Travel

 
Latest Update 24th April 2020.

When I was a young man stuck in the rush hour traffic, I used to think how ridiculous it was that we should spend so much time and energy driving to and from work on large motorways and freeways packed with other vehicles. How much of my hard earned went in taxes to build more motorways and freeways so I could drive to work and make the rich even richer?



As well as the focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps we should be looking hard at the true cost of travel. Many drive like 20 year olds in cars vastly larger and more powerful than needed to satisfy personal egos. Some to experience the occasional thrill of driving the car near its upper limits. Maybe simpler, lighter vehicles would serve us just as well.

We cluster our businesses in large mega cities so that billions worldwide commute large distances from their homes to their workplaces. It seems crazy to me that half the traffic is traveling in one direction and the other half in the opposite direction. Surely we could find a better way of bringing work to the home or homes closer to work.

The true cost of all this is enormous including the provision of vehicles, fuel and maintenance and especially the hidden costs to the environment. The health impacts of driving long stressful hours in a polluted environment, which often causes physical and mental disorders are adding to rapidly growing costs in the hospital and medical sectors.

The huge costs of transportation infrastructures, including the construction and maintenance of roads, railways, airports, docks and container handling facilities, are incredibly high and fundamentally they service demand for products driven by incessant advertising. Planned obsolescence and the throw away society assures the suppliers of these goods, the wealth and power to manipulate the population for their own benefit.

Maybe we should reconsider how we can use the billions we spend on this headlong rush to grow so wantonly, maybe it would be better to take a hard look at how we organise our huge cities, and perhaps decentralise workplaces and dependent populations.

It irritates me to watch the car industry's efforts to produce sustainable vehicles to combat global warming. They should be designing vehicles which have a reduced carbon footprint using less material and power in manufacturing and are lightweight with engines powered by renewable sources like hydrogen made from the hydrolysis of water, instead they produce very large expensive, high powered, electric vehicles that only the rich can afford. Are they serious ???

I don't believe our future world will survive if we continue to put pleasure before well-being. Although in 2019 I accompanied my wife on my first cruise on an enormous cruise ship carrying several thousand passengers and crew. An enormous feat of engineering, but for what. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, but I didn't need it and although it was very important to my wife, I felt somewhat guilty after the trip. This growing industry is a significant consumer of resources including those used in manufacturing the ships and passenger terminals, and fossil fuels for power and propulsion.

Air travel is a mighty industry today, and its a great freedom to travel the world visiting beautiful places and living the high life, but is it really necessary and at what cost to the climate. Air travel is probably the most polluting of all transport forms and largely satisfies a want rather than a need when all is considered.

I believe we must all adopt a simpler life style if we want to preserve our future on this planet. We need to grow our food locally and eat seasonally. We should manufacture goods regionally which last a lifetime and longer. Make them from easily recyclable materials and meet needs not wants. We must resist the urge to see what's on the other side of the hill. Its not always greener, and getting there may be unsustainable when all the costs are taken into account.

When all the costs of powered transportation are taken into account, the impacts on human health and greenhouse gas emission are massive. We have to stop nibbling around the edges of this problem and make some hard decisions without delay.