Safe Speed Forums

….just came a step closer

National road pricing

3.124 Congestion delays and the resulting uncertainty in journey times impose a significant cost on business and private motorists. The Government’s strategy to tackle congestion includes increased investment in the road network and public transport, and better management of the road network. A well-designed system of national road pricing could deliver substantial benefits, with the potential to reduce congestion by up to a half.

3.125 The Government has announced that it will make funding available from the Transport Innovation Fund (TIF) to support forward-looking local authorities that are considering introducing road pricing as part of a package of transport measures in their areas. As well as helping to tackle congestion in places where it is already a significant problem, the implementation of local road pricing schemes would help to inform future decisions on the potential to move towards a national system of road pricing. The design of any national scheme would need to be considered in the context of meeting the Government’s environmental objectives (described in detail in Chapter 7).

(buried in two small paragraphs of the 310 page report!!)

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp ... t_2320.pdf

Does that mean they'll dump road tax and fuel tax??

_________________

In other words may do nothing.

I like the term "forward thinking" when it actualy means "do as we say" which does not require thinking at all.

Looking at the full transcript there was no mention of Motorcycle VED.

_________________
Speed camera policy Kills

...Which is a shocking £60 a year

_________________
Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

was £65 though....bargain, NOT!

_________________
Speed camera policy Kills

I doubt it But he did reduce VAT on condoms from 17.5% to 5% so you can have 12.5% more sex

Oh so thats the plan. Pillock

_________________

Semitone: "I doubt it But he did reduce VAT on condoms from 17.5% to 5% so you can have 12.5% more sex"

And there's me thinking that it was so he could carry on shafting the public.

_________________
Gordon Brown saying I got the country into it's current economic mess so I'll get us out of it is the same as Bomber Harris nipping over to Dresden and offering to repair a few windows.

Chaos, panic and disorder - my work here is done.

http://www.wildcrafts.co.uk

Oh and what about his 'joke' about his next position ??

The one I'd like to see him in would entail his new speach "Do you want fries with that?"

_________________
Gordon Brown saying I got the country into it's current economic mess so I'll get us out of it is the same as Bomber Harris nipping over to Dresden and offering to repair a few windows.

Chaos, panic and disorder - my work here is done.

http://www.wildcrafts.co.uk

[quote="Safety Engineer"]Oh and what about his 'joke' about his next position ??

quote]

In the stocks perhaps along with his CONgestion charges might be a good place

_________________
lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Only if you have a motorcycle (or car) that is officially older than 1973 vintage

_________________
What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

This is going to sound like a really stupid question Gix, but how might a car be unofficially older than 1973

Built in late '72 but not sold/registered until '73???

I don't really know just guessing

_________________

If you put '74 mechanicals into a '72 shell how old is the car? The answer depends who is asking!!!!

Bringing this old thread back to live because of interviews with new Transport minister on the radio about how they are going ahead with road charging using "black boxes" fitted to all cars.

See also http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4756763.stm

The guy is either an idiot or just towing the part line. My questions:

Given that the number of man-hours wasted through congestion are already excessively high, and that motorists are already paying higher charges for sitting stationary through fuel duty, why do you think that the behaviour of drivers that know that they have to drive to a certain place at a certain time will change?

The black box point isn't in the BBC report, but was mentioned on the Radio and TV, but who is going to pay for black boxes to be fitted to every vehicle? Are these going to be the same boxes that are soon to be compulsory for e-Call (automatic emergency call for accidents including GPS and Mobile phone), or are we talking about something different such as RFID. We are talking about £300 per vehicle - is it not really a plan to just tax the poor off the road?

Are you aware that RFID systems are already being hacked and fooled, and how do you think that any system that you create will be accurate? Will it not just accelerate the trend for unregistered vehicles and cloned plates? Will a proportion of drivers just not find ways around the system in the same way that cloned plates and simple reading error cause problems for the London system.

The system is going to have to track every vehicle movement along every chargeable road and bill the driver/owner for that movement - is it going to be a single monster IT system or is it going to be a disjointed regional effort? Given that even the well established DVLA system contains a massive number of mistakes why do think that this will be accurate? What makes you think that such an IT project can be delivered on budget - isn't it more likely that there will be a massive overspend, and a huge number of errors just like with all Government IT projects.

Isn't it just a stupid idea that is going to waste a lot of taxpayers money on a faulty white elephant when the real cause of many of the problems is Labour policies that prevented new road building and encouraged widespread restrictions on alternative roads through humps, chicanes, road closures, changes to traffic light sequences and other techniques employed in the 10 year plan for the objective of reducing the number of cars on our roads?

Here's a scan of an article from Local Transport Today about the potential unintended consequences of road pricing.

_________________
"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Yes, I believe that this scheme will be subject to "the Law of Unintended Consequences" in a big way.

_________________
Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Oh what a muppet.

First of all, he thinks travelling is a luxury – well it might be for him; I wish I didn’t have to drive to work everyday, believe me. I’ll still be driving to work regardless of any congestion charge. ‘Congestion charging’ will not fulfil its claimed aim regarding ‘congestion’ (but it will fulfil its aim regarding ‘charging’).

The most important aspect of any healthy system is being able to move component parts around freely (like: data in a processor, electrons in wires, blood in veins, oil/coolant in a car, parts in a factory, goods in economy). Even if congestion charging works it will serve to impede growth, individually and nationally, resulting with a slowdown of our economy.

Second, he’s mixed up cause and effect:

No, people travel further to increase their prosperity - or to reduce their lack of poverty. Thanks to over self-regulation, other countries are now more competitive than the UK (outsourcing).
Most people work to live, not live to work; people hardly opt to spend less time at home with their family in favour of commuting. His statement only holds true when people are going on holiday (and that’s an overall insignificant contributor).

As for his environmental concerns: prospective buyers of (arguably cleaner) electric cars will be somewhat deterred by the substantially reduced financial incentive.

What’s needed is for someone to end the deliberate mis-management of many traffic lights/roundabouts and to completely rip out the rest. To do anything else can only be viewed as regulation for regulations sake.


I will come to hate this is a scheme much more than our speed camera policy, in fact I’ll do more than hate it…….

It's going down really well on the BBC Have Your Say discussions: http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=1734&edition=1

I know - I've been contributing to that as well. Bored at work...

_________________
Pecunia Prius Equitas et Salus