CPRE is in favour of managing the demand for travel by car. The impact of rising levels of transport is impacting on all aspects of our environment, economy and social well being.

Investing in Public Transport, Walking and Cycling can provide an alternative to car travel but evidence has shown that it is not always sufficient on its own to change travel patterns.

There are a number of ways of managing demand. These include prioritising road space for public transport, ensuring car parking is in the right place and priced in the right way and, in some cases, restricting access to particular areas.

In many towns and cities in the West Midlands, for example, the town centre has been pedestrianised.

We can also influence demand by where we locate offices, homes and shops, favouring easily accessible town centres, for example.

And we can manage demand by influencing the price of motoring, which has been falling relative to public transport over the last twenty years.

Increasing petrol tax is the obvious way to change the price of motoring but the Government is also considering a national road pricing scheme in the long term, which would seek to charge motorist by the distance they travel, paying more on congested roads. We have yet to see what such a scheme would look like and how much it would manage demand and how much it would simply relocate it.

In the interim more local congestion charging schemes have been promoted by the government.

In the West Midlands there are two schemes being considered. One is in the major conurbation of Birmingham, the Black Country and Coventry. You can read our response to that proposal. While we support its goals, we have raised concerns that the plans must not transfer problems to rural areas and that there is full consideration of how that might be avoided. We also do not want it to be used to fund new bypasses around the conurbation and we want long term funding from the scheme to support public transport. We are also concerned that it could rely heavily on Park and Ride sites in the Green Belt.

There is also a proposal for a congestion charge in Shrewsbury, but this proposal is largely being pursued to fund the Shrewsbury Northern Relief Road which we do not support.

Neither scheme is now being progressed by the local authorities concerned. While this is disappointing in some ways it begs the question: how will traffic levels be managed?

We would like to see a much clearer way forward, including stronger support within the Regional Spatial Strategy. We would also like to see good practice, such as the "Choose How You Move" work in Worcester on personalised travel planning which has been successful in reducing travel, to be more widely shared.

29.04.08