Transport

Travel and Transportation

We all have places to go. Today, even after the coronavirus travel restrictions and the shift to hybrid working in many sectors over the last couple of years, we travel much further and much more often than a few generations ago. While connecting people and communities is a positive, the volume and methods of travel has also brought harm. These include the increase in land consumed by roads and motorways since the mid twentieth century, poor urban air quality, CO2 emissions from aviation and many more.

EWM is keen to drill down into some of these issues and look at the choices we can make for the better and to investigate other solutions under development.  Different considerations come into play for hyper-local travel (upto a mile/2km), local (town or city wide), regional, national and international travel. In some cases active travel or public transport are most appropriate, while space remains for private cars. Both the distance and the purpose of the journey is important, but the needs for a small number of journeys should not dictate the mode of all journeys.

Planned posts cover active travel, including a personal reflection on how EWM fell out of the way of regular cycling then, after some false starts, got back into the way of utility cycling.  There will also be posts on regional public transport, predominantly from a west central Scotland (Strathclyde) perspective but hopefully with relevance to other metropolitan areas.  Resilience of our ageing transport infrastructure against the effects of climate change will also be covered.

This page will be updated with direct links to key posts on Travel and Transportation.

EWM, December 2022