Investing in sustainable travel

A few years back, I was asked to chair the Select Committee on sustainable travel. Select committees are council groups that come into being for a short period (six to eighteen months) to look in detail at a specific issue with a view to getting an agreed way long-term forwards between political parties. It was quite a difficult committee to chair, partly for a few party political reasons that I won’t go into here, but also because sustainable travel is such a vast area that there was no way to do justice to everything in the time that we had available. Nevertheless, we did hear evidence from a wide variety of people and captured all the best bits in a lengthy report that covered things as diverse as personal travel planning, 20mph zones, the need for a strategy for improving pedestrian facilities, alternative fuels and future public transport modes.

Recently this work has been put to good use. Bristol applied, with the neighbouring council areas, to the national Local Sustainable Transport Fund (established by Lib Dem Minister, Norman Baker) to fund major works in this sort of area. We’ve recently had two bits of good news:

• Firstly, we have been awarded £5m to start work on projects this year, including improving Gloucester Road for pedestrians.
• Secondly, we have been given permission to apply for up to £25m of funding starting from 2012 – we need to prepare our bid for this December and they will tell us in July whether or not we have the money. We're only one of eight areas to get such an invite, so the chances of success are strong.
  

I had a meeting earlier with the transport manager who is leading the ‘big bid’ and I'm looking forward to having an influence into what goes in over the next couple of months. I would love to include some projects around the early adoption of alternative fuels like biogas and hydrogen, following on from the decision (which I had some hand in) that any future rapid transit systems would not be based on the increasingly expensive and risky diesel and petrol. I'm not sure yet whether this is within the scope of the Fund.

I will also be looking for projects which build on the work that we’ve done on developing a Walking Strategy. All the research suggests that money spent on walking provides some of the best ‘bangs for your bucks’ of any traffic works, getting people out of cars and finding better and healthier ways of getting around.

As always, happy to hear about other ideas for local (rail sadly isn't included) sustainable transport options that I can feed into the bid-drafting process. As with all things, there is no guarantee of landing the money, but the theory is that you are only invited to bid if you’re in with a good chance of getting it. £25m is a lot of money and it could make a very positive impact on the back of the recent history of transport improvements.