This story about road tolls (Motorists ‘must pay for road use’) scares me.
Since we moved from Croydon, we’ve gone from only needing one car for occasional use (at one point we didn’t even own a car) to here in Worcester running two cars pretty much all the time.
Akra works a 45 minute drive from our house and his office is in a converted building on a farm in the middle of nowhere – not a likely destination for any bus service. In fact, bus services around Worcester are getting quietly cut all the time.
House prices nearer to work are much dearer and would put us in an even more precarious position with our mortgage, even if we were willing to pull the kids out of school.
Travelling by any means other than by car is JUST NOT FEASIBLE.
We are by no means alone. One of my neighbours lives 30 minutes drive away from her work and her husband’s job is 30 minutes in the opposite direction. Both need to be on the motorways at peak times.
In the article, it mentions:
If road charging was introduced, the government would be able to examine the option of whether it could raise enough revenue to replace fuel duty and the car tax disc.
But honestly, we all know this isn’t going to happen, don’t we? It’ll be in addition to rising fuel prices and the normal road tax.
It won’t make us a more environmentally friendly nation – for those of us living outside the big cities (unlike most of the politicians, it seems) there are no other options.
Those in the benefits trap will have even less incentive to find work if all their gains in finding a job are immediately taken away in road tolls.
House prices in cities will soar as people try and live close to work or near a viable public transport network.
This isn’t about the environment. This is about taxing the populace even harder, and if it comes in I think it might just topple our already fragile financial balance.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Kaptain Kobold // 4th Dec 2006 at 8:01 pm
Well, if our migration plans come together (some chance) there’ll be a house for sale just to the west of London. Just in case you want to move …
2 GoodTwin // 5th Dec 2006 at 10:26 am
Public transport is a joke in most areas. We moved my parents into a bungalow onto a good bus route 6 years ago (just a couple of miles out from a very busy large town). The buses have now been cut to half the services at twice the intervals.
My Dad has been in hospital for the past 3 weeks. It is a 50 mile round trip from where we live, a journey completely impossible by bus or train within the timeframe (i.e. to manage 2-hour visiting between 6-8 I would need to leave work by 3 pm and might get home at 11 pm – and that would involve expensive train/taxi journeys).
I can see that a lot of people will give up jobs because they can’t afford to travel to them by car and public transport doesn’t get them there. Those people will end up on benefits – this will help the country how, precisely?
3 Pewari // 6th Dec 2006 at 3:58 pm
KK: we might take you up on that ;)
GoodTwin: it’s insane isn’t it. I haven’t looked at the news yet – want to read the pre-budget announcements as apparently there’s a lot of extra “green” taxes in there, doesn’t bode well. I’ve already heard that fuel duty is due to go up :(
4 Blue Witch // 11th Dec 2006 at 2:00 pm
You have to live in a non-urban area with limited or no transport to understand what this is going to mean.
It’s always the motorist that gets hit.
All cars *could* do at least 50mpg, if people chose to buy them, or manufacturers were forced to make all cars more economical. That would immediately solve a lot of the ‘green’ problems, not to mention cut down on congestion as everything would be a more sensible size.
5 Madness on Ice // 12th Dec 2006 at 4:46 am
’tis I, Monsieur LeClerc. I am cleverly disguised as an Internet Loon. Obscure ‘Allo ‘Allo references aside; public transportation and taxation also happen to be two of my “buttons” – who’d have thought.
The actual problem with public transportation in the UK can, as you have readily identified, be drawn from service and spending cutbacks. As I recall some figures that appeared on the BBC news, the UK’s per capita spend on public transportation in _LONDON_ is something like a quarter of the national average per capita spend on public transport in Holland. Go outside of London and other major cities, and the per capita spend plummets as low as 1/40th. But then, unfortunately, large chunks of public transportation have been privatised, and so are now run as commercial concern.
As far as pay as you drive/throw/breathe (just you wait) taxes are concerned, we’ve got to keep the warchest levelled off somehow, haven’t we? Not to mention all the MPs, consultants to the public sector and middle managers who we have to be forking over grotesquely large sums of cash to. I’m sure that the MPs and the government yesmen will be all to eager to tell you that all taxes are generally ringfenced and used to plough back into the general area that they came from, but I’m afraid most of us are too cynical to buy that anymore. And we’re back to another key issue with the current people we have ‘elected’ to represent us; it doesn’t matter if they’re committing the crimes, or saying the untruths that we think they are – the fact that so many of us consider it plausible that they MAY have is the real measure of the trustworthiness of our government, and shows the sad state we’re in.
Give me an axe and carte blanche and I could revolutionise the governments spending in a few months, fix the holes in the NHS and send the CSA as it presently stands somewhere very unpleasant indeed. Some might say an axe is overkill, but trying to micromanage these organisations out of the mire they find themselves in is never going to work; micromanagement and meddling precisely the reason they’re in a hole in the first place, and none of the politicians that we have the choice of appear to have the balls to actually put their arse on the line, roll their sleeves up and sort the mess out without writing a few thousand pages of reports.
I’d better not show my mum this, or she’ll start bugging me to get into politics again; and then everyone would start thinking I was a liar because of the road our “onourable” epresentatives have paved for those who try to follow them.
I went off on one again. Sorry about that.
6 Pewari // 12th Dec 2006 at 5:33 pm
Yes BW, I agree about improving fuel efficiency – would make a huge difference. Ours are about 50mpg and 46mpg which aren’t brilliant but aren’t terribly bad either – they’re about as efficient as we can currently afford anyway.
Madness on Ice: I always enjoy getting your well thought out rants, no need to apologise :) I may be getting cynical in my old age, but all these new taxes conveniently arriving when coffers have been depleted due to the war has occurred to me too… I wonder how long it’ll be before the oxygen tax comes along…
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