Road Pricing

mumblemumbledumberthanyeastmumblemumble, etc.

 

Quite. Champ's on a mission to make himself look patronising lately
it seems.

And what is certainly unacceptable is a bad idea that will makes
things worse.

Good article here which sums up a lot of my feelings:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2010571,00.html

 

You'd still have to go there though....but at least you'd have leaving
again to look forward to.

 

Give me something worth the effort and I'll see if I can be bothered.

 

Absolutely true.

 

They said it when I were a lass.

Er, if you mean programmes where you are now - ChIPs perhaps? They were
filmed on the same damn stretch of new freeway before it opened.

Ali

 

And I'll say again, I don't have the answer - I'm not sure that anyone
does, least of all the government. But not having the answer doesn't
mean that my opinion regarding the pricing proposal is disqualified!

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique,

Oh, I dunno.

I remember trips to Norfolk as a youngster. The journey home was fucking
awful. We'd queue at Red Lodge, Newmarket, Fourwentways, Baldock, it
could take upwards of four hours to get home.

These days? Hour and a half. Tops.

Why? Bypasses, and decent road design.

Remember trying to get through London to get anywhere south? Fucking
awful. Now, you'll sit in a bit of traffic on the M25, but you'll still
get there faster than you would have done twenty or thirty years ago.

It's really, really not that bad. When you get really major holdups it
tends to be because Plod have closed a road for fucking *hours* (if not
days) so they can have fun with the chalk and tape measure.

I contend that it's not that bad, and the proposed alternative *will not
solve the problem*. It will just mean that people will sigh heavily and
pay up anyway, whilst still sitting in traffic.

It will also mean that when you do break free, you'll have the DVLA and
Plod looking over your shoulder for your entire journey.

Not a price worth paying.

--
Wicked Uncle Nigel - Podium Placed Ducati Race Engineer as featured in
Performance Bikes and Fast Bikes

WS* GHPOTHUF#24 APOSTLE#14 DLC#1 COFF#20 BOTAFOT#150 HYPO#0(KoTL) IbW#41
SBS#39 OMF#6 Enfield 500 Curry House Racer "The Basmati Rice Burner",
Honda GL1000K2 (Falling apart) Kawasaki ZN1300 Voyager "Oh, Oh, It's so big"
Suzuki TS250 "The Africa Single" Yamaha Vmax Honda ST1100 wiv trailer

 

That's my issue with it. Traffic levels are worse, depsite road
improvements and something does need to be done. But this way? No.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Champ

The two pinch points that will be rationed by usability. There's a
reason I use a bike for my commute to Twickenham (when said commute is
unavoidable) and it's simply that I don't want to sit in traffic. So I
use the bike (and go to the office late morning and come home in the
evening), don't contribute to the jams, and get there faster. Simple.

But it *won't*. Most people will (as previously stated) sigh, then pay
up. It's what we (as a nation) do!

Or usability. I cannot accept that the *inevitable* consequence of
road-pricing (the government being aware of my movements 24/7) is at all
acceptable, even if it worked.

I don't have an answer to the perceived problem. What I do have is a
total conviction that the proposed solution is wrong, wrong, wrong. It
has the potential to be a huge evil (particularly given the fallibility
of the technology[1]). It is not, and cannot ever be, a price worth
paying for *anything*.

[1] Remember how you felt when that copper on the M20 was threatening to
confiscate your bike because you weren't on his database? That's
*nothing* to what these bastards have planned.

--
Wicked Uncle Nigel - Podium Placed Ducati Race Engineer as featured in
Performance Bikes and Fast Bikes

WS* GHPOTHUF#24 APOSTLE#14 DLC#1 COFF#20 BOTAFOT#150 HYPO#0(KoTL) IbW#41
SBS#39 OMF#6 Enfield 500 Curry House Racer "The Basmati Rice Burner",
Honda GL1000K2 (Falling apart) Kawasaki ZN1300 Voyager "Oh, Oh, It's so big"
Suzuki TS250 "The Africa Single" Yamaha Vmax Honda ST1100 wiv trailer

 

Where else is someone supposed to snipe from? Getting into
the thick of things tends to get one fragged.

oh. sorry. wrong thread.

 

That's plain.

 

Nonsense. Occasional gridlock happens, and has been happening since the
days when horse-drawn traffic ruled London. Seen the pix of London in
the late 19th century? Gridlock it was. Partly because there were no
rules of the roads.

Traffic management is the solution. It's worked well for 100 years or so
now, and still works.

 

And consider roads like the A30 down to the south-west, and what they
were like in holiday season. And London. I was riding bikes in London in
the mid-1970s, and I can assure you it was just as bad as it is now, if
not worse.

Yes, there are more cars around, but the roads are better, the
management is better, intelligent speed limits, lights allowing traffic
flow are better. It is not as bad as people say it is.

I think that a lot of the people in power bleating about how bad the
traffic is really don't GAF. It generally doesn't affect them, and it's
a usefu;l stick to beat people with,.

 

Strike 2.

 

Exactly. The solution, a real solution requires buy in from the
public. This scheme patently has no buy in. It might garner grudging
acceptance, but it won't get to the fundamental core of the problem,
which frankly is too many people and too many cars in a small island.

100% agreement. It's very glib for Champ and Bear to say that unless
you can come up with an alternative you can't critiscise the pricing
scheme, but it's a complex problem that won't be solved by crude,
regressive taxation. But the fundamental objection is just as you
state.

 

"Everyone feels and deplores the evils of congestion under which the
older portions of the metropolis, and more especially the City,
suffer".

Illustrated London News, 1854.

 

This scheme certainly appears to be more based on political doctrine
than intelligent analysis.

 

Quite. Once we've stopped all of the poor people travelling
altogether[1], we can herd them all off up North and get on with our
lives.

[1] They won't be able to afford to drive, fly or use public transport,
obviously. They'll be left with sailing around the coast and up & down
a few navigable rivers.

 

You are so right. I mean, you can buy a functioning T&T motah for...
what? £250? £150, even? these days. Trying to buy a similarly usable
motorcycle for under £500 is a real challenge.

I agree with Champ in that I think we *must* pay more for our personal
transport, as a means of reducing congestion, pollution, and
stimulating the design of cleaner, ever more economical vehicles.

The simplest way I can think of is to hike the price of fuel. That
gives a massive incentive to seek cheaper means of (public?)
transport, and also to buy more economical vehicles.

I can also see a case for shifting the tax onto emissions, which would
have much the same effect. But it's harder to implement.

But spy in the sky road pricing? No. A hugely complex and costly
system, both to set up and administer, and has the potential to be
massively abused (in the civil liberties sense). And - which nobody
seems to have mentioned - it's a system which the growing underclass
of road users will find ways to get round. Consider recent reports of
the huge increase in untaxed and uninsured vehicles, not registered to
their owners, that's a direct result of the present spy camera mania.

These people will treat road pricing in exactly the same way, while
the average honest Joes will get penalised. Much higher tax on fuel is
simple, hard to dodge, and fair. KISS.