Date published: 2006/05/31
The BBC says:
A congestion-beating project that could lead to some of the UK's 9,000 miles (14,500km) of disused railway being paved with rubber, has been launched.
The flexible highways are made of panels of shredded car tyres laid over the existing tracks.
New thoroughfares could be shared by both cars and trams travelling at up to 50mph (80km/h) say Holdfast, the company behind the scheme.
But some users of disused railways do not support the scheme.
"We would like to see these routes converted into walking and cycling routes," said Gill Harrison, a spokesperson for sustainable transport charity Sustrans.
The charity has converted approximately 1,000 miles (1,600km) of disused railways into part of the National Cycle Network.
"More road space does not automatically mean less congestion," she said.
"More roads just get filled up with more cars. We're not saying that cars do not have their place, but ultimately we've all got to think about other ways of getting around."
Well that last comment ("more roads just get filled up with more cars") is a typical rant of the car-hating chattering classes. How dare the goverment build infrastructure that actually gets used (and is more than paid for by the people using the infrastructure). Far better to throw money at infrastructure (like the Dome) that nobody wants to use. And of course there is a finite supply of cars so at some point additional roads will not fill up with more cars. We are not far off that point now, since most people in Britain already commute to work by car.
But on the point of the article, Sustans is more correct about that. For example, there is a disused railway line going from Cambridge to St Ives. The county council wants to convert this into a "guided bus" route at great expense (80 million pounds and counting). But the railway line is parallel to and not far from the A14, and if and when the latter is upgraded, buses might as well use that (at very little marginal cost to society, since most traffic on the A14 is cars or lorries, so the odd bus would hardly be noticed). (This is not perfect because villages are strung along the old railway line more than along the A14.) And the disused railway line has, of course, become a perfect habitat for wildlife. Converting it to a bus route will destroy all that. Converting it to a cycle route would be much less damaging (although still damaging, because the safety nutters would insist that the area around the track be perfectly tidy). And there are no safe (or even that sensible) cycle routes from Cambridge up towards St Ives.
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