfordshire is having to switch off its cameras for want of £600,000: a pittance by comparison to the £13.6m that Thames Valley police already spend on traffic enforcement(14). Penning’s own department reports a cost-benefit ratio for speed cameras of 2.7:1(15). The House of Commons Transport Committee examined the alternatives and found that “a more cost effective measure for reducing speeds and casualties has yet to be introduced.”(16) This Tory cut has nothing to do with saving money.

And even if speed cameras did make more money than they used, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Why shouldn’t there be a tax on breaking the law?

Penning might have fallen for another tabloid myth: that speed cameras are unpopular. The most recent poll whose results I can find show that 82% of British people surveyed approve of them, and that the percentage has been rising(17). The horror and fury being expressed by parents in Oxfordshire will be voiced wherever they are switched off.

The real reason why conservatives hate the enforcement of speed limits is that this is one of the few laws which is as likely to catch the rich as the poor: newspaper editors and council leaders are as vulnerable as anyone else. The conservative reaction to speed cameras suggests that they love laws, except those which apply to them.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Jamie McGinnes, 25th July 2010. Government axes speed cameras. Sunday Times.

2. http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/8291805.Transport_chief__Speed_cameras_could_go/

3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10755509

4. Department for Transport, September 2009. Reported Road Casualties Great Britain: 2008 – Annual Report. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/accidents/casualtiesgbar/rrcgb2008

5. Department for Transport, 2010. Fatalities in reported road accidents: 2008. Road Accident Statistics Factsheet No. 2. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/accidents/casualtiesgbar/suppletablesfactsheets/fatalities2008.pdf

6. The headline figure is 42%, but once regression to the mean is taken into account it falls to 19%. See page 155. UCL and PA Consulting Group, December 2005. The national safety camera programme: Four-year evaluation report. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/speedmanagement/nscp/nscp/coll_thenationalsafetycameraprog/ationalsafetycameraprogr4598.pdf

7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/england/8636654.stm

8. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268392/Town-scrapped-speed-cameras-sees-increase-accidents.html

9. http://www.safetycameraswiltshire.co.uk/

10. http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/8290743.Oxfordshire_decides_it_will_turn_off_its_speed_traps/

11. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/7909246/Treasury-set-to-cash-in-on-speeding-fines.html

12. Department for Transport, no date given. Road safety grant – the allocation process. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/secroadsafetygrants/secspecificrdsafetygrants/pagerdsafetygrantallocation

13. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/7838300/RAC-local-authorities-cutting-back-on-speed-cameras.html

14. Chris Walker, 24th July 2010. “We will still police roads”. Oxford Mail.

15. Department for Transport, no date given. The national safety camera programme: Four-year evaluation report. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/speedmanagement/nscp/nscp/thenationalsafetycameraprogr4597

16. House of Commons Transport Committee, 31st October 2006. Roads Policing and Technology: Getting the right balance. Page 40. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmtran/975/975.pdf

17. Claire Corbett, School of Social Science and Law, Brunel University, 2006. Memorandum submitted to the House of Commons Transport Committee, 31st October 2006. Roads Policing and Technology: Getting the right balance, Ev 73. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmtran/975/975.pdf

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 17th May 2010

Hallelujah. Heathrow’s third runway is history, the biggest victory for the environment movement since the scrapping of the last Tory government’s road-building programme. Gone too is the planned expansion of Gatwick and Stansted (though the government has so far said nothing about airport expansion elsewhere)(1). Instead we’ll have a high-speed railway connecting London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. All hail to the new age of the train. Perhaps.

I don’t dispute the problem. Both roads and railways are close to gridlock. New motorways, government figures show, scarcely improve journey times between city centres(2). Upgrading old railways snarls up the system even more, costs a fortune and adds little to their capacity(3).

New lines, by contrast, free up the old tracks for freight and local trains. They allow companies to run longer trains and extra services. High-speed rail cuts journey times almost twice as much as new conventional tracks, while costing scarcely more. The greenhouse gases it produces will be cancelled out by people switching from planes to trains. What’s not to like?

What’s not to like is that the case has not been made. The background data on which these claims are based isn’t just sparse: in some cases it’s non-existent. Where it does exist, it starkly contradicts other government figures. I wanted to be convinced, perhaps I still could be. But the Department for Transport’s argument currently consists of several thousand pages of wishful thinking.

The last government’s command paper contains a graph showing carbon figures for air, road, conventional rail and high speed trains(4). This creates the impression that high-speed rail produces less than half as much carbon per passenger kilometre as conventional railways, and just a fraction of the emissions from cars. How did it produce these results? By selecting Eurostar – and apparently only the French section – as its example of a high speed train. French electricity is mostly produced by nuclear power, so high speed trains there create much smaller emissions than ours would cause. It also appears to have ignored the carbon costs of construction.

