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RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS CLIPPING OUR WINGS TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Zareer Masani Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 01.03.07 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 04.03.07 2130-2200 CD Number: PLN708/07VT1009 Duration: 27’ 41” Taking part in order of appearance: Edmund King Executive Director, RAC Foundation Brenda Boardman Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University Bridget Rosewell Chairman of Volterra Consultancy Chief Economist to Greater London Authority Professor John Adams Social Geographer, University College, London Professor Tim Butler Department of Geography, King’s College, London Margy Waller Director, The Mobility Agenda, Washington DC Dr Nick Middleton Geography Teacher, Oxford University Travel Writer & Television Presenter MASANI: We’re zooming around the globe at a pace our ancestors never dreamt of. Have we freed ourselves from the shackles of time and place, or become too mobile for our own good? KING: In 1890, the average distance a Briton travelled was thirteen miles a year. By 1990, it became thirteen miles a day, mostly by car. So the car if you like became this great liberator. And if you look, most seventeen year old boys and a fair proportion of seventeen year old girls, the first thing they want to do is pass their driving test to get out on the road there. BOARDMAN: You hear about Hen parties in Dublin and people going for the weekend to New York to shop. The other day I heard of somebody who has now got a dentist in Budapest. You just have to say is it really necessary to do these? Wouldn’t it be better to be a little bit more careful? Can’t you just constrain some of these flights? MASANI: Dr. Brenda Boardman at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, and before her Edmund King, Executive Director of the RAC Foundation, which researches the future of motoring. With the near-unanimous, scientific consensus about global warming, our addiction to cars and cheap flights is being challenged now as never before. The dramatic growth of aviation, in particular, has been identified as the fastest rising source of greenhouse gases. And the debate goes further than our carbon footprint. There are concerns that too much travel is making us a footloose, transient and unstable society, locked into the tyranny of commuting ever-longer distances. But just how important is mobility to our sense of freedom and to the economic prosperity and consumer choice we take for granted? ROSEWELL: No transport, no economy is basically the simple answer. In order to become better off, you need to be engaging in some kind of trade; and in order to get engaged in some kind of trade, you need mechanisms to get stuff to market, get yourself to market, be able to participate in opportunities. That means moving around, no question. MASANI: Bridget Rosewell, Chairman of Volterra Consulting, is Chief Economist to the Greater London Authority. ROSEWELL: The economy starts with trade and exchange. And exchange requires that people can get together whether that’s some nomad at the end of his nomadic wanderings bumping into somebody at the end of his who’s got something different and they make an exchange; through to medieval markets and the horse and cart, making that possible; canals; railways; through to the Internet and everything else. MASANI: Through history, efficient transport has always been closely linked with economic success. But for the first time there are serious concerns that market forces could be sending us into overdrive. In 1990, the average Briton travelled thirteen miles a day; today it’s more than thirty miles, and forecast to double again in the next two decades. Professor John Adams, a social geographer at University College, London, has coined the term “hypermobility” to describe this galloping lifestyle. Does he really believe we can turn the travel clock back? ADAMS: Projecting these current trends backward into the past, we find ourselves in the pedestrian peasant society - socially claustrophobic, prone to famine and misunderstandings with neighbours - and I wouldn’t want to live there. I haven’t met many people who would. And so through most of history, the rising graphs of mobility have been labelled progress and now progress is acquiring a question mark. And if you project this graph on and off the top of the page, that’s the realm of what I call hypermobility. MASANI: What’s the most important thing driving this process? Is it the revolution in transport technologies? ADAMS: Probably the principal driver is everybody’s desire to be more mobile without contemplating the collective consequences of everyone pursuing that ambition. A friend a few years ago did a survey of sixth form students, first year university students, and the question she put to them was, “If you had to choose between having the right to vote or having the right to drive, which would you choose?” and 75% chose the right to drive. MASANI: And does that suggest that there is something intrinsically attractive to the human imagination about travel and mobility? ADAMS: Indeed. Liberty – with it comes freedom and more power over your life and it’s very attractive, until you start thinking about the consequences of everyone having unlimited amounts of this precious good. MASANI: Mobility can undoubtedly be liberating for us as individuals. And it is also a valuable part of economic globalisation, argues the economist Bridget Rosewell. ROSEWELL: The more things get