Bashing the Motorist - John Redwood
Discussion
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/11/28/do2801.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/11/28/ixopinion.html
How much more of a bashing does the motorist have to take?
By John Redwood
(Filed: 28/11/2003)
I like my car. It's never late for me, but I can be late for it. It takes me from where I am to where I want to go. It rarely complains. It will take all my luggage. It never goes on strike. It takes leaves on the road in its stride. It doesn't experience signal failure. It doesn't make me wait around in the rain or carry heavy bags to a station.
The trouble comes from Town Hall and Whitehall. They seem to hate drivers. We are the polluters. They think most of us are criminals in the making. They throw everything into making the use of the car as difficult as possible. There are speed cameras, chicanes, humps, bus lanes, a surfeit of traffic lights, road closures, road repairs and diversions. Every day I use my car there is some new obstacle on the course.
How much more bashing does the motorist have to take?
It is all done in the name of safety. Speed cameras, they say, save lives. Why was the number of fatalities and bad injuries falling before they went camera-mad? Why are the figures now getting worse?
I do not support violent protest of any kind. It is a sign of desperation that some have gone out at night to smash up cameras. Many drivers feel victimised. Cameras are disliked by normally law-abiding people who think they are unfair and unhelpful. Some motorists slow down for the cameras, not wanting to lose their licence, and then speed up elsewhere, where it may not be sensible to do so, to try to catch up lost time.
Cameras cause sudden braking and bunching, which is more dangerous than faster free flow. To make matters worse, there are fewer patrols catching the dangerous drivers in unsafe cars and those without proper insurance.
Bus lanes are meant to be green. Funny that. Coming in on the M4, I often see the car lanes full to bursting, with cars going at walking speed in places, consuming far more fuel. Meanwhile, the bus lane is usually empty.
To add pollution to inconvenience, many of our buses are old, so, unless a bus is very full, it is dirtier than having lots of newer cars on the road. Government policy seems to be to make people's lives more difficult and worsen the environment.
I am a keen green. I want to keep our green fields and green spaces. I want to breathe in fresh air and find more environmentally friendly ways of travelling. But the present policy is doing the opposite. Technology, not tax and regulation, is the way to green the car. Modern cars are so much cleaner than the cars of 10 and 20 years ago.
The best way to clean up our transport system is to switch people from old cars to new ones. It is to work on new energy sources for personal transport. We should also be working to make public transport greener, more comfortable and much more user-friendly. We need to improve traction and braking on commuter trains so we can run more an hour, letting the train take more of the strain.
Our fastest roads are our safest. Motorways are much safer than slower roads, because traffic travelling in different directions is segregated, and because pedestrians and push bikes are not allowed on the road. Motorways share this safety advantage with railways, which also ban all pedestrians and bikes on or near the tracks.
I want our transport to be safer. The way to do that is to have dedicated pavements and crossings for pedestrians, dedicated cycle ways for bikes, and dedicated trunk roads and motorways for vehicles on all the principal routes. We need some extra capacity of dedicated highway for safer, greener, faster travel.
Most of us have a love affair with the car. When I speak to students, they usually tell me they want policies to be greener and less car-oriented. When I ask if that extends to them doing without cars, there are no takers.
It is the ambition of most young people to learn to drive and to buy a car. They associate their own car with freedom to go out and to visit whom they want when they want. As teenagers, they learn the hard way how difficult it is to get around using public transport, particularly outside the urban areas, which makes them keen to get wheels.
In our consumer-oriented world, we don't take kindly to nannying governments restricting our freedoms. We have to live with appalling national transport systems. We have to live with rip-off government, taxing us for buying a car, taxing us for owning a car and taxing us for driving a car. We have to put up with more and more ways of trying to make us criminals at the wheel. Despite all this, we carry on driving, because there is no alternative.
We carry on driving because cars are a part of our lives. We choose them in our own image. We customise them, give them a wash and brush-up, carry our personal possessions in them, treat them as one of the family. The Government is not going to divorce us from our cars. They are too useful.
More likely is a motorist revolt. The motorists snapped when the Government overdid fuel taxes in the last parliament. Today, the threat from their regulations and controls is so severe it is causing new tensions between those who use the roads and those who control them.
That is not healthy, and is based on a government misunderstanding of how we live now and what we want in the future. We want clean and green flexible transport, not dirty old buses and trains that do not work in the heat, the wet or the cold. We need more transport capacity of all kinds, and we need to use the trains more with better technology at peak hours when they can compete.
How much more of a bashing does the motorist have to take?
By John Redwood
(Filed: 28/11/2003)
I like my car. It's never late for me, but I can be late for it. It takes me from where I am to where I want to go. It rarely complains. It will take all my luggage. It never goes on strike. It takes leaves on the road in its stride. It doesn't experience signal failure. It doesn't make me wait around in the rain or carry heavy bags to a station.
The trouble comes from Town Hall and Whitehall. They seem to hate drivers. We are the polluters. They think most of us are criminals in the making. They throw everything into making the use of the car as difficult as possible. There are speed cameras, chicanes, humps, bus lanes, a surfeit of traffic lights, road closures, road repairs and diversions. Every day I use my car there is some new obstacle on the course.
