Safety on roads ‘has priority over air pollution’

THERE has been little improvement in air quality over the last 20 years as transport planners concentrate on preventing road deaths, according to a new study.

Two university academics set out to try and understand why there has been little improvement in air pollution concentrations from road transport since the UK signed up to international air quality standards in 1995.

Dr Tim Chatterton and Professor Graham Parkhurst, from the Bristol-based University of the West of England, said that UK transport planners were not taking the environmental impacts of transport choices sufficiently into account and that over 50,000 deaths a year could be attributed to air pollution in the UK yet transport planners focused on reducing road accidents.

“Air pollution is perhaps the grossest manifestation of a general failure of UK transport planning to take the environmental impacts of transport choices sufficiently into account,” said Professor Parkhurst

“Currently air pollution is a shared priority between the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Department for Transport but shared priority does not mean equal priority.”

The two academics also claimed there was limited regulatory and financial support for alternative modes of transport and for local councils seeking to introduce air improvement measures such as ‘low emissions zones’.

They also said there was a strong social equity issue, with households in poorer areas tending to be exposed to much higher levels of air pollution while contributing much less to the problem, principally through driving less.