spread out, actually the more people get together. And that’s partly because more trade, more global activity, more interaction means that people move and people get together and then they need to get around as well. MASANI: But in a sense globalisation has led to the production process being split up much more than it was in the past, so jobs are outsourced, operations are offshored. Doesn’t that reduce the need for people to cluster round particular metropolitan centres? ROSEWELL: You’d think so, wouldn’t you, but that doesn’t seem to be actually how it happens? I think it’s partly because one of the things that’s happening with a process of globalisation is that you’re getting new things, new innovations, new developments, and all those sort of new developments mean that people get together in order to invent them, discuss them, produce them, worry about how to do them. Cities are the places where you can change what you do, you can reinvent yourself, you can reinvent activities, and so the more things are changing, the more people get together as well. I think that’s important. MASANI: So as more businesses go global, it’s inevitable that their managers travel further and more often. Does that mean a less settled, more nomadic way of life? Not necessarily, says Professor Tim Butler at King’s College, London. He’s a sociologist who’s specialised in research on the professional middle class. BUTLER: It used to be the case that for a middle class career, in order to go up you’d have to move around. Increasingly nowadays, I think that is less the case. Now that may sound illogical given all that we’ve heard about globalisation, but certainly within many professional types of job, I think that is increasingly the case. I could give an example of some research that I’ve done. We looked at the legal profession and the legal profession is very, very tied in in London to global business, but actually these people hardly ever move out of two or three districts of London - the City or around Fleet Street and the Inns of Court - and the business comes to them. MASANI: Why is that because I mean it does sound rather curious that when the world has become much more mobile, certain professions are moving around less? BUTLER: The world has changed. In the old world, if I can call it that, we used to make things and we made things in lots of different parts of the world, and to a large extent the large corporations were the corporations that made things. They would have a lot of branch plants and the senior managers as part of their role would move around the company, would move around the plants that made things and they would take their families with them. Now we live in a very different world where if we make things, that’s not where the power lies; the power lies in the large, global cities where finance and corporate headquarters are. And that is where the top jobs are located and that by and large is where most people will spend most of their time with maybe a large number of very short forays out to other places in the flat beds of British Airways and others where they’ll go for a day or two and then return home. So I think it’s a very different world. MASANI: So if you’re a legal or financial high-flier, you can settle in a major city and wait for the jobs to come to where you are. You no longer have to go through the dreary, old routine of provincial postings before you’re promoted to head office. But what about those of us who are less in demand, especially if we can’t afford soaring property prices in the world’s financial capitals? For many, the harsh reality of working for the newer and leaner urban corporation means having to commute ever-longer distances. Edmund King finds a direct link between people’s insecurity at work and the distances they need to commute. KING: Commuting distances have increased over the last five years or so and now in the UK we actually have the longest car commutes in Europe in terms of distance and indeed time. And one of the reasons for this has been that job security isn’t as great as it was before, so whereas before if someone got a new job they would quite likely move houses to be close to the job, now people are quite worried that if they move houses they have to pay stamp duty, they might have to change their children’s schools and then they might move to that job and that job may only last a year or two. So as a result of that, people are travelling much greater distances, living in the same places but travelling more, and the bulk of that travel is by car. MASANI: To compete in a tighter job market, we have to be increasingly flexible about where we work, even if that means longer commutes from where we live. Economic necessity is driving large numbers of people to travel growing distances up and down the country, and even across Europe, says Professor Tim Butler. BUTLER: We’ve clearly seen huge mobility in terms of economic migrants and so forth, particularly now across the European Union – very much I suppose the kind of movement that we’ve seen in the last five or ten years that’s been very similar to the huge movements that we saw across the United States during the 1930s when people migrated for work from Oklahoma across to California. We’re now seeing people coming from Poland or Bulgaria to Britain. But whether that mobility is happening so much in Britain, I don’t know. Clearly there is a shift from the north to the south. People are also commuting quite large distances in terms of day-to-day commuting. And also I think, interestingly, there is quite a large instance of weekly commuting; that