Week 6 - Structural Issues ...Public Transport system failures!

The main structural problem with sustainable consumption has been the public transport system, because of where my family live. Although only a couple of miles outside Norwich there has been no public transport service from this hamlet since the 1960s. Since there are no shops or post office (not even a post box!) and our school, Broadland High was nearly six miles away with no available places on its bus, it has not been possible to manage without a car in the past. Rural dwellers have some challenges not experienced by those living in urban development!

More recently a Park and Ride service has been running from the Sprowston Road, which is between two and three miles from my home, and this has been really useful for my younger daughter's and my own journeys into Norwich, so saving some carbon emissions. My husband rides his bike twelve miles a day to and from City College four days a week, keeping his travel sustainable.

If we had a bus which passed through the hamlet we (and I suspect several other families living here) could probably manage, now the children have left school, our shopping and other local journeys without a car, which would be economically as well as ecologically efficient. However there are no plans to re-institute the bus service which used to run twice a day, in the foreseeable future.

The Northern Distributor Route which is scheduled to begin in 2012 is most likely, (since this is the cheapest route, and there have been surveyors and reptile, bird, plant and archeological groups all assessing the locality for anything which might provide a delay or even, like the newts in the Wensum Valley, a stay of execution, without success), to be within 100ft of our home. This may perhaps mean that we are able to have access eventually to another bus service connected to this new road. That would be one positive outcome from our point of view. Also the new "eco-friendly" town to be built at Rackheath will only be a couple of miles away and I understand there are to be frequent tram-train transport links with Norwich which might also prove useful to us, if we can get across the Northern Distributor Route without having to go miles to find an access point, since it will be between us and the new town.

So the public transport infrastructure is our major difficulty and is unlikely to be improved in the immediate future, although whenever we are asked for feedback on council services I always mention this point. Without instituting the system people will not get rid of their cars, and I think if they have them they will tend to use them when not strictly necessary. It could be argued that building another major road system will only improve the driving experience of those in cars going around the city perimeter (through lowered congestion), and so possibly even increase the numbers of those who are using cars without regard to limiting journeys and emissions.

I think there would have to be a substantial increase in public pressure on the council to bring about any changes in local rural bus services, it has been raised countless times in the past in various areas of Norfolk without success, the reason being the council claims there are insufficient users for it to be economically viable, that being the measure considered, not ecological issues.

To change this attitude would require a strong education programme to show the long term costs on all electors in an effort to change the priorities of the council policies, or perhaps more simply, the election of a majority of green party members.