Towards a UK national campaign for free public transport

Friday, October 23, 2009

An ecosocialist MP for Blaneau Gwent?

Well there is one Member of Parliament pushing ecosocialist politics already Dai Davies, he stood as an independent and beat Labour in a by-election, excellent stuff, he is working with my friend Roy Wilkes on free public transport, I am looking forward to posting up more of his stuff.

Be great if Plaid and the Greens gave him a free run at the General Election...

In the past ten days big strides have been made towards a national campaign for free public transport.

I published a research paper some months ago making the case for the wide-scale introduction of free transport.

In areas like ours, where many of our valley communities and people find themselves isolated, the issue is very important.

If you can’t access work, shops, friends, hospitals, and other things which the better-off expect, then life can become very difficult.

The research led to various interviews including an hour-long debate on BBC radio Wales in which I called for free transport to be introduced across Wales.

A like-minded group in Greater Manchester then contacted me, and from that we have agreed to put the whole thing on a UK-wide footing.

At the heart of the UK campaign will be a major research project.

That research will be unveiled at a Conference next March in the House of Commons.

The aim is to get communities, organisations, trades unions, and others involved from all over the UK.

I’ve been asked to lead the campaign, and will chair that inaugural conference of the National Campaign for Free Public Transport for all.

The vice-chair is Roy Wilkes, who has chaired the campaign for free public transport in Greater Manchester.

The aim will be to produce a fully-costed and rigorous evidence-based case, which will address such issues as the social benefits (especially for less well-off communities).

It will also spell out the costs of the present over-dependence on cars, lorries, and profit-making buses and trains – in terms of the environment, pollution, transport gridlock, Co2 emissions, and other issues.

The overall aim is a fully integrated, publicly owned, and free at the point of use system.

This is an issue which every one of us needs to take seriously. Britain is grinding to a halt, we are churning-out climate-threatening levels of co2, many of our most deprived people and areas are isolated and unable to access vital services.

When people ask us ‘can we afford it’, my answer is it could cost us the earth of we don’t take action on this.

The aim of the national campaign is to put that case to everyone in Britain.

more here

Labels: Ecosocialism, free public transport

From blogsite of UK green activist, and former principal speaker of the Green Party of England & Wales, Derek Wall: www.another-green-world.blogspot.com

The cost of not having free public transit

We have tried to list all the externalities of the private auto and sprawl. But the list keeps growing and growing. People ask, "can we afford to have free public transit"? The answer is "we can no longer afford not to have it". In the article quoted below fromClimateProgress they show how NRC counts more externalized costs.

...The report estimates dollar values for several major components of these costs. The damages the committee was able to quantify were an estimated $120 billion in the U.S. in 2005, a number that reflects primarily health damages from air pollution associated with electricity generation and motor vehicle transportation. The figure does not include damages from climate change, harm to ecosystems, effects of some air pollutants such as mercury, and risks to national security, which the report examines but does not monetize... NationalResearchCouncil via ClimateProgress

Banks Fuel Climate Crisis

BAD BANKS leaflet #3: 'Their Pollution Market Stinks!'

Bad Banks leaflet #3 is available now. It addresses the link between global banking power and the ecological crisis, specifically focusing on the banking class's prosposed "solution" to climate change, pollution markets (or as they're calling them, emission trading schemes).

This leaflet has contributions on the back page from David Parker (writer for www.wellsharp.wordpress.com/), Mike Treen (Unite Union National Director), Omar Hamed (Unite Union organiser & Rainforest Action co-ordinator), and Roger Fowler (editor of www.farefreenz.blogspot.com/).

"Car-based economy is simply not sustainable"

Laid-off auto workers can work on public transit

...Public transport creates 25% more jobs than the same investment in building roads or highways. At a meeting of the Policy Board of the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) hosted by De Lijn from 13 to 16 October 2009 in Ghent, Belgium, worldwide leaders of the public transport sector called on governments to invest in the public transport sector. Carfree Blogosphere

Free public transport advocate wins seat

Socialist Alliance WA co-convenor Sam Wainwright was elected from the Hilton Ward to the Fremantle Council in the October 17 poll. Wainwright was the candidate with the most votes, polling over 33% of the vote.

