Green grandstanding expands Councils’ carbon footprints
Mon 10:11 am +01:00, 19 Feb 2024Anti green policies are now blighting many local communities. Individual Councils declare a climate emergency and take it out on motorists. They wish to grandstand whilst often adding to emissions. Create worse traffic jams and fuel use rises for a journey.
Lib Dem Wokingham Council hates drivers. They do not want us driving to work, taking children to school by car, going to the shops in a vehicle. They want to make the lives of delivery van drivers bringing goods to our home and truck drivers taking things to our shops and factories more difficult. They do not seem to like taxis, and see delaying the ambulance or fire engine as acceptable collateral damage in their campaign to get people out of vehicles.
They spend large sums on closing some roads altogether. They take well functioning main roads between villages and towns and place obstacles in one carriageway to make vehicles wait until the other direction lane is empty for their use. This presents new dangers. They see roundabout junctions that flow well and spend large sums on reducing their capacity. In the latest scheme just to the south of my constituency they are spending £5.5 m on changes to a roundabout that the public strongly opposes.Conservative Councillors with the approval of the local MP tried to stop it. Main roads at the junction will be completely closed or subject to one way light controls for six months. Local shops and the garage report lost trade on a big scale. Parents will be badly inconvenienced when the junior school returns. The Council has had to warn people not to take it out on the workers at the site as they are not to blame for such an aggravating waste of money.
People pay a lot of tax. They want the road money spent on mending the potholes and improving the safety and capacity of junctions, not on making life difficult for drivers. The Councillors who inflict this misery have a car park at the Council offices, presumably take delivery of on line goods at home from vans and expect emergency vehicles and trucks to get through to handle crises and restock the shops. This latest example of anger about local government should be a warning to all that the wrong kind of green policies make people more distrustful of politicians and Councils. Why can’t they do things that make our lives better? When do they not do a proper carbon count of how much CO 2 all their tarmac, crazy paving and traffic congestion causes?
John Redwood
