Let me be blunt. We have a problem.

That problem is a result of our car based planning over the past 60 years – we’ve built our society around the car to such an extent we can’t see beyond them any more. Our politicians are afraid of them. As far as our transport system is concerned, we place a higher value on an individual’s time than we do their health, or our health for that matter.

We’ve become car blind.

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We are an obese nation, and getting fatter. Our children are likely to have a lower life expectancy than us because of poor health related to physical inactivity. We currently spend about 10 per cent of our health budget (that’s £11.6billion) on an entirely preventable disease – type 2 diabetes, caused by obesity.

This is literally the elephant in the room. A large proportion of that £11.6billion goes on treating the complications of type 2 diabetes, such as kidney failure, amputations, heart disease and stroke.

That’s £1.5million per hour. On a preventable disease.

We’re car blind to the damage they cause to us and our environment. In 2014 (the latest year full statistics are available) eight people were killed, and 113 were seriously injured on Bristol’s roads in traffic collisions.

This all adds up, across the whole of the UK, over 22,000 were seriously injured – that means they have life changing injuries and will rely on the NHS to pick up the pieces.

1,732 were killed.

And yet, if we look at our rail network, the last passenger fatality was in 2006. 10 years ago at Grayrigg in Cumbria. There was widespread media coverage. There was an inquiry. We’ve managed to engineer out passenger fatalities on the rail network by managing risk appropriately. Imagine if were to take the same approach to road based transport. Across the country, we currently have five equivalents of Grayrigg every day on our roads, and most of these wouldn’t make the papers or the evening news. It’s because we’re car blind.

Let’s take air quality. Nearly 40,000 premature deaths are directly attributable to poor air quality in the UK every year, the main cause of which is our transport system especially in urban areas. 200 of these premature deaths are in Bristol. It’s the invisible killer – but traffic is still the cause. And what’s worse is that the impacts of this are often felt by the poorest in society, the youngest and the oldest. It’s a real equality issue that we’ve sleep walked into that we’re simply not addressing. We’ve become very good at monitoring air quality, but we’re only just beginning to understand the scale of the impact across the city.

So what can we do about it? Well, as humans, we have evolved to move, and it’s clear we’re doing less and less of that, so we need to design and build the environment around us to encourage us to move more. This means giving us the opportunities not to use the car. In Bristol, this means adopting the principles of the Good Transport Plan, and redressing the balance away from private motor traffic to high quality public transport and a network of safe, attractive walking and cycling routes.

But we need to go further still. We need to think about our transport system as a public health issue, and concentrate on preventions rather than continuing to mop up the impacts.

Put simply, we need to manage risk appropriately.

The 20mph limits in the city, are there not because George Ferguson (or the Lib Dems before him) wanted to wage a war on the motorist, but because the simple fact is that you’re less likely to die when hit by a car travelling at 20mph than at 30mph. Prevention, not cure. What was originally a public health initiative quickly became a transport backlash at the polls in May. Counterintuitively we’re now about to review our 20mph limits.

Air quality also made an appearance at election time in May, with all the major candidates committing to Clean Air Zones for the city centre, or a form thereof. However, little has mentioned about this since, with Marvin Rees only confirming a congestion task force in his recent Mayoral address with clean busses and taxis being the main transport announcements.

We need start to address these problems head-on. This is why we’re hosting a panel debate as part of Healthy City Week to help to draw attention to the scale of the problem, but to look for solutions from a number of different angles.

Join us and our panel of experts alongside moderator Martin Booth, editor of Bristol24/7, on Wednesday, October 19 to discuss how we can stop Bristol’s transport system being one that tries to deal with cures, to one that focuses on preventions.

Our panel includes:

– Dr Adrian Davis – co-director SHINE, visiting professor at UWE and public health expert

– Mark Bradshaw – cabinet member for transport at Bristol City Council

– Mike Harris – senior associate town planner at Stride Treglown

– James Durie – executive director, Business West

– Zoe Banks Gross – director, Easton Energy Group and leader East Bristol Kidical Mass

Tickets are free, but booking is required.

We know that active travel built into someone’s routine can address many of the issues we face across Bristol, from congestion to reductions in KSIs to better air quality. Our task is such that we cannot afford not to act. As we know in Bristol with the state of the city’s finances, we literally cannot afford not to invest in active travel.

Jon Usher is head of partnerships, England South at Sustrans

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