people will either have a second home and the family will be in one part of the country. And you find that I think at both levels – both amongst the professional middle classes, you’ll certainly find it amongst university teachers - but you will also find, I think you will notice on a Monday morning and a Friday evening, an awful lot of vans moving up and down the motorway. As people working in construction or whatever move, you will find a large number of white vans parked outside the cheap hotels on the outskirts of London in places like Dagenham where people will come down from the north to fit curtains or carpets or do carpentry in London and then will go back to their families in the north where simply there isn’t the work or the wages aren’t so good. MASANI: So the economic migrants who supply London’s service needs aren’t just foreigners but weekly commuters from less favoured parts of Britain. For them, mobility isn’t a lifestyle choice but a matter of survival in the job market. And that’s also true in the land most renowned for its love-affair with the car. Margy Waller in Washington works for “The Mobility Agenda”, a new initiative that focuses on the transport needs of low-paid Americans. WALLER: Something like 90% of all commuting trips are taken by car, by all income groups, and that’s because it’s the reality of our choices for living and working, choices of employers for location decisions. They make it a virtual necessity to have a car to get to and from work. Public transit works well in some situations – it works for very dense, urban areas for people who live and work in urban areas – but most jobs, especially most entry level jobs, are now located in the suburbs. MASANI: Is it because work to some extent is moving out of major urban centres into the suburbs? WALLER: It’s absolutely true that work has moved out to the suburbs. You know a hundred years ago it was easy to walk or maybe take a streetcar to your job. Farmers in rural areas walked out the back door and people who lived in the centre of cities often walked to work or maybe rode the streetcar. Today we’ve had a complete flip reverse of that situation where most jobs are now in the suburbs. Two thirds of jobs in metropolitan areas are in suburbs. MASANI: Is there perhaps a sense in which we need to rethink the need to move given that the whole environmental context is changing quite rapidly? Is there a sense in which we need to question whether mobility is a good thing in itself? WALLER: I expect that over time there will be changes in the way that we live and work because it will become a necessity for the environment and because of the cost of commuting. I expect that over time people will be more and more likely to pursue options that allow them to reduce their commuting time whether that means working from home or because people will move in the direction of living and working in closer proximity. I think that the problem with this conversation occurs when too much of that burden of reducing the use of cars for getting to and from work or for other mobility is placed on the backs of the low wage workers who absolutely have to have a car in order to work more hours. MASANI: British jobs aren’t nearly as suburbanised as in the U.S. We’re more accustomed to moving out to the suburbs and commuting back in. And 90 per cent of commuting into London is by public transport. But can’t we offset at least some of this travel time with the opportunities new technologies give us to work online or from home? Can our computers rescue us from the tyranny of our cars? Nick Middleton teaches geography at Oxford University, but he’s best known as a travel writer and television presenter who specialises in dramatic foreign locations. MIDDLETON: You could actually turn the whole Internet, television age on its head and say in another sense it’s removed a lot of the need for people to travel because information comes to you; and in many respects staying put and not moving further than your immediate surrounds, whether it be village or farm or homestead or whatever that might be, is also much easier today than it’s ever been in a Western civilisation. You can get other people to do your travelling for you. You can order your groceries and shopping on the Internet and have it delivered. You needn’t go and get it at all. So the ease with which travel is available also has come to an extent with a degree of choice as to who does that movement. ADAMS: Great hopes were held out for what I call electronic mobility substituting for physical mobility. Very few people believe in that any more. MASANI: John Adams of University College, London. ADAMS: There are a few occasions where people have video conferences and that replaces a plane journey, but on the whole the two growth trends are running in the same direction. It’s easier to make friends at a distance, to do business at a distance, and periodically we want to meet these people, we want to have coffee with them, we want to shake their hands. I’ll give you an example. A few years back, I was in Vancouver Airport waiting to fly back to London; got chatting to the fellow sitting next to me. He was waiting to fly to Toronto to play Bridge with somebody from Edinburgh, somebody from Toronto and somebody from San Francisco. And they had met and played Bridge on the Internet and now they needed a real game. The two forms of communication reinforce each other rather than substitute for each other. MASANI: A prime example is the way we cruise the Internet for cheap flights to exotic locations. But as some of us contemplate