Case for Change
Environment
Environment
Climate change and the environment – the core reasoning behind any public and active transport investment.
More public and active transport infrastructure promotes modal shift from the car, and therefore reduces carbon emissions from polluting diesel and petrol vehicles. This is the logic behind many public transport improvement projects – and that is not an exception here.
The Facts 📄
81% of people in the East Midlands have a car permanently available in their household and use it often, according to the Statista Research Department, and more than 6 billion miles were driven on Northamptonshire roads. We need to lower these figures, and to do that, more people need to adopt public transport as their primary way of travelling – whether that be to work, to hospital, or to be with family and friends, and more.
However, the people of West Northamptonshire are limited in doing that with the small number of railway stations in the council area (three) and limited non-rail public transport, especially in the more rural towns and villages such as Towcester (with buses running every two hours to Northampton) and Brackley.
South Northants case study 🛣️
In 2017, the former South Northamptonshire Council launched a bid to find out their district’s carbon footprint. The report detailed where carbon emissions originate from. A graph displayed in the latter section of the document showed us that 68% of carbon emissions from within South Northamptonshire alone was from various transport modes.
The figure above also shows us that diesel rail plays a very minimal part in transport emissions in South Northants, although 3 different major railways pass through the former LA:
- West Coast Main Line slow via Northampton (overhead electrification)
- West Coast Main Line fast via Weedon Bec (overhead electrification)
- Cherwell Valley Line via Kings Sutton (no electrification at all, and a major part of the CrossCountry Network, which is fully diesel-powered)