In my last post I highlighted some of the flaws in the latest push by Governments to produce small fuel efficient hybrid vehicles. Let me recap some of the problems:

• Increased congestion in our major cities
• Decreased use of public transport
• Increase in waste, eg, tires
• Increase in petrochemicals to produce components

Of course this is all based on an assumption that people will buy more vehicles more often due to their reduced costs. Some households will go from a single car household to a two or perhaps three car household – our young will be able to afford cars a lot sooner.

So what are the solutions? Public transport is one solution, however here in Australia no government appears willing to bite the bullet and push for a decent public transport system. They all pay lip service whilst running the services down.

Public transport needs to be viable and cost effective. You can only reduce prices so far so the answer has to be to make the alternatives so much more expensive. If city parking cost $40-$50 per day together with congestion taxes for our busiest cities, $10-$15 per day becomes the cheaper option.

Couple this with free, “safe” and well lit parking facilities in the outer suburbs and commuters would have the best of both worlds – using their car and public transport.

When it comes to cars themselves, rather than producing small fuel efficient vehicles, it is time that smaller 6, 7 and 8 seater vehicles were produced. I am sure that one full 8  seater is far cheaper to run than four 2 seater concept cars.

Of course there is one aspect to this whole argument that most people seem to forget – cars only produce 15% of all carbon emission. Power generation is by far the biggest producer of carbon – it’s ironic, one solution is to produce electric cars. What do they need? A power supply at every parking meter. Using the biggest source of carbon emissions to resolve the smallest source of carbon emissions!

That’s life I guess.