Thread by @jonburkeUK

1/ There's a myth that home deliveries are the 'cause' of recent road congestion, so what are the facts?

Of the 360 billion miles driven on the U.K's roads in 2019:

🚗 77.2% cars/taxis
🛻 15.4% small vans
🚚 4.8% HGVs
🚲 1% bicycles
🏍️ 0.8% motorcycles
🚌 0.7% buses/coaches

2/ In my view, part of the reason for the propagation of this myth is to extend responsibility for road surface miles/injuries/emissions to a broader category of people, and therefore to delegitimise policy responses like LTNs. Data here: roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/summary

3/ Home deliveries are, of course, environmentally problematic - especially from a waste system perspective - but there is reason to believe that they also help eliminate some car journeys. The potential for delivery decarbonisation is also much greater than for private cars.

4/ Not only can better regulation vastly reducing the resource depletion impact of delivery packaging, but there is also much more scope to decarbonise direct tailpipe emissions through electric-assist containerised cargo-bike deliveries...

https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status/1370318777536163841

5/ Ultimately, there are too many miles being driven on our roads by private cars, for reasons that are often avoidable. These aren't my subjective views, they're the views of the Government's official advisors...

https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status/1375032633986588673

6/ ...and that's why, in addition to road user pricing, controlled parking, significant improvements in public transport, and heavy investment in active travel, we also need Low Traffic Neighbourhoods... londonsociety.org.uk/post/change-op…

7/ One final point, just *look* at how efficient buses and coaches are at moving large numbers of people. 4.07 billion passenger journeys in 2019/20, but only 2.4 billion miles driven.