We simply cannot afford to have half of the staff at the Department of Transport calculating the likely increase in traffic and the other half setting about furnishing a suitable number of green fields on which to slap enough concrete to provide for that capacity. We have to something about actually managing the demand for travel. And I think the extent to which the government's integrated White Paper in a sense formalised our acceptance over the last five years amongst all the political parties and amongst virtually every academic and professional in the industry that we are now at a stage where we have to start managing demand, where we have to start looking at the role that land use planning plays in eliminating unnecessary traffic demands if we want to survive into the 21st century. That has been enormously welcome. It follows, incidentally that I was very pleased to see that one of the first things the government did was to actually put the department of transport and the department of the Environment together.
Transport is almost unique in the sense that it serves no end in itself.
I nonetheless wish the government extraordinarily well because I think the general thrust of policy is one that none of us would wish to disagree with. This is quite an extraordinarily phenomenon. I believe that's where the central flaw in our transport policy exists. Let me just make one or two points on that. First of all we are an economy which treats transport essentially as a milch cow.