By Bruno Waterfield, Brussels 4:16PM BST 28 Mar 2011
The European Commission on Monday unveiled a “single European transport area” aimed at enforcing “a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers” by 2050.
The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.
Top of the EU’s list to cut climate change emissions is a target of “zero” for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorries in the EU’s future cities.
Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission, insisted that Brussels directives and new taxation of fuel would be used to force people out of their cars and onto “alternative” means of transport.
“That means no more conventionally fuelled cars in our city centres,” he said. “Action will follow, legislation, real action to change behaviour.”
The Association of British Drivers rejected the proposal to ban cars as economically disastrous and as a “crazy” restriction on mobility.
=================================================================
Gee, ya think? And the greens/labor wonder why they just got booted out of power in Australia and why the American public no longer gives a rodents posterior about global warming.
I think it will the EU that’s banned by 2050, not the automobile. Why? The automobile actually provides a useful function for people.
==================================================================
Here’s the plan:
A new European transport plan 
aims to increase mobility and further integrate the EU’s transport networks – while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the bloc’s dependence on imported oil.
Measures to encourage major infrastructure investments, change the way freight moves and people travel would boost economic competitiveness and create jobs.
The plan – with goals to be met by 2050 – focuses on travel within cities and between cities, and on long distance journeys. It includes calls for:
- cities to completely phase out petrol cars
- shifting to rail or water 50% of all passenger and freight road transport currently making intercity journeys of more than 300km
- airlines to increase their use of sustainable low-carbon fuels to 40%
- shipping to cut 40% off its carbon emissions.
===================================================================
UPDATE: Per my comment above:
I think it will the EU that’s banned by 2050, not the automobile. Why? The automobile actually provides a useful function for people.
It seems to mirror the thinking of many:
A MASSIVE wave of public support was last night surging behind the Daily Express’s crusade to liberate Britain from the stranglehold of Brussels.
An exclusive poll conducted on the first day of our crusade showed an astonishing 99 per cent of people agree we should quit the European Union.
In an indication of the strength of public feeling on the issue, the poll saw the biggest ever response to a Daily Express phone survey, with tens of thousands of people swamping our switchboards.
Read more and sign the petition: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/213821/21382199-of-you-say-Get-us-out-of-Europe#ixzz1HztMDhJN
h/t to Fred Berple for the update
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Socialist A Hitler would be proud of the EU. Socialists can recognize one other across centuries. Why do Europeans allow themselves to crawl like this?
Keep it over there Lord, keep it over there.
Imagine it’s 1911. Imagine the European Governments of the day planning for what their cities would look like in 1950. I’m betting that they wouldn’t have taken into account the possibility that most of their cities were going to be burned to the ground by that time.
It can happen again.
dp says:
March 28, 2011 at 11:43 pm
Remember when the biggest problem they faced was just a thousand year Reich?
And what, dear dp, do you think this is?
@ur momisugly crosspatch says:
March 28, 2011 at 11:33 pm
How about a “high speed rail” system that uses individual vehicles rather than long trains of cars? You have one track in one direction, one track in the other direction. You want to go somewhere, you go to the station, hop into the next available “pod” on the track in the direction in which you want to go, and it takes off down the rails at 200+ MPH. Want to get off at the next station? Push a button and off you go to the station siding and the car waits for someone else needing a ride down the line. Instead of having these large trains, have “caravans” of individual vehicles, electric powered of course, but with individuals themselves deciding where they will stop or if they will take a branch off the track to get onto a different track. People can then go where they please, when they please and you only have as many pods on the road as needed to actually move people around. No hauling of mostly empty cars around all day.
You should bone up on logistics and queuing theory.
There are a range of sensible travel options. My main ones in order of my current use are walking, electric cycle, ferry, car, train and air.
Its horses for courses, naturally I don’t take a plane to travel to the town over the estuary-thats where one of the other options come in according to circumstances (am I in a hurry, do I need to carry anything, what’s the weather like?)
I can understand that journeys UNDER 186 miles should be by rail, but long rail journeys to say the south of Europe, will take forever and mean numerous changes at a variety of stations, with every chance of missing a connection. Long distance rail journeys will only work if you live next to a railway station and can take a high speed train direct to your final destination.
