REGULATING TRANSPORTS ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS IN A DEREGULATING WORLD

In recent years, a growing awareness of the environmental impacts of t ransport has played a major part in the shift towards policies to mana ge the demand for travel. As a result, a substantial increase in the r ole of public transport has been identified as necessary in any strate gy towards more environmentally sustainable transport patterns. At the same time there has been a quite separate process of deregulation and the withdrawal of the state from the transport market. These two tren ds appear to represent potentially contradictory processes. This artic le draws upon two major studies that explore the relationship between increasing needs for environmental regulation and the privatisation of bus and rail services. It is shown that, as currently organised in Br itain, the development of bus and rail services are inadequately linke d to strategic environmental policymaking and, rather than being part of the solution to transport's environmental impacts, there is a real danger that these 'green' methods of transport could slide into simply being part of the problem itself. It is concluded that privatisation and deregulation does not mean the end of the need for policy mechanis ms, but they do mean that policy has to be implemented in a very diffe rent way. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.