Dr. Lynn Sloman:

I thank the Senator. I think I am right in understanding that her first point was around road building. She was asking if we should not build roads because we do not have the money or because the targets are so challenging that we do not have the time. It is the latter. To achieve the reduction in carbon that we need to achieve is very challenging indeed. Road building that increases road capacity and opens up land for car-dependent developments will make it impossible to achieve a modal shift away from driving and towards travel by public transport, walking and cycling.

Of course, if we do not need to build roads then we save money and can invest that in sustainable transport. It becomes a virtuous circle. Fundamentally, a large road construction programme is not compatible with taking the climate emergency seriously.

On the point made about remote working, one of the things the Welsh Government is looking at is the idea of super-fast broadband-enabled remote-working hubs. We all know from the last year, it is fine working from home if one has a spare office or a spare bedroom to work in but many people, particularly young people, may not have a good space to work in. There may be noise from children and it may be difficult to work from home. One of the things the Welsh Government is looking at is repurposing either public buildings or supporting the private sector to develop remote working hubs so a person can cycle a couple of miles to his or her local remote hub and work from there rather than having to drive 15 miles to his or her office. That is still at the discussion stage within the Welsh Government. It is an idea that seems very worthwhile.

I will make one point about the question directed at Dr. Windisch around street space requirements and the efficiency in the way we use our street space. In London, Transport for London built the cycleway over Blackfriars Bridge. The cycle lane is able to move as many people as would be moved in two and a half lanes of general traffic but it only takes up half the space. One could say it is five times more efficient. In general, the cycleways in London - the east-west and north-south cycleways - have more capacity because they have cycleways and more people can be moved on those corridors than could have been before the cycleways were built. Reallocating road space to more efficient modes, whether to buses or to bikes, actually makes the city function more efficiently. It is a very sensible thing to do.