How much more bashing does the motorist have to take?
It is all done in the name of safety. Speed cameras, they say, save lives. Why was the number of fatalities and bad injuries falling before they went camera-mad? Why are the figures now getting worse?
I do not support violent protest of any kind. It is a sign of desperation that some have gone out at night to smash up cameras. Many drivers feel victimised. Cameras are disliked by normally law-abiding people who think they are unfair and unhelpful. Some motorists slow down for the cameras, not wanting to lose their licence, and then speed up elsewhere, where it may not be sensible to do so, to try to catch up lost time.
Cameras cause sudden braking and bunching, which is more dangerous than faster free flow. To make matters worse, there are fewer patrols catching the dangerous drivers in unsafe cars and those without proper insurance.
Bus lanes are meant to be green. Funny that. Coming in on the M4, I often see the car lanes full to bursting, with cars going at walking speed in places, consuming far more fuel. Meanwhile, the bus lane is usually empty.
To add pollution to inconvenience, many of our buses are old, so, unless a bus is very full, it is dirtier than having lots of newer cars on the road. Government policy seems to be to make people's lives more difficult and worsen the environment.
I am a keen green. I want to keep our green fields and green spaces. I want to breathe in fresh air and find more environmentally friendly ways of travelling. But the present policy is doing the opposite. Technology, not tax and regulation, is the way to green the car. Modern cars are so much cleaner than the cars of 10 and 20 years ago.
The best way to clean up our transport system is to switch people from old cars to new ones. It is to work on new energy sources for personal transport. We should also be working to make public transport greener, more comfortable and much more user-friendly. We need to improve traction and braking on commuter trains so we can run more an hour, letting the train take more of the strain.
Our fastest roads are our safest. Motorways are much safer than slower roads, because traffic travelling in different directions is segregated, and because pedestrians and push bikes are not allowed on the road. Motorways share this safety advantage with railways, which also ban all pedestrians and bikes on or near the tracks.
I want our transport to be safer. The way to do that is to have dedicated pavements and crossings for pedestrians, dedicated cycle ways for bikes, and dedicated trunk roads and motorways for vehicles on all the principal routes. We need some extra capacity of dedicated highway for safer, greener, faster travel.
Most of us have a love affair with the car. When I speak to students, they usually tell me they want policies to be greener and less car-oriented. When I ask if that extends to them doing without cars, there are no takers.
It is the ambition of most young people to learn to drive and to buy a car. They associate their own car with freedom to go out and to visit whom they want when they want. As teenagers, they learn the hard way how difficult it is to get around using public transport, particularly outside the urban areas, which makes them keen to get wheels.
In our consumer-oriented world, we don't take kindly to nannying governments restricting our freedoms. We have to live with appalling national transport systems. We have to live with rip-off government, taxing us for buying a car, taxing us for owning a car and taxing us for driving a car. We have to put up with more and more ways of trying to make us criminals at the wheel. Despite all this, we carry on driving, because there is no alternative.
We carry on driving because cars are a part of our lives. We choose them in our own image. We customise them, give them a wash and brush-up, carry our personal possessions in them, treat them as one of the family. The Government is not going to divorce us from our cars. They are too useful.
More likely is a motorist revolt. The motorists snapped when the Government overdid fuel taxes in the last parliament. Today, the threat from their regulations and controls is so severe it is causing new tensions between those who use the roads and those who control them.
That is not healthy, and is based on a government misunderstanding of how we live now and what we want in the future. We want clean and green flexible transport, not dirty old buses and trains that do not work in the heat, the wet or the cold. We need more transport capacity of all kinds, and we need to use the trains more with better technology at peak hours when they can compete.
If only he hadn't tried to sign the Welsh National anthem 
......
...but he makes a good observation in support of our shared interest, adding eloquently to the debate. Anticipating that the Tories have built a strategy to challenge the Government on the persecution of the motorist, perhaps we should have a Pistonheads' Politician of the Month Award. Redwood's contribution puts him in the frame
...... ...but he makes a good observation in support of our shared interest, adding eloquently to the debate. Anticipating that the Tories have built a strategy to challenge the Government on the persecution of the motorist, perhaps we should have a Pistonheads' Politician of the Month Award. Redwood's contribution puts him in the frame
Yes, I've been feeling increasingly the same way. They seem to want to make the car a worse option rather than making public transport a better option! I used to frequently take the train from Penrith to Manchester. After the Hatfield crash it became increasingly difficult to do so. Now I take my 13 year old 200,000 mile 3 litre "gas guzzler" because it's faster, cheaper and more likely to get me there than the train! Something's seriously wrong when I can say that isn't it?!
Just one thing though - getting everyone to buy a new car isn't necessarliy (IMHO) that good an idea for the environment because you just create a huge pile of "End-of-Life" vehicles to dispose of.
Just one thing though - getting everyone to buy a new car isn't necessarliy (IMHO) that good an idea for the environment because you just create a huge pile of "End-of-Life" vehicles to dispose of.
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