Date published: 2011/05/14
The Cambridge News says:
Soaring fuel prices mean basing new homes around a widened A14 would lead to the "slums of the future", a travel expert warned yesterday.
Stephen Joseph, chief executive of the Campaign for Better Transport, said new communities would be unaffordable to live in and that imposing tolls to fund improvements to the A14 would not work.
He was speaking at a debate in Huntingdon organised by the Institution of Civil Engineers, which asked if the Eastern region had been "short-changed" when the £1.3 billion Ellington to Fen Ditton upgrade was scrapped last year.
Attendees supported the motion.
Speaking against the proposition, Mr Joseph said: "If you build a very wide A14, allowing large increases in traffic, and build housing around it which relies on car-based access to the A14, and oil prices are double what is forecasted, you are building the slums of the future.
"They will be unaffordable because travel costs will be very high."
The Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) is one of the zillions of special interest pressure groups that plague the nation. What the Cambridge News fails to mention is that the CBT hates cars and loves trains. They perpetually want to throw more government money at train passengers, which is about as unsustainable (and so environmentally unfriendly) policy as can be. One of the problems Cambridge faces is that thousands and thousands of people take the train every day to London, which in particular puts pressure on house prices in the city. It would not be so bad if these people actually paid for the service they receive, but they do not.
If Joseph believes that commuting a few miles by car down the A14 is going to be prohibitively expensive, then imagine how expensive it will be to commute 60 miles to London by train. And yet the latter is what he advocates. His argument is also based on a fantasy oil price, and of course if you are allowed to make arbitrary assumptions then you can arrive at arbitrary conclusions.
All in all, the CBT should just be ignored, they are typical members of the academic middle class and they contribute very little to the debate on transport.
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