Transport
This section aims to get your community thinking about the way you move yourselves, goods and services into and around you community.
Society’s love affair with the car continues to grow – more and more people drive every day. While for some communities cars are a necessity due to poor public transport links, convenience is the main reason that we use our cars more. Our reliance on the car has a variety of environmental, social and health consequences. As well as the threat of accidents and the negative health effects of less exercise, our transport choices have some less obvious impacts on our lives too.
For example, the gases and chemicals released by engines make a large contribution to global warming and air pollution. The more we use cars, buses, lorries and trains the more the air becomes polluted. Exhaust fumes contain harmful emissions that both pollute the atmosphere and contribute to CO2 levels. These emissions also damage our health – increasing conditions such as asthma and causing our fitness levels to drop. The health impacts resulting from transport are wide and varied as the below findings show:
- On average, 1 in 7 children suffer from asthma; but this figure rises to one in three in inner city areas.
- Pollution levels are higher inside cars than outside in slow moving traffic.
- Cycling or walking briskly for half an hour a day can halve the risk of heart disease.
Greater distances between our homes and work and increasing amounts of urban traffic have created a fear of traffic. Because people feel less at risk driving as compared to walking or cycling, more and more trips are being made by car.
However, it is not just health and environmental impacts that transport affects. It also affects our economy. Diesel and petrol engines not only mean we can get around easily, it also means that goods can be shipped in easily. We import a huge amount of goods from other areas where they can be produced more cheaply – meaning increased competition for local manufacturing businesses.
The Cadarn scheme wants communities to address community reliance on the car and move towards more sustainable forms of transport. This will help prepare our communities for a future where it will be too expensive to use the car too often. Sustainable transport includes any means of transport which reduces fuel consumption, pollution and car use – meaning cycling, rail and bus transport, walking.