At the full council meeting on 23/01/2020 I was asked a question about how I get to council meetings.
The question was
The climate emergency was declared last year by Wokingham Council to stop the climate temperature rising 1.5°C. You have therefore made it abundantly clear that you care about this prominent and rising issue. So I would like to ask you, how would you normally travel to meetings like these and what type of transport did you use to arrive here tonight?
I answered,
I walked here tonight. I aim to walk to 50% of the meetings I have here in the Council. I walked to the Group meeting we had here last week. I walked to the Overview and Scrutiny meeting that I attended yesterday. I walked to the Executive meeting that we had last week as well. Whenever possible, my aim is to walk to this Council 50% of the time. I don’t always achieve it as sometimes I have to come directly from work.
I know that many of my colleagues, across all Groups, are making conscious efforts to car share in order to get here. You have to remember that this is, in part, a rural Borough. The Leader of the Council lives 11 miles away. He said to me the other day that, if he was going to walk here he would have needed to leave on Tuesday!
We don’t have a public transport network that covers the entirety of the Borough. We need to work on that. As I have already said, we need to find other ways to move people around our Borough and that starts with each of us making a conscious effort to reduce the number of journeys we make in our cars every day by ourselves.
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