Sustainable Transport

Transport has definitely influenced economic and social development in a big way. Of course because of this it has had many costs on the environment.

The over-reliance on motorised transport also goes back to the first ever blog I did “improving the 'sustainability' of my lifestyle”. In this blog I said I relied on my car a lot back home even to drive short distances and now having moved into halls my reliance is on public transport (again motorised transport). There are not a lot of places I would walk to because I have always been used to travelling in some sort of motorised transport. Laziness, the ease of it, and depends what the weather is. Not really good excuses for the over reliance to be fair. I rely heavily on trains to get me home on weekends and buses when I am at university to travel between campuses and into town.

Some people’s jobs involve travelling around the world a lot. Relations between countries create a good opportunity for businesses to broaden and expand and social skills to widen. Our world is now very global because of air travel although this does have impacts on rural areas all over the world when building large airports or expanding ones that already exist and of course the direct impacts such as air pollution on a huge scale.

I do not believe all benefits of motorised transport outweigh the costs but for the world to develop there will always be a transport problem. A happy medium will never occur as it is damaging on the environment and there will always be sustainability issues arising and where would we be without motorised transport. It is how people cope and become innovative towards the scarce resources that will be available to us in the future (maybe not my generation, but still).

Minor changes such as more cycle routes need to be put into place in urban areas. If I wanted to start cycling I would not feel safe cycling in the road, but again you have the downside to this where areas will need to be developed to be able to put these in places. South Africa is an example where they have put projects in place to promote the use of non-motorised transport to cope with their developing urban areas. They have plans in place to change the mind set of people. If it is just an over reliance on these vehicles surely this could also be done in other countries? If a Less Economically Developed Country can come up with simple strategies like this so could More Economically Developed Countries.
Source: http://www.transport.gov.za/content.aspx?subID=19

Major changes already being put in place are the eco cars. I have seen a fair few of these on the roads recently and have seen many adverts for them. It seems fashionable to have one of them. I typed in eco cars to Google and found many news articles on the “Eco cars: the ten best” for example. The only problem with this is they need to be more affordable and available to target the family market for example but none the less it is better than a gas guzzling Range Rover Sport.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/3165537/Eco-cars-the-ten-best.html