Road charging is wrong!
PetrolTed's brain explodes at the thought of another car tax
More cost, more admin and it's wrong
This week’s ruse to rile motorists is to implement a road charging scheme whereby a trip to the shop at the end of your road will cost you tuppence whilst a trip to work via roads clogged by lazy slobs going to their local shop will cost you £1500.
I suspect that Darling’s black and white thinking extends beyond his eyebrows. The plan to introduce road charging in place of extortionate levels of tax on fuel is obviously brilliant but for one thing. We already have road charging – fuel tax. The more you burn in traffic or on long journeys, the more you pay. It’s brilliantly simple and doesn’t discourage much travel at all.
Fiddling with the formula by introducing hi-tech tracking devices that encourage people to use rat runs rather than arterial routes isn’t suddenly going to magic away people’s need to go to work. The startling success that the Government claims in reducing unemployment obviously means that more people need to get to work.
More journeys. Less road space.
Taxing motorists doesn’t discourage usage. Cars now cost and arm and a leg to fuel and insure. Yet how many people do you know who have made the conscious decision to turn their back on the automotive marvel?
Public transport is held up as the holy grail that will provide an alternative to using our cars. While public transport has its place (and I used it for beer fuelled commuting for many years), let’s not kid ourselves that it can replace even 10 per cent of the journeys that we make in our cars. While I can walk to the pie shop, to use a bus to get to the bank of an afternoon would cost me an immense amount of time – much more time than the fuel or guilt consumed.
Putting a black box in my car will have one effect – the extra weight will increase my fuel consumption and probably encourage me to find ‘cheap’ roads to use rather than main roads. More fuel burned unnecessarily, more residents enraged by me ‘speeding’ at 20mph past their houses and more bureaucracy required to create, administer and police the massively complex and ill thought out system. I see a pattern emerging here .
We’re a country of service industries now – the biggest one being the Civil Service. Jobs, jobs, jobs – administering us, administering each other, administering the administrators.
A road charging tax on the law-abiding and the subservient plebeians among us who bow to the Government in the mistaken belief that they are doing what we ask of them. Sadly, those with no regard for the law would find some way of circumventing the system or – as is often easier with the law these days – simply ignore it.
Making the UK’s road system the preserve of the rich isn’t something that would be welcomed by most of the population and would seem somewhat at odds with the Labour Party’s ideology of opportunity for all. Labour’s think tank has taken a scary detour from what was becoming a predictable journey up the middle of the road. Running out of control it’s now firing salvos in all directions in the hope of scoring a hit. Left a bit, right a bit, FIRE DARLING... If only.
There’s only one solution to traffic congestion and that’s to accept it. If I know that a journey into London will take me two hours then I’ll probably take the train (thankfully the congestion charge has cleared the streets so it’s easier to drive).
If I know that a stretch on the M25 will take three hours then I’ll suffer it, find another route or discount my journey as impractical.
There’s a natural equilibrium that will be reached with traffic. The only way to drive traffic off the roads is to make journeys unattractive. Money isn’t the key here – time is. Put speed humps between here and John O’Groats and perhaps it would have the desired effect. Ah… no it didn’t did it. Everyone went and bought 4x4s instead.
So Mr Darling, please put away your Ladybird book of clever wheezes and look for some lateral thinking instead. Don’t fight it, don’t try to administer it. You’re not King Canute. Accept it.
I look forward to meeting you in a traffic jam soon.
The cost and complexity of reorganising the administration and implementation of technology will be beyond them by light years (remember the dog licence fiasco?) so it'll never happen
PetrolTed said:
We already have road charging – fuel tax. The more you burn in traffic or on long journeys, the more you pay. It’s brilliantly simple and doesn’t discourage much travel at all.
Most fuel in the UK is company purchased so the individual is not discouraged.
>> Edited to correct quotation syntax
>> Edited by spnracing on Monday 6th June 12:08
My car costs a fair bit to run, but I'm willing to pay because a bus would take me over an hour and a change to get to work, and it's a once an hour route. Currently my car takes 15-20mins and I very rarely sit in traffic anywhere (lucky).
The bus/public transport route would add up to 50%-65% of my running costs of my car overall, and thats just for work.
Going shopping, going to the sea side, going out for a leisure drive to a friends, going to visit relatives or go to my parents for sunday dinner would soon add up to £1000's in busses and taxi's where public transport is not available, and many many wasted hours waiting for busses and trains etc.
Cars are just great, they should be encouraged and the network optimised for them.
But thats the point, the government know it, and want to bleed us dry to braking point. It's a stealth tax that can cover up their incompetent spending elsewhere!
If they do this, I'll be contacting all the landowners of fields on my way to work and just go cross-country
Private road network anyone?
Dave
>> Edited by Mr Whippy on Monday 6th June 12:15
"This months total invoice = 579 miles plus 15 points for the following speeding offences.
*Please note you are no longer legally allowed to drive - please return your license in the enclosed pre-paid envelope*.
