back to article Local govt think tank slams road pricing plan

A new think tank report says government should drop the idea of a national road pricing scheme and allow councils to make decisions on local schemes. The New Local Government Network (NLGN) has made the recommendation as part of a broad emphasis on local authorities dealing with traffic management. In The Politics of …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Jason Hall

    bloody government busybodies

    And there is me , with the old-fashioned notion, thinking that government is there to do what the voters/public/business etc actually wanted.

    I don't know anyone who actually wants the government to mess any further with our roads, and that includes both workers and employers, since they make enough of a mess of things as it is.

    Leave our roads alone please... we already pay for acces and repairs to them through multiple taxes.

    Please spend your time making public transport that actually works... and reducing the cost too... otherwise more people will stop using it and fill-up the overburdened roads even more.

  2. TeeCee Gold badge
    Coat

    "....£380m fule subsidy for bus operators...."

    But any fule kno that bus operators rely on this?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fuel subsidy

    'The report also advocates scrapping the £380m fule subsidy for bus operators'

    Okay, ignoring the typo, how does making buses even more uncompetitive against the car make for less congested roads?

  4. Ben Boyle
    Stop

    WHat we're of course missing..

    ... is that national road pricing also gives our friends in Whitehall and the local constabulary the ability to track what we're doing and where we're going on an almost real time basis. This government has shown time and again that they want this ability and they'll get it by any means necessary.

  5. David Ramsden
    Thumb Down

    Bl***y fules

    Somebody has to justify his/her job

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Everyone knows the answer...

    ...only the politicians are too busy trying to grab power or squabbling with each other over the scraps to solve it. This is the baggage professional policitians bring with them. How many people took Politics degrees when Lloyd-George and Churchill were around? Give me an old-fashioned aging business man turned conviction politician any day of the week. That's why politicians tended to be grey, wrinkly and smell of mothballs. That was until Blair's babes arrived. Babies more like.

    BTW, the solution to the problem is obvious. If there are too many people moving from A to B, stop them moving from A to B. In other words, make it unnecessary, at least some of the time, for people to travel. e.g. software developers and many other professionals work from home 1 day a week, virtual call centres, etc, etc. Give independent corner shops ways of staying viable against the power of the "Big 4", midweek markets, etc.

    Instead of putting money into building road capacity, give tax relief for businesses to invest in broadband connections, extra telephone lines and relevant infrastructure so their staff have to travel/commute less. Might actually give BT enough cash to invest in some decent infrastructure themselves.

    Put simply: don't supply more (roads), use less.

    Or am I just talking out of my arse?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    "Ahh Mr Bond....."

    "Ive been expecting you."

    "... but wha, how?"

    "Ha Ha haaa Mr Bond... let me begin..."

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Subsidy collection companies

    As someone who works within a bus company I can see that bus services are not set-up to convey passengers quickly and economically to their destination.

    The services are run to maximize revenue from fuel subsidies, concession cards and other local travel cards. The paying customers are only seen as irritation that must be tolerated to get the subsidies, as they only contribute a small proportion of revenue.

    What we need is a complete overhaul of the way public transport is managed.

  9. Richard

    Bus subsidy

    This reminds me of a tale a few years back when some council or other were rumoured to be looking at scrapping the subsidy to the local bus operator. Said bus operator huffed and puffed saying that there was no way that they could survive without subsidy - however they might just be able to get by on [a lot less than they were getting]. Cue swift subsidy cut to more realistic levels...

    Suggesting it on a national level sounds like a fantastic political wheeze of Absolute Power proportions

  10. Ben
    Happy

    @ mike richards ( quietly and to one side )

    whispers...... that aint no typo Mike , Tee Cee refers to a well known series of

    literary works by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle ...... as any fule kno .

    As for the Institute of Red Herrings (Govt UK ) public transport policies , hey

    they make a bollocks of everything they touch, u kno dat ?

    Remember kids vote Halfwit ! tick any box , it dont mean nuffin' eeva way .

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Build it and they will come and if they dont then you can..........

    Its typical of the Goverment who after pledging to 'Get Britain Moving' have done absolutely nothing to address the problem in 10 years and neither did the previous lot.

    Now they are staring methaphorically down the barrell of gridlock (considering devleopement tiem scales) they are panicing and reverting to the old standby of central massive control systems that wont work and aren't necessary.

    The whole thing went wrong when the buses were deregulated and i dont mean privatised i mean when they were allowed to decide how they were going to run routes and unsurprisingly they decided to go with profit. So now these days in most places buses go into and out again of city and town centres bt rarely across town as the money making routes are the busy ones into the centres.

    We now have the stupid situation of more buses that the system can handle ona few routes but non serving the rest of the community. The effect is that that journey times are doubled as tow buses are needed and congestion is increased. Public transport is to slow & inpracticable for the majority of people and too expensive compared to cars averaged over a year in a lot of cases.

    Its only now that local authroties are getting the powers to regulate the systems again and we may have chance of getting back to the state we were in Newcastle / Gatehead, for example, in 70's (OI never thought i would say that) where rail, light rail, buses and taxis were integrated around transport hubs all over the place and they served the entire community not jyst the ones that provided the most money per trip.

    The thing is that you need to build the public transport system and make it cost effective, cheap, quick and reliable to use before you should try and force people to use it through congestion tax. You would probably find that some congestion would drpo without the tax if people figured out they could get about quicler on a tram.

    However the Gov have vetoed scheme after scheme to improve public transport such as the supertram system in west yorkshire that has been replaced with some buses that hold less people than normal buses or the refusal for an extension to the Sheffield tram system or at least a dozen other metro light rail systems.

    They are also trying to force Manchester into accepting the trial National Road Prcing Tax Scheme in exhange for the money for the metro system to be finshed. Manchester asked if they could just do a London style congestion charge insead for the city centre but no, the madarins have decided and woe betide any local authority that thinks of siding with its community.

    Build us some proper integrated, regulated, cheap, reliable, safe, secure public transports infrastructures and then if people dont get out their cars fee free to hit them with a local congestion charge but keep big brother and the ridiculous national scheme in its box.

  12. Stephen Jenner
    Pirate

    More roads please!

    There was a fashion a few years ago that said that every time we build a new road, "it just fills up with cars", the implication being that building roads was not the answer. Well, that is complete bull. Obviously, if we build new roads there will come a time where there is little or no congestion.

    The government robs us blind, with an 80% tax on petrol/diesel, the road fund licence, and traffic camera fines etc., and then spends the money on public enquiries and fact finding missions (banquets and holidays), as well as bombing the shit out of Afghani’s and Iraqi’s etc.

    Meanwhile, despite what people are led to believe, there is plenty of room for new roads. Whether they are built by the state or private industry is irrelevant, (except that private industry would do it cost effectively). The reason it is not happening, is that the government also controls the planning laws and restricts new road building, presumably for their own controlling reasons.

    For the pinko/greens amongst us, the real problem with personal transport from an environment standpoint is the type of fuel being used, which leads to pollution, not the amount of vehicles.

    Socialists want equality, yes, but surely they want us to be equally prosperous, not equally destitute, no one would advocate a return to mediaeval times where the only people who travelled, were the extremely wealthy.

    There can be no doubt that the answer to the problem of congestion, is building new roads, anyone who says anything else has an alternative “Orwellian” agenda.

    Actually the same thing can be said of housing and house prices, if planning restrictions were removed in exchange for strict rules regarding construction methods (ie no shanty’s), there would be houses for everyone and reasonable prices too.

    I just do not understand why we let these government people away with this sh*te, they are no better than the mafia.

This topic is closed for new posts.