I would have thought trying to get people out of their cars for short journeys, which can easily be done by other forms of transport, is a more sensible aspiration.
tonyb
Rhys Jaggar says:
March 29, 2011 at 5:32 am
‘So long as there family-friendly access modes for out-of-town folks, this isn’t as mad as it seems you know…….’
Oh yes it is. It’s barking, even by EU standards. Though I suppose there may be ‘green’ jobs for the horses**t shovellers.
I am quite surprised you are all so sarcastic about this measure. Are you all anti-EU nationalist British or average Murrikans ? “EU said X, so X might be extremely bad, or worse: communist.”
1) I do not really believe in Global Warming but I do think city air pollution really matters.
2) I do not know if you noticed, but 2050 is in 40 years. 40 years ago, technologies were different. As they will be in 40 years. The big thing said in this report is banning cars with current oil technology. Even though there will be a huge cataclysm when we’ll discover no temperature increase,bad air in populated cities would still be of policy matter. No one likes black pulmons as well as noone likes traffic jams. Since there is more walking way in my city center I discovered the joy of wandering around.
Actually, the scheme isn’t as totally crazy as it seems viewed from an EU perspective.
Most cities in Europe are high density with good mass transit. Think NYC on smaller scales.
I lived in Madrid and would have considered having a car to be a hassle just like when I lived in NYC.
Re. high speed rail (HSR) , I would love to have that option in Texas.
I’ve traveled with HSR in Spain, France and Germany and it is much less hassle than flying and usually faster when factoring in security and baggage check.
So these restrictions would have less impact in most of Europe than they would have in the US. In the US it would be a disaster.
I think it’s crazy to mandate this behavior. It is bureaucracy gone wild and fortunately has little chance of success.
Easy to see why these idiots are not elected, Yep, the European Government is an employment boondoggle for the boys and girls, now if this was to become law it would put plus minus, 50-60 million people out of work, then think of the sweat and tears that that new car cost, and the mountains of trucks and cars that litter the countryside, etc, etc,
It’s all part of the Master Plan that Schellnhuber will soon reveal, see my site if you wish.
The population is being reduced to herds of cattle – to be driven here, away from there, into this, out of that…
For the skeptic cattle, they are probably getting railroad boxcars ready – to take us to the soap factories.
Anybody that denies this is central planning and authoritarianism is in for a big surprise – and much sooner than 2050.
“Sustainable low carbon fuels” puzzles me
Ethanol/Methanol/Soylent – it is “sustainable” because it is made from living organisms. You kill the current organisms and convert them to fuel. New organisms then grow in their place, making the process “sustainable”.
DirkH is right. In Europe we have the choice between red-green and brown-green.
Annei says:
March 29, 2011 at 3:09 am
Train? What train? How come, when we live quite a few miles from the nearest station which is itself several miles on the far side of our nearest small town? There are three buses per day into that town from our village, and only two back out…
Interesting. Now that you mention it, I notice that the nearest working train station from where I am (in Portugal) is 36 km from where I live, that via autobahn with tolls. The nearest bus station is 2 km from here, but there are only 2 buses a day to the nearest city, where one can get a long-distance bus.
Finally, they’re phasing out trains — too costly to maintain, they say. This is getting medieval in a different sense.
DirkH says:
March 29, 2011 at 4:18 am
Anthony; Australia is a democracy; the EU is not.
Precisely. No longer part of the so-called free world.
UK Sceptic says:
March 29, 2011 at 5:54 am
[…]the roads where I live (in the sticks) tending to flood there one way I’ll ever use a tiny, low wheel base electric car.
I looked into electric cars too, and that was the argument out of them. Today I hardly made it back home with a Polo.
ferd berple says:
March 29, 2011 at 6:28 am
“Sustainable low carbon fuels” puzzles me
Ethanol/Methanol/Soylent – it is “sustainable” because it is made from living organisms. You kill the current organisms and convert them to fuel. New organisms then grow in their place, making the process “sustainable”.
Now about the low carbon part?