jetting around the world for a card game, a gourmet meal or a concert, it’s easy to forget that travel can be a hard and tiring daily grind for others. Most of the tired and harassed commuters in and out of our cities don’t have the luxury of choosing to work online, because they’re in hands-on jobs that require their physical presence. According to John Adams, there’s a growing gap between winners and losers in the mobility stakes. ADAMS: The world becomes more socially polarised - those at the top end who are enjoying more mobility – they have cars and the freedom to use them, taking lots of cheap holidays by air and so on. But significant proportions of the population get left behind: firstly, those who are too young to drive - there has been a huge loss of traditional children’s freedoms; and the elderly – elderly people who have been driving and then lose the ability to drive. They feel it very acutely as well. MASANI: But is there a sense in which we can’t really un-invent the new transport technologies? ADAMS: Well obviously with very great difficulty, if at all. One of the things that’s been happening is that people are more and more living in what are called communities of interest rather than old-fashioned, geographical communities. This creates a whole new set of problems because although people are liberated in one sense - they no longer have to get along with their incompatible geographical neighbours and they can commune on the Internet and get in their car and drive on the motorway to meet all their friends who have interests in common – if you spend less time in your neighbourhood, one measurable consequence is each year fewer people can attach a name to their next door neighbour. The old-fashioned community was one with twitching net curtains and people knew each other and knew each other’s children and knew which ones were misbehaving. That increasingly just doesn’t exist. MASANI: But surely what he calls hypermobility is only one of several factors that are fragmenting our old sense of community. And are the new, global communities of interest to which we now have access any less stable or valuable? The twitching net curtains may have gone, but the affluent, hypermobile middle classes in their gentrified neighbourhoods still have a strong sense of home. Tim Butler. BUTLER: What has also changed is that in a sense the home has now become more important. Increasingly both partners working. The home isn’t just the as it were place where the mother stays and then the father returns to of the post- war period. It is now a place from which all the family sally out each day whether to school, to work - often working maybe different hours, different shifts - and that in a sense the home has now become much more of a kind of command and control centre from which the family operates where now they will take meals at home, they will buy ready cooked food, they will buy DVDs, they will use Broadband to do their financial planning, to plan the holidays. In some senses, I think the home has become much more important in terms of people’s sense of belonging, of identity in a world which is moving much, much faster in which they travel much more, in which they all go out to work. But actually, paradoxically, in order to make sense of that (and I think in terms of identity), the home, the domestic sphere in some ways is much more important MASANI: So the more we travel, the more we invest financially and emotionally in our home, wherever it happens to be. And if we mix less with our next-door neighbours, we make up for that with the closer contact we now have with people who are much further away. Nick Middleton. MIDDLETON: People talk already about ‘the global village’, so in one sense you could say well just because the village is getting larger, does that matter? I don’t think it does particularly. In another sense, yes because individuals are spending more time at greater distances from their houses and their homes, perhaps that means they’re inevitably losing contact with people in their more immediate surroundings. But at the same time, I think there’s a danger of us taking a view, or certainly in my own case, taking the view which is essentially urban and highly mobile. I still think there are a lot of people in this country who don’t travel very far very frequently, who still feel essentially that their village is where they live and they do not often go to the nearest big town, let alone the big city. And therefore I don’t think we should lose sight of the fact that yes there may be a significant number and that number may be increasing of people who are moving greater distances, but at the same time I still think there are significant numbers of people who don’t actually move very far from home at all. MASANI: True, we mustn’t generalise from the lives of the rich and famous; overall mobility may be less dramatic than we assume. But there’s no denying that millions of Britons who wouldn’t have dreamt of crossing the channel half a century ago now think nothing of jetting off abroad several times a year. Given the environmental damage being done by the boom in cheap foreign holidays, is it time to impose some restrictions? Although some low- cost airlines have protested against the Government’s hike in airport tax, it’s a sign of the times that even a travel firm like Lonely Planet condemns what it calls “frivolous” British travellers who fly off for weekend breaks in other European cities simply because they can. Does the state have a duty to intervene, even if that means rationing people’s travel? According to Bridget