I appreciate that I may be going over old ground, but in relation to London – which seems to set the pace for most transport emissions control – your commentators in the Big Story seem to be both hitting the nail on the head and missing the point at the same time.
Out with Sadiq Khan's unrealistic expectations for greening the London bus fleet, and the emissions technologies deftly dealt with in your comment piece, the industry seems to be so intent on hugging trees, it can't see the wood.
According to the Mayor's own figures, buses and coaches account for 10% of NOx emissions and 3% of PM10 emissions, whereas private cars and taxis together spew 20% of NOx emissions and 30% of PM10s into the lungs of Londoners.
Those figures tend to swing the finger of blame away from the bus and coach fleet, but the real situation is even more damning of the Mayor's ineptitude in tackling emissions.
Passenger vehicle emissions are not about vehicles, they're about passengers. Even at 8mpg, a bus laden with 50 people is delivering each individual to their destination at 400 passenger miles per gallon (I'll call this pmpg). A black cab or car carrying two people (and not many do) barely scrapes 60 pmpg.
I cannot believe that the logic of looking at the ‘pmpg’ figure has escaped TfL or the Mayor, so I have to conclude that either this does not fit with their ideology, or that local government sees the coach and bus industry as a soft touch and rising passenger fares as an irrelevance.
I appreciate that those worthy figureheads of the industry charged with negotiating with TfL and the Mayor's office have to bite their lips for fear of incurring the wrath of bureaucracy, and thus getting an even worse deal, but I have no such constraints. To point out the obvious, London's buses and coaches are not the problem but the solution to the problem.
TfL and the Mayor may come over all idealistic in press releases and soundbites, but what they can't admit in public is that, to actually make a difference, they are faced with telling London car drivers and militant cab drivers to either clean up their act or get out. Unfortunately for the coach and bus industry, their votes outnumber logic by 10,000 to one.
Mark Williams
Transport journalist
Peterborough
