Dear Sir
Simon Jenkins (4 April 2008) exposes the Achilles heel of all the proposed eco-towns: transport. But he is a trifle hard on the motives of the original proponents of the garden cities and new towns. Relieving the squalid, densely packed, inner city slums by providing houses in new settlements, with gardens, in which people would live within walking or cycling distance of jobs, shops, schools, doctors and friends was a noble vision. All these visionaries, including the eponymous author of the Abercrombie Plan, failed to anticipate the enormous increase in car ownership. The presumed local-scale functioning of these new settlements was destroyed by the car. Their inhabitants bought them, got into them, and roamed widely in pursuit of employment and supermarket bargains. They became car dependent.
The naiveté of the early visionaries is no longer excusable. The process has been going on for too long. John Prescott’’s vow to get people out of their cars and on to public transport has been overwhelmed by growing numbers of cars. Since Labour came to power the country’s motor vehicle population has increased by almost 8 million. To provide just one parking space for each of these extra vehicles would require a car park equivalent to a new motorway stretching from London to Edinburgh – 90 lanes wide.
The nation’’s vehicle population cannot be accommodated within a landuse pattern in which walking, cycling and buses are viable modes of transport for most of the human population. The Government’’s eco-town aspirations will be defeated by the Government’s transport policies.
An abbreviated version of this letter was published in the Guardian on 7 April 2008.