“This, of course, only means that it will not be an election that puts an end to these schemes, but something else. ”
Uneconomical policies always solve themselves. Long before 2050. The cost of EU policies is already being seen in the bailout programs sweeping EU economies. That program is clearly not sustainable. The current concerns over CO2 will be a distant memory long before 2050. Everyone will be asking “what were they thinking”?
The euro-green-nuts surprise us everyday. This is not a consequence of science whatsoever but of the fantastic “spread” between paying Euros 2 per hectare to the amazon tribes and forcefully selling it to 1st.world “polluters” at Euros 137,500 (at a 5,500 tons of “carbon capture” per hectare). What it is still in question is if the real owners of the amazon basin :Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador will submit its sovereignty to the “Global Governance” UN scheme….
Friday November 26,2010
UK NEWS
99% OF YOU SAY: GET US OUT OF EUROPE
A MASSIVE wave of public support was last night surging behind the Daily Express’s crusade to liberate Britain from the stranglehold of Brussels.
An exclusive poll conducted on the first day of our crusade showed an astonishing 99 per cent of people agree we should quit the European Union.
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/213821/213821
There’s always the rickshaw.
A warning though, don’t take your rickshaw puller onto the freeway, not unless you’ve got a steady supply of illicit stimulants available.
As a proud GW denier I have to say it is an excellent idea. I hope they can pull it off.
Just because I deny Global Warming does not mean I am going to automatically attack progressive thinking when it comes to the environment in general. FF powered vehicles must and will be removed from our culture. The sooner the better.
With ideas like this taking root perhaps they will tackle the way we grow food next and instead of mass transport from all over the world everything is grown locally in hydroponic towers.
Discrediting good ideas on this site, simply because they pertain to improving the environment, is a discredit to WUWT, which is supposed to support logic not defy it purely out of spite.
Maybe China will get some immigrants from Europe to fill up all their “Ghost Cities.”
I wonder how long it would take after this went into effect to require those wanting to use the rails to “show ze papers” to the brown shirts in order to board.
How to Control the Population 101:
1. take their guns
2. take their money
3. restrict their movement
4. restrict their information
5. ration their food
6. incarcerate those who do not comply
But how is this going to work? Didn’t they also say that electricity on demand was going to become a thing of the past – brownouts, blackouts, appliances remotely shut off. If we also ban fossil fuel driven cars we will likely more than double the demand for electricity and it will be a pretty jerky trip to work each day. Watching a movie may take 5 hours, your eggs may be softer than you like them ….oh but then you may have more time to walk through the coast to coast windmill forest. This is not funny anymore. These Luddites are on automatic pilot and even an ice age can’t stop them now.
TMJ says:
March 29, 2011 at 6:17 am
Travis B says:
March 29, 2011 at 7:04 am
Don’t leave the thinking cap behind that makes you a skeptic. The idea has a nice clean futuristic look, but don’t forget that they are also shutting down coal and nuke fired plants and if they also ban fossil fuel transportation then it is even going to be worse than the UK Transport Commissioner recently stated where he envisages brownouts, blackouts, etc. Think! Are they gong to make this happen with windmills? Europe will look like a hedgehog from space with these contraptions. Fortunately something has got to give here. I’ll go for the futuristic city, too, if their plans to retire all reliable energy generation gets dropped. Don’t get too comfortable and complacent as a skeptic in these crazy times.
P Gosselin says:
March 29, 2011 at 6:26 am
That´s the “Brave New World”, the dream of the left, an anatropic society as a beehive or an ant-hill; really a dictatorship of a small elite who imagine themselves as the most intelligent, as they call themselves “the white brotherhood”, a self defined quasi angelical kind of people who only by accident, inheritance or by the hard work of their predecessors, happen to have much more than it is necessary to survive and, while really being “rich fools” allucinate they can manage humanity, and by doing so, will remove the most precious values we have: individuality, individual freedom and the corner stone of society: family. This is why they, so fanatically, promote everything which goes against it.
“I think it will the EU that’s banned by 2050, not the automobile. Why? The automobile actually provides a useful function for people.”
lol Anthony. 2050!!!!!!!!!! 2013 is nearer! Portugal has now gone t/ts up with more to follow! The Euro is in terminal decline and the only way Brussels bureaucrats can operate is with financial clout. The problem is that they are bent cheats that could not run a piggy bank!