Why climate activists need to call for joined-up transport policies

Team Train Smart met this week with those lovely folk at Transport 2000. They worry about the technicalities of transport reform on behalf of the nation, and a jolly good job they do too: demand a rail White Paper – check; insist capacity sits (ahem) at the heart of it – check.

But there’s no denying the Department of Transport (DfT) is only just waking up to the fact that when it comes to integrating climate change policies, it's the government’s most renegade department.

Thanks to all those involved in the Camp for Climate Action, officials are finally being given licence to join the dots between planes and human impacts on the world’s ecosystems. However, without a reversal of declining investment in trains, progress is looking more two-step than tango – one step forward, two steps back.

Under current plans, the DfT is slashing subsidies to rail transport from £4.5bn to £3bn by 2014. The specifications of the franchises it offers operators, however, have exacting financial performance targets. So where is the shortfall to be recovered? From the pockets of Joe and Josephine Public, you and us, whose contribution is expected to double to £9bn over the same period.

Among general users that means that while price doesn’t stop the relatively affluent from using the train, people on a lower income say it does (Passenger Focus).

Train Smart smells an opportunity. If rail operators changed their stock and pricing mix by taking some of that underused First Class capacity and opening it up to untapped demand, economic sustainability might more comfortably go hand-in-hand with ecological sustainability.

You would be forgiven for thinking this is no business of Train Smart’s – after all, the journeying in question is very likely being taken by car. But this is where the analysts call the ‘interdependencies’ of responsible travel matter.

An increase in the total journeys taken by rail equals economies of scale, equals greater affordability and higher service standards, equals more leverage on facilitating the critical switch from planes to trains. (And cars are anyway on average five times more polluting than trains.)

Our conclusion? It is imperative the DfT takes a joined-up approach to reducing carbon dioxide emissions across aviation, rail and road policy.