Vans are taking over UK roads

The Department for Transport’s figures from their Road Traffic in Great Britain for the third quarter of 2007, show that while cars are slowly disappearing, vans are multiplying.

In the last year, traffic levels rose by 1.1%- the catalyst?- a huge growth in vans! The presence of vans increased by 12% in the last year, while 1% of car drivers bowed out of taking to the road- or indeed- swapped their cars for vans!

The overall increase in traffic, combined with short term factors such as road works and adverse weather conditions, led to the average vehicle delay on the slowest 10% of journeys increasing 0.38 minutes per 10 miles.

When looking at motorways and urban A roads however, there was a reduction in traffic of 1% and 3% respectively. 

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What shade of green are you and how will it effect your next car purchase?

Thursday is the new Friday and green is the new black, but are those advertising their products and services, especially cars, in danger of putting people off with ethical talk?

This is the question which has been posed by Green Light, a new report from the Guardian, which researches into the views of different types of green customers. It finds that;

• ‘Onlookers’ make up 26% of the UK population (i.e. Moderately concerned, No desire to live ethically, participate in ‘easy’ activities.
• The ‘Conveniently Conscious’ account for 35% of the population (i.e. fairly concerned, think others should be penalised for their unethical behaviour, do the easy things, not concerned about ethical or local issues)
• ‘Positive Choosers’ consist of 31% of the population (i.e. aware, concerned and feel guilty about their lifestyle, desire to live ethically, buy from good and boycott bad companies. They are not vocal about their views)
• ‘Vocal Activists’ account for 4% of the population (i.e. Concerned, aware and take a stand. They live ethically and vocalised their discontent).
• ‘Principled Pioneers’ also make up 4% of the population (i.e. Committed, pro-active and whole hearted approach to living more ethically and seek out new ways to reduce their carbon footprint).

Where does this leave you on the scale and what does it mean for greener cars. Technically it means that 74% of the UK population (not including the ‘onlookers’) have the potential will to buy a low carbon car for their next car purchase. An encouraging thought, but unless the right information about CO2 ratings is made readily available potentially only the ‘principled pioneers’ who seek out their own information on action to take, will make this shift to a new low carbon vehicle. 70% of the UK population need the information to make this change, lets hope Government and industry can meet this challenge. 

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Should the UK follow Japan and develop musical roads?

Engineers in Japan have developed a new way for car drivers to keep themselves entertained according to a report by Bobbie Johnson in today’s Guardian.

According to the article a team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of ‘melody roads’, which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel. Groves are cut into the road at small intervals to create the sound, which you need to travel across at 28mph to get the optimal tune playback . There are currently three musical strips in central and Nortern Japan, but rest assured it is a initiative that is unlikely to feature on UK roads.

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