Car free city centres

As cities around the world wake up to the environmental, social and health benefits of reducing motorised traffic, the most ambitious are pledging to go car free: Hamburg plans to phase cars out of its city centre by 2034; Vancouver wants to make 50% of its journeys non-car by 2020; Copenhagen intends to be the first carbon-neutral city by 2025.

To celebrate the festive period this year, Madrid closed its city centre to most cars. Those buses, taxis and residents’ cars that remained were restricted to an 18 mph speed limit.

When it comes to capital city car-free initiatives, London is lagging. Oxford Street is due to be pedestrianised by 2020 and Sadiq Khan is said to be supportive of car free days, but action to ban traffic is long overdue; the government estimates nitrogen dioxide pollution kills over 20,000 people in Britain each year, while particulates cause another 29,000 premature deaths.

We know beyond reasonable doubt that motoring in towns and cities is actually damaging for our health in a much wider way than is recognised in the media generally. Living on a main road is not good for your health.

Take Denmark: there is no town in Denmark through which a main road travels. Here in Weybridge, where the ETA is based, we have an A road going through the town centre. That simply wouldn’t happen in Denmark - they’d actually think it was slightly mad to have a main road going through a centre of town.

Cars damage our happiness in a way we find hard to understand directly, because they also help our happiness in our mobility. It’s that conundrum of having the mobility without the downside which is stretching us as a society.

Dr Ian Walker, a specialist in traffic psychology at Bath University, adds to the argument: “One of the big social costs is the way it disenfranchises people who cannot or will not drive a car. Around 25% of British households do not have a car or access to one. How are they meant to get around when we plan shopping centres, facilities and amenities on the assumption you’re going to drive to them? There’s a huge social cost of cutting off people who can’t drive, and that particularly affects older people.”

Ethical insurance

The ETA has been voted the most ethical insurance company in Britain for the second year running by the Good Shopping Guide.

Beating household-name insurance companies such as John Lewis and the Co-op, the ETA earned an ethical company index score of 89.

The ETA was established in 1990 as an ethical provider of green, reliable travel services. Twenty six years on, it continues to offer cycle insurance, travel insurance and breakdown cover while putting concern for the environment at the heart of all it does.