I had a good meeting with Travel West Midlands and the Police today. We've been having particularly bad problems with anti social behaviour on one of the bus routes through Kingstanding, and the Councillors got involved before Christmas, as there was a potential threat to the continuation of the route. The Police already had an operation planned, which went into effect, and today's meeting was mainly to look at progress and what more could be done.

There are problems both on and off the buses, but one of the particular concerns was the large number of bus windows being broken by stones or other missiles being thrown from the pavement. Having been on a (moving) bus when someone has done this, it is scary when it happens, and obviously could be very dangerous to passengers, drivers, and other road users. It's also generally treated as criminal damage, despite the obvious (if not neccesarily intentional) threat to the person. So one of the things we talked about is whether attacks of this type could be considered as a more serious offence of causing danger to road users - if the Police can get someone on this, I think it will send out a strong message about how serious an issue this is.

On another issue, I caught part of Tony Blair talking to the people on Channel Five tonight. I just heard the last question on climate change and Kyoto, because I was watching the Channel Four news where Margaret Beckett was talking about the same issue. She was quite vague - talking in terms of choices that people will need to make over the next 10-20 years in terms of changing lifestyles and consumption. Blair gave rather more detail on the international aspect, but a lot of the emphasis was on scientific discovery and potential new developments. I'm quite pessimistic about the whole issue, particularly with the U.S still refusing to sign up to Kyoto - how long will it be before making choices has to become active enforcement to try to address the problems of climate change?