Dear Mr Hammond First of all, congratulations on your appointment as Secretary of State for Transport, and at the same time commiserations on missing out on the Chief Secretaryship at the Treasury. I am sure that the Treasury job might have been more to your taste, but transport will be no less demanding and, on [...]

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THE Department for Transport has updated its report on public attitudes towards climate change and the impact on transport. The analysis is based on responses to questions asked in an ONS ‘omnibus survey’. The questions were first asked in August 2006, then twice in 2007 (April and August) and twice more in 2008 (February and [...]

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I have long held that the one thing you can say about the environment is that being friendly towards it is not a simple matter. It sometimes seems that whatever apparently green measure is proposed has an adverse consequence somewhere else in the eco system. And it is no wonder that, faced with often conflicting [...]

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An opinion survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics and analysed by the Department for Transport has revealed growing public concern about the environment and climate change – and detected a willingness by a significant proportion of the population to use public transport more frequently in order to reduce carbon emissions and help stop [...]

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The Government’s current political woes have been much exacerbated in recent days by the explosion of anger about petrol prices and the level of fuel taxation. Given the trends of the last few months, and the knowledge of what happened over fuel tax protests in 2000, this can hardly have come as a surprise to [...]

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What a difference half a year can make. Starting this blog just before Christmas, I wrote a couple of pieces about the economy and the environment, in the context of oil prices then liable to reach $100 a barrel. There were worries about the economy, and the impact that the ‘credit cruch’ was likely to [...]

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As we end the first month of the New Year, there are three main preoccupations for observers of the public transport scene: the progress of the Government’s current transport legislation, the economy and its effect on our industries, and the growing concern over carbon emissions and climate change. Despite all the attention it is receiving, [...]

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