stef's posterous

Let's get rid of these things from our cities

Today I was the victim of some very aggressive driving from a Range Rover Vogue driver, nearly pushing me into the kerb and causing an accident. So I thought that today was as good as any to write up another one of the interesting things that came out of the Birmingham City Centre Masterplan "Big Ideas" event. Over recent years I've become increasingly irritated by these hulking ego boxes tailgating me, clogging up the roads of Kings Heath and Moseley and the other narrow roads of Birmingham, burning up fuel that is becoming more and more scarce and generally representing all that is bad about the car industry. I'm sick of them and it would be a happy day if I were to see these machines removed from our cities, particularly Birmingham. They are anachronistic - a 4x4 that was once used as a rural tool has now become a distasteful show of disregard for environmental issues. Land Rover's business model is a car crash waiting to happen. The public no longer has the taste for 12MPG urban transport any more and over coming years we're going to see growing derision for the solipsism that drives people to continue buying them. They've made a lame attempt to add some 'carbon offsetting' to their new sales, but having met a couple of in-the-know people from Greenpeace this year it's clear that a £175 charge to new customers of a £60,000 vehicle does not adequately represent the cost of offsetting (if this is even possible with the schemes they invest in) the carbon produced in the manufacture and ongoing use of these kinds of vehicles. Birmingham City Council have committed to a reduction of 60% of the city's carbon emissions by 2026. When I was at the Masterplan event two weeks ago there was a very challenging presentation from an expert in the field who made the situation very clear about what that would mean: To achieve the City's own target of 60% reduction in emissions by 2026 there can be no cars within the ringroad at all from 2026. Sorry - let me repeat that: No cars within the ringroad. Obviously this was laid down to us as a provocative and challenging statement, representing a particular scenario. But if we're going to start anywhere I say we start by putting measures in place to remove these pointless, never-used-off-the-road, wasteful machines from the city centre and put a stake in the sand that Birmingham is the progressive and tough-decision-making place that it will need to be to make it happen.