Junction 41 and pollution

I thought it was going to be a fairly short and quiet meeting of the local Lib Dems last night, but "any other business" turned out to be other than that. We had got discussion of the various proposed ward boundary changes (we wait to hear from the boundaries commission) and the arrangements for the selection of regional candidates out of the way. Then councillor Helen Clarke hit us with the news that the county borough council's budget proposals would go further than not increasing the money spent on education (which in itself amount to a real terms reduction because of the effects of inflation) but actually cut the budget by 2%. It also transpired that there had been some creative accounting at the civic centre to the detriment of local councillors, not helped by the fact that the Labour cabinet has made it even more difficult for "back-bench" members to access the overall accounts. (They had stopped issuing the printed budget book to other than a favoured few in my last year as a councillor. This was clearly an economy measure and my querying of certain items outside the subject areas of the committees I was on was just coincidental. Now it seems that even the on-line links to the accounts are more obscure than they used to be.) There will probably be more about these matters in another place ere long.

The discussion on junction 41 was something else. It seems that a cat-fight has broken out between Plaid Cymru and Labour councillors, and between councillors and AMs, as to who has been more prominent in the fight to keep the junction open throughout the year. The belief that the Labour council originally came up with the idea of partial closure in order to encourage more drivers to take the lightly-used new southern distributor road has been quietly forgotten about.

The assertion that the Welsh government took up the idea enthusiastically because it might have enabled the then transport minister to travel back from Cardiff to her west Wales constituency more quickly is probably malicious. The current justification is that reducing stop-start motoring here would reduce pollution. However, motorists among us suggest that closure would merely push the pollution to another pinch-point, nearer housing. A more effective, if radical solution, would be to split the M4, creating another carriageway (upgrading Harbour Way?) and practically doubling the carrying capacity of the existing road through Port Talbot.

As to roadside pollution generally, there is a promising solution from a German firm with an English name, Green City Solutions. "CityTree" is a wall of mosses selected to absorb the most worrying gases. There is a description of an installation in Delhi here. The Green City Solutions Web pages are only in German, but there is a useful map which shows that there are already installations in Glasgow, Newcastle-on-Tyne and in the City of London. I feel that the Welsh government should look seriously at scaling up this technology and applying it to the revetment walls where the motorway cuts through Port Talbot - and other urban areas. (Thanks to Cen Phillips for the tip.)