1 Jun 2011

The worst global carbon emissions figures ever – and life on a bike

Two days now of rail travel on sun-kissed days in Southern England. Today to and from Brighton, and  yesterday, Cambridge. My dad went to Oxford. I didn’t have the Latin to go to either. I did go to school amid the dreaming spires, and had a sublime period of being Chancellor at Brookes, but Cambridge I hardly know.

I have done evensong in Kings, been to dinner with Amartya Sen in Trinity, never punted, and never stayed a night. So cycling through the town in a mad breeze of students and dons on bikes was an education – at speed. My destination was the archive at Churchill College where I’m working on some stuff from the 1980s.

The train to and from Cambridge was itself a breeze. The bike was tolerated aboard and so I was able to go from home to the College in an hour and twenty three minutes. The train was packed… every  doorway sported a bike askew. No storage space provided, but no awkward squad trying to throw you off with it either.

The Brighton train was different. A Gestapo style ban on ALL bikes. And when you arrive at London Bridge station, no obvious place to park the thing until you find there are platform racks AFTER the ticket barrier – presumably for all the machines they have just thrown off the trains.

Someone talks environment at us every day. Yet the obstacles to car free environmentally friendly travel are everywhere. In forty years of UK bike life I have seen little dramatic change – painted cycle lanes that run out; cycle parking hoops on pavements that are forever full; the glorious Boris bikes; York, Cambridge, and a few other urban beacons, but not much else.

It would take so little: compulsory bike spaces on ALL trains – urban streets with cycleways as an everywhere norm in every town and city linked up and integrated.

Like the politicians, it doesn’t do for objective journalists to talk of further restrictions on the lone motorist – car sharing; the complete re-jigging of congestion charging in all cities so that it more honestly reflects the environmental damage being wrought.

None of these are my ideas, they swill around the Department of Transport waiting for that day when the sky falls in and someone somewhere has to act.

This week’s publication of worse than anticipated global CO2 emissions may herald the sky falling in. 2010 was the worst year on record according to the International Energy Agency figures (published May 30th).

But we won’t believe it until it happens, that is, until the sky really does fall in. Will we then be able to breath, as we try to sort it out?

Tweets by @jonsnowC4