No cycling! (or walking) but Jeremy Hunt’s budget delivers £5 billion giveaway to drivers

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Fuel duty freeze benefits wealthy motorists, says think tank

Fuel duty freeze “just tinkering around the edges” of necessary transport changes and “disproportionately” benefits wealthiest motorists, says influential IPPR think tank, as Cycling UK slams short-term thinking on sustainable transportJeremy Hunt has been accused of “just tinkering around the edges” of the changes required to transform the UK’s transport system and benefit those on the lowest incomes, a leading think thank has said, after the Chancellor of the Exchequer opted to keep fuel duty...

“Maintaining the fuel duty freeze for another year at a cost of £5bn does nothing to help those who do not drive, who are likely to be on the lowest income, and disproportionately benefits the wealthiest drivers. “Our own analysis found that drivers on the lowest income are spending more than a fifth of their income on running a car,” Singer-Hobbs continued.

Despite the widespread desire to travel actively noted by the IPPR, today’s Budget contained no mention of either cycling or walking, a stark omission noted by Cycling UK, and one that’s particularly glaring coming in the wake of last year’s , which claimed that the Department for Transport is highly unlikely to achieve any of its four key active travel goals by 2025.

“Instead, the Chancellor has made another short-term focused decision to extend the fuel duty freeze, a poor value for money policy that has been shown to disproportionately benefit the wealthiest in society. Hydrogen is taken into the fuel cell and converted into zero-emission electricity which is then transported through a wire to the charging port.

On the other hand if I keep running my existing 9 year old car. It might create more emissions as I drive than an electric car. BUT, unless I scrap the car, someone else would be driving my current creating emissions while I am driving the new electric car.Fair point and the reason why ultimately more ULEZ-type schemes will be required to remove the most polluting cars from the roads .

To put it another way: if the manufacturing alone of that 48kWh EV alone is accountable for 14 tonnes of CO2 emissions , that same emissions burden could cover over 60,000 miles of use in an existing, second-hand car, assuming it were doing 58mpg. After that point, an EV’s vastly lower running emissions makes it the greener car.Diesel being significantly worse for the environment due to its PM2 and NOX emissions than petrol so I'm not sure why you think that's a win.

Does the battery pack last the life of the car? Is the burden of disposal/recycling taken into consideration? And is the lifetime of an EV similar to a petrol/diesel vehicle?It's almost impossible to state that as a fact, the whole debate is extremely complicated and due to manufacturers not being transparent you'd be a fool to state that EV is significantly more environmentally friendly than an ICEHydrogen powered vehicles have been around for ages ...

 

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