Friends and Family discount earned this month - nil"
>> Edited by smash on Monday 6th June 12:49
Businesses will incur more costs which, in turn, will be added to the cost of goods and services to customers, which will then have an inflationary effect.
Trust me, it will be a complete "own goal" in the long run.
spnracing said:
We already have road charging – fuel tax. The more you burn in traffic or on long journeys, the more you pay. It’s brilliantly simple and doesn’t discourage much travel at all.
Most fuel in the UK is company purchased so the individual is not discouraged.
>> Edited to correct quotation syntax
>> Edited by spnracing on Monday 6th June 12:08
Which is public transport and haulage, if you mean company cars, how is public transport going to make a difference here?
I heard that t
t Darling on TV last night, and much as though I might agree with his comment that 'we have to do something to combat congestion', I most certainly do not agree that GPS tracking devices are a sensible answer. Especially given the general views of this Govt that seem to want to erode any personal liberties or privacies, and make motorist pay through the nose for the use of their vehicles where public transport is crap. Big Brother type control may be their intention, but they won't ever get that far as, like hospitals, they will spend vast sums of tax-payers money without improving the public service at all.
Imagine that they did get GPS-based traffic charging to work, but congestion remains on the increase at rush hour. What would they do then - continue raising the fees for driving at that time of day? How much would you have to pay to be able to drive to work, in this far-from-egalitarian society they seek to control?
The worries about speed monitoring and fines are probably not totally unfounded either, but we could all be looking a bit too much on the conspiracy side here. But if they were able to use the new technology to do this, I'm sure that they would turn that on too...
) seem to think that any solution is better than the status quo. Like pricing people out of being able to travel to work, to see family, to take grandma to the hospital etc. They think we like sitting in traffic jams and that the thought of being one of 10000 cars stuck on the M25 after an accident up ahead is our idea of a great day out. There is no acceptance what so ever that we need to get around. Proof of point: Rememeber the fuel blockades of 2000? The country almost ground to a halt. It's not an exageration and if taken as far as these proposals suggest it's a possibility. Nurses can't afford to buy a house. In 5 years time they won't be able to afford to drive to work either, so quite simply they won't. MP's live far too much of a privileged life to even comprehend the effect that this could have on the ordinary people of this country. People like you and me.
Simon.
It is simply flawed logic. The government are getting mesmirised by the shiny new technology and the prospect of "leading the world" in the transport technology stakes instead of taking a common sense approach that might actually work. They seem to want something for nothing, but the fact is that improving public transport is going to cost a lot of money.
Ted already touched on lardy arsed idiots who drive a few hundred yards to the shops and back. We've all seen them, and it's these uneccessary, thoughtless - can't be bothered to de-ice the windscreen/switch my lights on/concentrate on the road - journeys which also cause the most pollution per mile. How does the new system discourage this?
Surely if we are truly looking at reducing pollution as well as congestion, people should be discouraged from using their cars in this way?
We should then take a view of our road network and for the greater benefit - forget the NIMBIYs - build some new roads. Anyone who's driven in mainland europe will know how totally inadequate our system now is.
The last time I drove in Germany, my biggest headache was choosing which route to use, as it seemed there was always an alternative. And many of us here have enjoyed the, relatively uncluttered French roads (accepted that Rouen can be a nightmare!) as we baltt down to Le Mans.
OK, so the UK is not the only place with traffic jams, but we now rank way down the league of european nations when measured by motorway/trunk road miles per capita.
When it comes to the crunch, it's this which is the problem in terms of congestion and pollution.
Simple physics dictates that traffic is far more energy efficient and much less polluting when it's cruising rather than stop-start crawling.
Suckmychrsitmas said:
I think something has to be done to remedy rising congestion levels. Installing GPS trackers in cars, however, isn't the answer, as far as I can see. .
No but it would be a way of collecting MORE speeding fines as a side issue.
I'm happy to have GPS fitted to my car. I'll then happily remove it and fit it to my garage door. Then I'll get fake number plates and a fake ID and Hence I'll be paying less road tax, no speeding fines and whose to know !!!! .
Be aware this is typical Government Propoganda to bring in something less bad, which we would have complained about if the government had not pretended this was on the Cards. What they really plan is anyone's guess, but maybe MORE tolls and higher road tax for old cars.
But I would disagree somewhat with your conclusion.
Some congestion could be solved with a targeted road building programme. I am not talking about expanding the M25 to 6 lanes, but providing dual carriageway access to parts of the country that are only accessible by single carriageway roads, eg the Hastings/Bexhill area.
Also congestion could be reduced through eliminating some of the congestion creating schemes in Cities and Towns.
Apart from this we will always have some congestion, which shapes where we live and work and at what times we travel.
Suckmychrsitmas said:
Also congestion could be reduced through eliminating some of the congestion creating schemes in Cities and Towns.
Any chance you could explain this?
By scrapping buslanes for a start, queues to get in to Cambridge now start 1/4 of a mile up the M11, something unheard of till these bloody buslanes were put in.
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