Coventry's air quality plans - Video and audio transcripts

I’m here today because I want to talk to you about our air quality plans in the city. I’m here at the junction of the Butts and the ring road that leads obviously into the city. Why am I here? Because this is one part of the changes we're making to the road network and the cycle path network and the pedestrian path network for our citizens in the city. Just going back a bit, a number of years ago, two years ago or so, the government decided, following three court losses they'd had in the highest courts in the land and in Europe, that they had to do something about air quality in our country and they told a lot of cities and towns they needed to improve their air quality that was emitting from some older polluting diesel engines particularly. Coventry was one of them. The government solution was to bring in what they called a clean air zone which in effect means charging you and me to use your roads in your city, and in Coventry in particular, because we're so compact and small, that would have meant most of the roads that lead to the city centre from the suburbs where you live would have incurred a charge. I didn't think that that was the right thing to do so we come up with a number of solutions where we're going to modify junctions, we're going to make it easier for people to cycle, we're going to make it easy for people to walk and we're going to encourage other greener forms of transport as well but we're not going to penalize motorists or residents for using their roads. And one of the proposals is to clean up this area actually cover up the subways as well and actually, the road here now will go straight through into the city centre. It means that it stops congestion traffic keeps moving and that means that any emissions disperse much quicker than they would do in stationary traffic. And that is the same for a number of our proposals around the city if you want to know more about them have a look at the link at the end of this video and then go to the website for a look at some of the more proposals that we have on the website itself.