Rosewell, charging people more for the use of overcrowded transport infrastructure like roads makes both economic and environmental sense. ROSEWELL: Governments do intervene. The state generally owns most of the means of transport, so essentially simply by being the producer of it they are already intervening whether they like it or not. They can then decide what their pricing structure is. In other words, they can decide to provide transport like they provide health – free at the point of use – or they can provide transport like they provide dentistry, for example, which is generally not free at the point of use; you have to make a payment when you use it. And that has different distributional consequences, so there’s no get out clause if you like. They have to decide how they’re going to produce it and therefore who is in fact going to consume it on that basis. With transport over time, it’s generally been concluded that rather than simply provide more, we’re going to start charging and rationing it by charging rather than by queues. MASANI: And is that plan to be socially regressive in the sense that clearly it will benefit or favour those who can afford to pay more? ROSEWELL: Yes, absolutely. If you charge for something rather than providing it free - it’s the whole argument about health, for example, isn’t it? If you choose to charge for something, then it’s going to be more easily used by those who find it more easy to pay for. MASANI: The alternative to making people pay would, as she suggests, be a blunter form of rationing by queues. But charging can be a political hot potato, as we’re seeing with the current backlash against the Government’s new proposals for “pay-as– you-go” charges on congested roads. People instinctively dislike the idea of “Big Brother” monitoring how and where they move around. And there are also fears that higher charges will mainly discourage those who already travel the least. BOARDMAN: The poorest people in this country neither fly nor drive a car and there’s at least 20% of households, as far as we can gage, in that category. And it’s worth remembering that despite the no frills airlines, half of the population flies each year and half doesn’t. And by and large, the growth in aviation has come from better off households flying more often. It doesn’t seem to have stretched down the income range a lot, even if at all. MASANI: Brenda Boardman at the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford advocates a fairer way of making us all more accountable for our travel. BOARDMAN: One of the things we’ve been looking at is a personal carbon allowance. And what that does, it brings together a free allowance for every individual, every adult, that covers your use, your direct use of energy whether in the home (for electricity and gas) in the car (for petrol, diesel) and flights – we would include flights in it. And you’d have that allowance on a plastic card and every time you made a purchase, the allowance that you’ve got would be reduced. If you went over, you would have to pay more. So you could still fly to Australia or to Biarritz or to wherever, but if you have no allowance you’d have to pay more for your flight; it’s an extra charge. But if you have some to sell, then you could go into a bank or into a market and sell and make some money. What we feel in terms of equity and personal carbon allowances is that it will be a very good way of helping poorer people have something to sell and therefore getting money in their pocket. MASANI: One big advantage of the carbon credit card she wants is that it would leave us as individuals free to make our own choices. BOARDMAN: Would you heat your hot water with sunshine in order to be able to have a luxury car? Would you buy a hybrid car, so that you could have some spare carbon in order to fly or would you buy green electricity? Wonderful tradeoffs, but actually each of us knowing that we’ve got an allowance within which we can take some personal responsibility. MASANI: Some of us might well decide to trade mobility against other energy-needs in our lives. We could all become smarter about our transport decisions and more conscious of the environmental costs. But we must be careful not to impose crude restraints on people’s mobility, least of all those for whom it’s not a luxury but a necessity. Bridget Rosewell looks forward to a future in which the hypermobile travel less, but the world as a whole is more mobile. ROSEWELL: I think that people will both rely more on virtual contact and probably also be more mobile, or more people will be more mobile at any rate. I would hope that in fifty years time more people have escaped poverty across the whole globe and that will mean that they will want to explore other places, move outside their villages and so on – so if you like average mobility across the globe, I would expect to be higher than it is today. But I think in developed countries, you may well reach a position where there’s less mobility. MASANI: While some of us have too much mobility, others have too little, and we need a fairer distribution of mobility globally and within our own society. For all of us, the transport revolution has been liberating and empowering, and we can’t un-invent the technologies that have made it possible. But the very success of those technologies may be hard to sustain if congestion and environmental damage grow unchecked. The solution lies partly in governments rationing and taxing our use of transport. But it may lie too in reminding ourselves that staying put can be a pleasure we’ve forgotten how to enjoy.