Compare this to a paper commissioned by the Department for Transport in 2007. When construction is taken into account, high speed rail journeys from London to Manchester will produce 60% more carbon than conventional rail and 35% more carbon than car journeys. They will generate only 25% less carbon than plane travel(5).

Throughout the recent government documents there’s an assumption that the new railway will be sustainable because it will draw people out of planes. But buried on page 162 of the report on which the department has based its case, published in March 2010, are the figures which derail this assumption(6). Of the passengers expected to use the new railway, 57% would otherwise have travelled by conventional train, 27% wouldn’t have travelled at all, 8% would have gone by car and 8% by air. In other words, 92% of its customers are expected to switch to high speed rail from less polluting alternatives. Yet the same report contains a table (page 179) suggesting that the savings from flights not taken outweigh the entire carbon costs of the railway(7). It provides neither source nor justification.

The 2007 report shows that even if everyone flying between London and Manchester switched to the train, the savings wouldn’t compensate for the extra emissions a new line would cause. “There is no potential carbon benefit in building a new line on the London to Manchester route over the 60 year appraisal period.”(8) A switch from plane to train could even increase emissions. Unless the landing slots currently used by domestic flights are withdrawn by the government, they are likely to be used instead for international flights. The government has no plan for reducing total airport space.

The business case the department has produced is just as shaky. The first thing that jumps out at you is that the government has conflated it with the cost-benefit analysis. They are not the same thing. The business case is as follows: the government shells out £25.5bn, loses a net £1.5bn in tax and gets £15bn back over 60 years from fares(9). Net loss to the government: £12bn. The cost benefit analysis (which the government calls “the business case”) produces benefits of £32.3bn(10). The department concludes that the scheme has a benefit-cost ratio of 2.7. But where did the £32.3bn come from?

Almost all of it is money deemed to have been saved by reducing travel times. Business customers, it says, will save £17.6bn by getting there faster; leisure customers £11.1bn. Nowhere in the documents are these figures explained or justified. I spent the whole of Monday pressing the Department for Transport, asking for an explanation of how it converted time into money. The department spent eight hours of frantic searching to discover, just before 5pm, that it did indeed have a model, which it described as “frightfully complicated”(11).

By then my copy deadline was almost up, so I cannot tell you whether or not its consultants accounted for the fact that business travellers can work on the train, sometimes as productively as they can in the office. Nor can I say how it priced leisure travel. Are we to assume that an extra 20 minutes spent watching the telly when you get to your hotel is a benefit to which a price can be attached? How much is an hour with your granny worth? Whatever the answers may be, none of it translates into government revenue: assumed and equivocal benefits are being weighed against real spending.

Underlying these questions is a much bigger one: what’s it all for? The department argues that high speed rail is necessary because economic growth encourages people to travel more. High speed rail, it says, will stimulate economic growth. This will encourage people to travel more, which will … For how much longer can this go on? At what point do we decide that this crowded little island is busy enough?

The answer from old and new governments appears to be never. The Department for Transport expects flying to increase by 178% between 2008 and 2033, driving by 43% and train journeys by 150%(12). It does not seek to reduce this demand, only to accommodate it, until England becomes a giant transport corridor. Progress is measured by the number of people in transit. Civilisation will have reached its apogee when the entire population of Manchester takes the train every day to London and the entire population of London takes the train every day to Manchester. Perhaps we should resolve Britain’s railway network into a single orbital system, so that we can all remain in constant circulation. Then we’ll know we’re getting somewhere.

Yes, it’s better to take a high speed train than to fly. It would be better still not to have to make the journey at all and to have some peace and stillness in our lives. And it would be better to have an honest, informed discussion about high speed rail, rather than a wild guess based on unfounded assumptions and dodgy figures.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Conservative Party, 11th May 2010. Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition negotiations
Agreements reached.
http://www.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2010/05/Coalition_Agreement_published.aspx

2. Department for Transport, March 2010. High Speed Rail Command Paper, page 13.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/pi/highspeedrail/commandpaper/pdf/cmdpaper.pdf

3. ibid, pp12-13.

4. ibid, Figure 2.2, page 49.

5. Booz Allen Hamilton Ltd, 12 July 2007. Estimated Carbon Impact of a New North South Line, Figure 1.1a, page 3. Report to the Department for Transport. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/researchtech/research/newline/carbonimpact.pdf

6. High Speed Two Limited, 11th March 2010. High Speed Rail: London to the West Midlands and Beyond. Figure 4.1d, Chapter 4.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/pi/highspeedrail/hs2ltd/hs2report/pdf/chapter4.pdf

7. Figure 4.2c, ibid.

8. Booz Allen Hamilton Ltd, page 6.

9. High Speed Two Limited, 11th March 2010, ibid. Figure 4.3a, p185.

10. ibid.

