Edinburgh has a particularly bad air pollution record. The countryside is also affected. Vehicle and aircraft emissions make a significant contribution to acid rain damage in forests in Scotland and Scandinavia. Moves to reduce the emissions with more efficient engines and with catalytic converters on new cars, while welcomed, only partly reduce the symptoms. They do nothing to remove the cause, which is the fossil fuel-powered internal combusion engine itself.
Transport now contributes nearly a quarter of UK emissions.
Our insistence on road transport is causing many other problems. Ever more road schemes lead to increasing impact on our urban and rural landscape. To avoid the alarming predictions which are being made from becoming reality, urban planning and transport between cities need radical rethinking. Central Region have pioneered an exemplary and imaginative lead in co-ordinating transport and planning in an environmental context,3 which larger and more complex conurbations could follow. The cost of failing to take radical action will be a decline in the quality of urban living, not to mention the appalling annual statistics of road deaths and injuries.