Travel Impacts on the Environment

From TheStudentWiki

Travel Impacts on the Environment

Introduction

During the past 50 years more and more scientists have began to realise that if we don’t take steps to counteract the effects of global warming then the world will experience dramatic uctionconsequences, travel plays a major part in many of these issues.

How is travel affecting the environment?

In the 1990’s travel was not a major article in the news, this is because many people lived within walking distance to their jobs and a majority of households only had one car. Nowadays, everybody has heard of the green debate and travel is one of the most popular articles in the news.

People are travelling more and more. The building environment is also changing, forcing people to commute to their jobs and pushing people out of convenient living areas, such as city and town centres. This has resulted in an increase of 12% for the average journey ( http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/Newsletter/0701.html), creating a dramatic negative impact on the environment.

Results taken from the National Travel Survey say that on average in 2000 we spent 2 weeks a year travelling, with only 3% of this on foot. This is still increasing and the problem is becoming severe. In 2005 4.2 billion hours were wasted for driver’s stationary in traffic jams in Texas. This worked out to be 2.9 billion gallons of fuel going to waste, costing the state an estimated $78.2 billion.

Travelling is affecting the environment in many ways; the currency and natural environment.

Possible Solutions

To reduce the affect of travelling on our environment there are some very simple steps we can already take, using public transport is the easiest one, using public transport will help cut down the amount of cars on the road if the numbers of cars on the road decreases it will cut the amount of co2 being released into the atmosphere.

Another way you can reduce the impact on the environment is car sharing, if you and your neighbour shared one car to go to work it will cut down the amount harmful gasses going into our atmosphere.

Looking more into the future, you could have vehicles that run on cleaner fuels or even renewable energy sources such as hydrogen powered cars. You could have an electric car which doesn’t produce any harmful gases that harm out atmosphere.

If you insist on using your own transport by yourself and still want to contribute towards helping the environment then you could cycle to work, which is has its health benefits to yourselves and has no harmful effects on the environment.

However some of us need to drive our cars and the option to share with someone isn’t available then what can we do? Well there’s driving schools out there that teach you to drive economically which in turn means using your car more efficiently which will release less harmful gases than normal use of your car.

Other than car sharing and public transport we can reduce our carbon footprint by using more of today’s current technology. There are things we can do such as web conferences and telephone conferences which allow people to have a virtual meeting and never have to leave their office or fly from country to country as they did in the past.

Britain produces more carbon emissions per head from air travel than any other country, according to a recent study.

The roads in the UK can get extremely congested car sharing could help avoid these problems.

Telephone conferencing is a system which can allow users from all over the world to listen, talk and ask questions all on 1 phone line. It means no travelling and they can interact with there colleagues from the comfort of the office.

Web conferencing is another valuable source in helping the fight against travel reduction within the business environment as it allows people to show PowerPoint and most other formats of documents to users worldwide as well as talk them through it on teleconference call which is a utility which can save company’s millions using but many fail to use enough.

Useful Links

http://liftshare.org – Car sharing website http://carplus.or.uk – Car sharing website http://carshareleeds.com – Car sharing website http://meetingzone.com – Teleconferencing and web conference company