11. NATA WebTAG. http://www.dft.gov.uk/webtag/index.php

12. Department for Transport, cited by High Speed Two Limited, 11th March 2010. High Speed Rail: London to the West Midlands and Beyond. Page 48, Chapter 2. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/pi/highspeedrail/hs2ltd/hs2report/pdf/chapter2.pdf

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th April 2010

Man proposes; nature disposes. We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated.
The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, atmosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter – tragically for many – the reality of thousands of miles of separation. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all.

Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones – up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.

But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortagage defaulters in the United States – the butterfly’s wing over the Atlantic – almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano – by no means a monster – keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.

We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection – a solar storm – which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails.

As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive(1,2). It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business – even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps. Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I’ve sent freedom of information requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven’t got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven’t.

There’s a similar lack of planning for the possibility that global supplies of oil might soon peak then go into decline. My FoI requests to the British government reveal that it has made no contingency plans, on the grounds that it doesn’t believe it will happen(3). The issue remains the preserve of beardy lentil-eaters such as, er, the United States Joint Forces Command. Its latest report on possible future conflicts maintains that “a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.”(4) It suggests that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” A shortage of refining and production capacity is not the same thing as peak oil, but the report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under “the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand”.

A global oil shortage would soon expose the weaknesses of our complex economic systems. As the cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown, their dependence on high energy use is one of the factors that makes complex societies vulnerable to collapse(5).

His work has helped to overturn the old assumption that social complexity is a response to surplus energy. Instead, he proposes, complexity drives higher energy production. While complexity solves many problems – such as reliance on an exclusively local and therefore vulnerable food supply – it’s subject to diminishing returns. In extreme cases the cost of maintaining such systems causes them to collapse.

Tainter gives the example of the western Roman empire. In the third and fourth centuries AD, the emperors Diocletian and Constantine sought to rebuild their diminished territories. “The strategy of the later Roman Empire was to respond to a near-fatal challenge in the third century by increasing the size, complexity, power, and costliness of … the government and its army. … The benefit/cost ratio of imperial government declined. In the end the Western Roman Empire could no longer afford the problem of its own existence.”(6) The empire was ruined by the taxes and levies on manpower Diocletian and Constantine imposed to sustain their massive system. Invasion and collapse were the inevitable result.

He contrasts this with the strategies of the Byzantine empire from the seventh century onwards. Weakened by plague and re-invasion, the government responded with a programme of systematic simplification. Instead of maintaining and paying its army, it granted soldiers land in return for hereditary military service: from then on they had to carry their own costs. It reduced the size and complexity of the administration and left people to fend for themselves. The empire survived and expanded.

A similar process is taking place in the UK today: a simplification of government in response to crisis. But while the public sector is being pared down, both government and private enterprise seek to increase the size and complexity of the rest of the economy. If the financial crisis were the only constraint we faced, this might be a sensible strategy. But the energy costs, environmental impacts and vulnerability to disruption of our super-specialised society have surely already reached the point at which they outweigh the benefits of increasing complexity.

For the third time in two years we’ve discovered that flying is one of the weakest links in our overstretched system. In 2008 the rising cost of fuel drove several airlines out of business. The recession compounded the damage; the volcano might ruin several more. Energy-hungry, weather-dependent, easily disrupted, a large aviation industry is one of the hardest sectors for any society to sustain, especially one beginning to encounter a series of crises. The greater our dependence on flying, the more vulnerable we are likely to become.

Over the past few days people living under the flight paths have seen the future, and they like it. The state of global oil supplies, the industry’s social and environmental costs and its extreme vulnerability mean that current levels of flying – let alone the growth the government anticipates – cannot be maintained indefinitely. We have a choice. We can start decommissioning this industry while there is time and find ways of living happily with less of it. Or we can sit and wait for physical reality to simplify the system by more brutal means.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-space-storm-alert-90-seconds-from-catastrophe.html

2. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16400-major-solar-storm-could-cause-lasting-damage.html

3. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/04/14/cross-your-fingers-and-carry-on/

4. http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf

5. https://campus.fsu.edu/bbcswebdav/users/jastallins/public_htm/courses/complexity/readings/Tainter.pdf

6. ibid.

Here’s my knockabout video interview with Boris Johnson; the latest in the Monbiot Meets series made by Guardian films.