Greater Manchester’s Environment Plan 2019–2024

5 min readMay 1, 2019

Chapter 5: Our cars and how we get around

An in-depth analysis of city region’s environment policy and where it falls short, presented in a series of 10 chapters related in the style of a fictional leader using language the crisis calls for #TellTheTruth

If a Martian arrived and looked at how we moved around, they’d see a strange sight.

Millions of us using a finite and precious resource that when burnt pollutes our air, and is warming the planet dangerously to move around ‘mini metal living rooms on wheels’.

We expect to go as fast as we can and park where we like ‘for free’ despite the hidden cost to us all, preferring to make room in public spaces for these metal boxes that sit empty most of the time, than for living, breathing people.

I know, I know — as car drivers we pay tax for the privilege …but actually that doesn’t really cover ANYWHERE NEAR the true costs.

I have framed it like that — so we get some perspective when I say what I’m going to say next.

We all need to stop using cars for journeys less than a mile or so.

And before you protest you don’t — you do! We all do! And we need to not. Not unless it is absolutely unavoidable (eg for those with genuine mobility issues).

We know there are 250m journeys in GM every year of less than 2km.

That’s about half car the journeys we make.

And one in three journeys of less than 1km are by car

That’s a leisurely 15 minute walk or less than five minutes on a bike.

People — what are we doing to ourselves!

You know how we’ve started to feel about cigarettes or plastic bags? Driving to the shop for a pint of milk, dropping the kids at school round the corner, idling engines — we need to think of driving a short distance, like we would smoking a fag or taking a plastic bag when we have forgotten our own.

It’s a piece of bad planning, laziness, inconsiderateness to others; a piece of personal pollution we can’t take back. It’s killing us.

How to break our addiction ?

It’s killing us in one, two, three, four — count ’em — four ways:

a) Our air quality is at such illegal levels in GM it kills 10 people a day and reduces life expectancy for each of us by an average of 6 months, the equivalent of smoking more than a hundred cigarettes a week;

b) We are facing a health crisis in the region partly through lack of daily mobility;

c) Petrol and diesel emissions are now the biggest causes of greenhouse gas emission in the UK;

d) And unfortunately vehicles kill or injure many people through accidents and make the streets of GM less pleasant for people, as we ourselves acknowledge.

So folks we need to break this addiction. By 2040, half of all journeys in GM need to be made by foot, bike, scooter, bus, tram or train etc. Your choice.

That is 11% more than now, which doesn’t sound like much.

But 11% is still one million more trips every day by one of these ‘sustainable modes’.

And if we’re to really tackle our fair share of climate change and stay within our carbon budget, that number would be far higher.

Here’s one teeny idea for now — get a ride from someone — or offer one instead with this new Manchester lift share scheme. One-person car journeys — no excuse for them really!

People who drive — which is most of us after all — don’t get angry at this state of affairs — tell us what you think we should all do about it?

What you should do about it? What should I do about it?

Let me spell it out — all of us will need to switch to an electric car by 2035 (as well as get by with fewer cars — could you get by without yours? — and not expect to park them right next to shops, schools or offices).

That is a big change given there are only 3,400 electric cars in GM at the moment — it means it’s got to be our next car or the one after that, given we only change cars every six years

You may want to start planning ahead for this switch now as I know it is a big investment; for instance a second-hand electric car costs about £6,000 or £1,500 a year for 5 years on lease, less if you only use it for short journeys and don’t need a long driving range (and maybe consider an electric bike!).

There are grants available for this but unfortunately the picture is not rosy — they’re only available for new cars (which start at above five figures) and the grant for hybrid cars has just been scrapped — though to be fair the grants did seem to be a bit of a waste of money given the scheme led to loads of companies buying them up on the cheap for their employees, who then never apparently used the electric option. This stuff ain’t easy!

Now the most important thing to owning an electric car, is how you charge it — sorry if that’s stating the obvious..

So many of us will have to install our own electric car charging points if we want to have one right by our house because you often can’t just whack it on the existing mains without blowing the whole street (there are grants but also a LOT of red tape) and sadly the UK’s efforts to introduce a national charging network have been a bit pathetic to date.

I guess they’re going to start popping up everywhere, probably ‘taking up those parking spaces’ we’re letting go of remember … coz we’re going to need at least 200,000 across the city region in the first batch.

We only have 324 now.

So watch this (car parking) space!

This page is part of a series critiquing and presenting the Greater Manchester Environment Plan, in the style of fictional leader Sandy Turnham.

All measures and facts and descriptions are accurate as far as my understanding but some artistic licence has been taken with tone in order to #TellTheTruth.