Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:35 pm on 13 October 2020.
I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do justice to all of those questions in the time available. A number of them have already been covered in the statement. So, perhaps Caroline Jones will forgive me if I just focus on those that haven't been covered.
The issue of car sharing, I think, is a crucial one, and encouraging people to make what are called 'smarter choices'—car sharing and travel planning being among them—will be an important part of the measures that we set out to tackle climate change as part of the Wales transport strategy. Crucially, the example she said about people having five cars in a five-bedroomed home, I think that we need to ask ourselves as a society: is that what we want to continue seeing? Do we want a situation where people feel that the only choice they have is to have multiple cars that, as I say, sit idle for most of the time? Surely, we need to be moving towards a position, if we are serious about implementing our climate change commitments, of reducing people's reliance on cars.
Of course, people will still have cars. I happily drive a car. But, you shouldn't need to have a car to make every journey. You should have a choice, and it should be easier and more convenient to use public transport for many of our everyday journeys. That's what we need to be moving towards. We have put significant investment in, especially in the wake of COVID, to shore up the public transport sector, which otherwise would have gone out of business in many cases. But all of us need to think about the share of spend on transport of different modes, reflecting where we want to get to.