ABSTRACT
As the overview history of modern urban transport in Chapter 1 showed, mass transport, and especially motorised transport, produces benefits distributed across a spectrum of beneficiaries. There are also costs, also unequally distributed, aris ing from urban transport, including significant losses to environmental values and diminished opportunities for future generations. As far as the environment is con cerned, these changes can only be losses, for ecology cannot ever benefit from human intervention (other than to repair or restore damages already caused by human activity). In the wake of the global environmental movement of the 1960s, a wider reckoning of motorised urban transport occurred (Minister of Transport 1963, Nader 1965, Hothersall and Salter 1977, OECD 1979). Coherent strategies and policies to address these problems only began in earnest in OECD nations in the 1970s. Policy agendas focused on three prominent concerns: pollutants from vehicle emissions, the vulnerability of oil supplies and rapid increases in fuel prices. Much of the efforts under public policy were directed towards mitigating vehicular pollution by addressing vehicle fuels and emissions (such as removing lead from petroleum) and reducing oil consumption through vehicle fuel effi ciency standards and guidelines. Land use and transport planning also moved, in this era, towards recognising its role in these problems and the limitations of private vehicle use and carbased models of urban design (Banister 1994).
