The SACTRA report and Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report (1994)
- WHAT ARE THEY AND WHAT DO THEY MEAN?

SACTRA stands for the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment. The purpose of the report was to "address the question whether new or improved trunk roads induce new traffic". Its findings were that rather than solve traffic problems, new roads actually did generate new traffic. It recommended that the government should change their road appraisal methods to include the phenomenon of induced traffic.

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report put forward these objectives and targets:

• Ensure that an effective transport policy is integrated with planning policy.
• Achieve standards of air quality that will prevent damage to human health and the environment.
• Reduce the dominance of cars and lorries and provide alternative means of access to towns and cities.
• Increase the proportions of personal travel and freight transport by less environmentally damaging modes and to make best use of the existing infrastructure.
• Halt any loss of land to transport infrastructure in areas of conservation, cultural, scenic or amenity value (unless the use of that land is shown to be the best practicable solution).
• Reduce carbon dioxide emissions from transport.
• Reduce noise from transport.
• Reduce substantially the demands which transport infrastructure and the vehicle industry place on non-renewable materials.

Basically, the two reports called for a virtual halt to the road program and a restructuring of the transport system to lessen the dependence on the car.

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