hedgehog

Speaking at the CBI's conference, Transport Secretary Alistair Darling announced that £7m was being given to fund road pricing pilot schemes in seven local authorities including Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and Tyne and Wear.

"One of the biggest threats to economic expansion we face in the next 10 years is congestion on the roads in our towns and cities," he said.

"Congestion is bad for business, frustrates motorists and hurts local economies."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4475450.stm

Does anyone think to ask why he doesn't use some of the £40 billion that motorists contribute to the non-transport economy to build some roads to relieve congestion? Instead his plan is to reduce congestion by forcing yet another tax upon the law abiding motorist while letting our road network fall apart.

Adrian F

Hedgehog i dont think this is the only reason. I think they have an eye to the future when in 15-20 years petrol is being replaced by other sorts of Fuels and the excuses they use for such high fuel taxation (pollution) are no longer vaild and this massive tax revenue starts to dry up.

Once pollution is no longer a problem much of the justfication for current anti motorists policies crumbles.

Clarebabes

Charging won't necessarily cut congestion. People need to get to work and until there is a comparably priced, convenient public transport system in place, we're still going to use cars.

Look at smoking and drinking. It doesn't matter how expensive they make **** and booze, people still consume them. The Government just rakes in more and more money.

I'm still waiting for my reply from my MP and I urge anyone else to do the same.

Adrian F

Clare i disagree. If you look back to the 50's in London they had a much better Public transport system than today and people were already in the habit of using it and cars were much more expensive as a proportion of average income but people still changed to cars.

Today we live in a society built around efficient personal transport, we all commute further to work have family spread further apart and are use to being able to travel where we want e.g. jet off to europe for the weekend or nip to the next town for some shopping how is public transport ever going to compete?

The only way it can be cheaper is with even more subsides all of which us the Tax payer will have to pay for so do we want income tax to go up by say 3 pence in the pound to reduce bus fairs? I dont!

This utopia of public transport is a dream and the only way you can get near is wind the clocks back 50 years, close all out of town shopping centres like Lakeside reduce choice by making Tesco's go back to the little high street stores and prices go up as no economy of scale, force employers to employee people local to where they work and destroy a key economic advantage of mobility of labour. and so on and so on. Basicly destroy 50 years of advances.

Look at China famous for the Bike and stat run public transport and now the fastest growing car buying economy in the world.