Let's go back to basics

I'm fed up of hearing about the government's initiatives for 'going green'. Especially when it comes to transport. Hiking taxes onto fuel and air fares is meant to help deter the nation from using these modes of transport. But it's not working.

Watching Panorama the other day, there was a report about the electric car, which - if successful - should cut carbon emissions immensely. In principle, it sounds like a good idea. The government is advocating this, and the report looked into the poor facilities available for owners of the electric car. Local councils don't have the recharge points needed (not enough, or none at all in many cases). On top of this, the electric car can't travel long distances on full charge - something that needs to be worked on before the scheme can become commercially viable.

But if the electric car is deemed the saviour to our carbon emissions dilemma, surely the effect would be cancelled out by the huge increase in the amount of electricity the nation would be using? I mean, there's only so much CO2 reduction possible with this 'solution'. And the electricity companies (as well as increasing the cost of supplying electricity) try and lure us to give them business by telling us they are the best in terms of carbon emissions created by their input into the national grid. So, if we all switched electric companies to the lowest CO2 producer, and exchanged our cars for the electric car, would it really get us anywhere?

This is where I propose my contribution to reducing carbon emissions: public transport. As far as I'm aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong), the taxes we pay on fuel and in our air fares are supposedly meant to be pumped into improving the public transport system (rail and bus in particular). Unfortunately, I don't see this happening. In some ways I'm in a better position to judge on this, having experienced the efficiency of the French rail network. As well as being heavily subsidised by the French government, there are rarely any huge disruptions to timetables - except when they go on strike, but that's a whole different ball game. Forgetting the subsidy that our government could potentially provide (they may do already, I haven't looked into it enough to know if they do or not), if the extra taxes we as a nation are paying are going where they are supposedly intended to, surely we should have seen a vast improvement by now? Instead, we see rising train fares resulting in no chance of people leaving the car at home and travelling or commuting by train. Maybe this is where the subsidy could come in (if it doesn't already...) to try and influence the population of workers and travellers to abandon cars and planes in favour of trains and buses.

Do you agree with me? Am I looking at this from an angle which has already been exhausted? Or am I being biased because I've just bought a car and have the prospect of high petrol prices and traffic jams ahead of me? If I could wholeheartedly depend on the public transport system, I probably wouldn't have bothered with my new car. But given my experience particularly with the trains in this country, I refuse to take the risk of arriving at school an hour late because the bus was late. At least this way, I will be in control of my punctuality.

Teething problems

Everything has a dodgy first few days/weeks/months/years. Babies have those horrible few weeks of pain as their first teeth start cutting through. Businesses have a worrying first few months wondering whether they're going to be a success or not. Heathrow's T5 is having the first week from hell.

But why? BAA have been banging on for months and months that T5 was going to be the best air transport facility in the world; that it was going to be the most efficient terminal of them all at Heathrow. Yet they've managed to cancel upwards of 400 flights in this first week, with no real idea when the chaos will end. A backlog of 28,000 bags in transit just makes the situation even more farcical. State of the art baggage system that can process 12,000 bags per hour? I can see a bit of blame shifting in the near future, what with the considerably higher luggage allowance for long-haul flights and all that.

Did anyone look at the logistics of moving the location of all BA's operations in one go? With all that's gone wrong since opening to the public last Thursday, it makes you wonder. But then, Eurostar moved all their operations from Waterloo to St. Pancras over one night, and as far as I recall it went without a hitch. Granted that wasn't on the scale of T5, but honestly, if a load of trains can find their way from one side of London to the other between the hours of daylight, surely a couple of planes can veer their way from one spot of tarmac to another within the same hectare? It's not as though T5 is out of the way of the rest of the airport now, is it?

The question on everyone's lips now? 'Will BA and BAA be fined for the chaos this hideously expensive venture has caused?" Personally, I think they should - Network Rail gets fined for having more than a certain number of late running or cancelled trains, why shouldn't BA/BAA be subject to the same? I know thousands more people are affected by late running or cancelled trains every day than they are delayed or cancelled flights, but it's the principle I'm getting at. In such a short period of time, after such high-profile (and, in hindsight, overhyped) publicity in the build-up to the opening of T5, the parties involved have really shot themselves in the foot. Maybe the government will shoot them in the pocket now... it won't buy back any time lost by all those poor poor passengers, but it'll hopefully make BA think twice about new terminals in the future...