Simon Crowcroft – who also chairs the parish’s roads committee – made the comments in response to a 91-page report recently published by the Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change.
The document included a series of recommendations on how the Island could achieve its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, such as bans on newly registered petrol and diesel vehicles by 2025, free bus travel for young Islanders and charging frequent flyers more depending on the number of flights they take.
Mr Crowcroft, who has regularly campaigned for sustainable-transport policies, said he was pleased to see the report had utilised similar imagery to artist Ian Rolls’ ‘climate stripes’ mural on the Waterfront, which shows how the world has warmed – particularly during the past 20 years.
He said: ‘That was an important visual aid for the public, as it reminds Islanders that we have responsibilities that extend far beyond our shores.’
However, he said he was ‘disappointed’ that the citizens’ assembly’s list of recommendations appeared to rank the de-carbonisation of public transport as a greater priority than investment in infrastructure to encourage walking and cycling.
He said: ‘The first responsibility we should have is to make walking and cycling safe and convenient.
‘How much money will be left by the time they get to recommendation five?’
Mr Crowcroft added that electric vehicles were ‘not a silver bullet’ and expressed frustration over the lack of a cycling strategy – which he said had ‘not been a priority for any government’.
He added: ‘We still have congestion, we have dangerous roads for walking and cycling – we should focus our resources on walking, cycling and buses rather than transitioning
everyone away from fossil-fuel cars.
‘You cannot get to a stage where you say “thou shalt not drive a fossil-fuel car”. I don’t think taking away the ability for people to enjoy classic cars is fair and I don’t think cars are evil – it is about how you use them and being considerate of your impact on the environment. We should focus on taxing vehicle use and not vehicle ownership.’
He added that many of the relevant issues – including the introduction of a cycling strategy – had been being discussed for decades, and that he was not confident that the report would lead to substantial changes.
‘It is being published to a government that will say all of the right things, but I don’t think that they will actually do anything about it,’ he said.
