For the Greta good - but I’m not keen on lecturing
I’M not a great fan of young environmentalist Greta Thunberg. It isn’t that I particularly disagree with what she is saying, but really the future of the world can’t be decided by someone so inexperienced in the realities of life.
Funnily enough I can though relate to her. For I was certainly a teenage idealist, shunning the car in favour of cycling, walking and going by train.
Indeed I remain a strong advocate for public transport, which I still think gets a rum deal from a Government in love with the private motor car.
Yet I know that people in general hate being lectured to, and that in a place like Grimsby you can’t expect individuals to simply give up their private vehicles. In London perhaps, and the biggest provincial cities where modern trams have been added to the mix of buses and trains.
But who in Grimsby is going to abandon their car for a trip which currently takes them 10 minutes when the alternative is a two-bus journey that lasts four times as long?
No, what we need are measures that make life more straightforward for the bus passenger, be they extra services at night or stops that have both shelters and Real Time Information provided. We can also advocate the positive reasons for choosing the bus, such as avoiding costly parking charges and the problem of finding a suitable space in town to leave your car.
But it’d be electoral suicide for a mainstream political party to force people out of their own vehicles when there isn’t a realistic other travel option. I used to live in Hebden Bridge, where drivers would leave their cars at the railway station before commuting to work by train. They didn’t do so for the sake of being greener, but because rail simply made sense for them.
It is this situation we should try to create all over the country if we are serious about climate change.
Tim Mickleburgh,
Boulevard Avenue,
Grimsby.