A socialist, unionist and community activist, Wainwright advocates for "free and expanded public transport" and for council to "fight climate change", workers' rights, and open spaces for all, and rates based on ability to pay.

For more details of Wainwright's campaign, visit: www.samforhilton.com

From GreenLeft Weekly 17 Oct 2009.

We're on Indymedia's 'Best Blog' list:

New Zealand has a new blogsite promoting free and frequent public transport, it's called Fare-Free New Zealand. Go to http://farefreenz.blogspot.com/ The editors welcome any NZ or international stories relating to the campaign for fare-free public transport. Send to farefreenz@clear.net.nz The call for free public transport is being made internationally by environmentalists, campaigners against climate change, Green parties, and eco-socialists. It's a campaign focus that makes lots of ecological, economic and political sense. And it's a grassroots response to the threat of climate change that challenges the pro-market illogic of the pollution market (otherwise known as carbon or emissions trading).

www.indymedia.org.nz

Message from Sweden: Action on Climate Change

Blog Action Day: Use the tools at your disposal! torsdag 15 oktober 2009

This blog post is written in English as a part of the Blog Action Day on climate change.

Today the web will probably be flooded with blog posts about how green technology will save us from the horrors of climate change. Some posts will be constructive and original, but a lot of them will probably just be deterministic and overly optimistic. As a contrast to this, we at Planka.nu would like to put the spotlight on what could be done today with political reforms that we have the tools and knowledge to implement. Such as a politically driven change of our infrastructure and simple green tax-switching policies.

In Stockholm and Sweden, we currently have politicians who plan to expand our large road network even more and constantly raises the fares on climate-smart means of getting around such as public transport. At the same time as they are doing this they are not willing to take responsibility for the ever-increasing car-traffic. Our politicians will not acknowledge that there are political reasons behind the fact that car-traffic is taking (and will do so even more according to current projections) market shares from public transport. Instead they blame it on the constantly growing demand for car-traffic, as if supply and demand only had a one-way relation.

More roads and more expensive public transport equals more car-traffic on the expense of public transportation; an equation so easy that even a five year old would understand it.

The transport sector is one of the biggest climate scoundrels in Sweden, accounting for around 40 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, in other words: it is one of the most urgent sectors to make climate-smart.

We in Planka.nu believe that the key to radically decrease the emissions from the transport sector lies within our cities, partly because they are hosts of most of the traffic and partly because their population density provides a good framework for easy and relatively cheap climate adjustments.

In September 2009 we released the report Travel doesn’t have to cost the earth, where we present five concrete measures to make the transport sector in Stockholm climate-smart. This whole package of reforms are built on the idea that we do not have the time to sit around and wait for the green technology to save us, rather the opposite: we need to act now, and we need to do it with the tools that are currently at our disposal.

The five measures we present in Travel doesn’t have to cost the earth are:

• Transport-saving social planning
• Major investments in rail-carried public transport
• Stop on all road expansions
• Car-free city centre
• Fare-free public transport

The fact that we can not know what kind of green technology solutions that will be available in the future is a very obvious one. But considering that blind trust in technology development is the dominant position in the climate debate, it is still worth repeating. On the other hand, one thing that we do know for sure is: changes in the infrastructure as well as simple green tax-switching are effective policies that are available to us today.

So, instead of wishful thinking and naive believe in technology we promote measures that will lead to concrete results – i.e. a reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector – and can be carried out with nothing else but the power of political will.

Read more:

• Blog Action Day – Website
• Planka.nu/Freepublictransports.com – Travel doesn’t have to cost the earth

Movie exposes "free market" fakery

Movie exposes "free market" fakery

CARnivores

No such thing as green cars

By now, it should be obvious that private automobiles are environmentally unsustainable. Yet many people still cling to the fantasy of “Green Cars”. Such people tend to focus only on alternative fuels and the emissions that come out of a car’s tail pipe. They ignore the fact that half the greenhouse gas and pollution a car will emit during its lifetime is created in its manufacture and disposal …and in the manufacture and maintenance of the roads on which it travels. The plastics in a car’s body, interior and tires, the steel in its frame, the lubricants it uses, and the asphalt and concrete it drives on all require petroleum to manufacture and maintain. Andy Singer on CarfreeNetwork