More cost, more admin and it's wrong
I’ve had cause to expel venom at Alistair Binary Barnet Darling before. I can’t remember exactly what the issue was – it might well have been the very issue that’s swelling my splean currently. Maybe it was another hair brained scheme designed to improve the UK’s transport system by making us all hop to work to conserve leather.
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.