I find it odd that the Home Office is creating six new sexual assualt referral centres (the nearest one to Coventry being in Gloucester), but that:
A new target of reducing serious violent crime - the 19,000 cases of murder, grievous bodily harm and death by dangerous driving last year - is to be introduced, but it will exclude a measurement of serious sexual offences.The King Report On Low-Carbon Cars is also not getting any press.
Brown announced, in his final budget earlier this year, that Julia King, vice-chancellor of Aston University, previously at Rolls-Royce, was going to examine how to "decarbonise road transport" over the next 25 years.
Part one was released with the Pre-Budget report yesterday, with part two coming in 2008.
Traffic is growing at the rate of about 1 per cent per year. If this continues to 2050, the number of kilometres driven each year would almost double. So, in order to reduce car emissions to 20 per cent of 2000 levels, we need to achieve a 90 per cent reduction in per-kilometre emissions by 2050 to offset the effect of traffic growth.
King touches on the main problem, in my view, on pages 44/47 (Modec, here in Coventry, gets a name check on pages 50/51). Clean vehicles will only become commercially viable when people start putting environmental impact first, before leather seats and speed and "can I pull in this car" considerations:
"New technologies will only succeed commercially if consumer expectations of range, comfort, safety and speed continue to be met ... many UK buyers discount heavily, and some do not consider, vehicle efficiency benefits at the point of purchasing a car.
They are therefore less inclined to adopt efficient vehicles than the financial incentive from fuel economy savings might suggest. In addition, the majority of buyers tend to rate the environmental impact of vehicles relatively low in their purchase criteria."
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