Transport initiatives...

Yet another report is issued today recommending that the government introduce taxation on road usage as soon as possible as a way to tackle congestion.

This current report seems to blindly follow the mantra that if you charge a lot of money for people to use the roads that they travel on, then they simply won't use them anymore and the roads will be less congested - its primary school economics, nice and simple so that politicians can understand it.

But it fails to address so many issues.

It fails to address the fact that we already have a method of taxation on road usage, its called the road tax, its that little round disc that you find on the front of (most) cars that can cost up to £175 a year - simple solution number one - increase the road tax disc to £500 a year to achieve the same effect as road charging but at a hugely significant lower cost, in fact with no additional cost at all.

It fails to address the fact that the revenue from the road tax disc is swallowed up into the treasury coffers and barely none of it is reinvested back into transport issues, the money raised from road usage or road tax should be ringfenced for a number of years until we have viable alternatives to using your own car quite so often - it won't be though, not with the cost of guided bombs being so ludicrously high and our army firing them off in Iraq and Afghanistan like they've got bottomless pockets.

It fails to address the fact that when this Labour Government was elected it made a commitment to getting people out of their cars and onto public transport and it encouraged many local authorities to invest ratepayers money into planning applications and preparatory work for grandiose public rapid transit systems, at the very least this Labour Government, led by the then Transport Secretary John Prescott , planned to have such a tram or train system in every major city in the UK by now.

Since then they have systematically rejected almost every one of those applications for government funding, shifting the goalposts every time so that the local authority applications wouldn't qualify for central funding for a new inventive reason so that nine years later we are no further forward, there is simply no reliable alternative for most people than to use their cars to go to the places that they want to go to - and there are no plans to make this situation any better in the near future.

We should have known all along that it was too good to be true after the time that John Prescott had a huge press photo-call at a London railway station showing how committed to rail travel he was and how everyone else should follow his example as he travelled north to his constituency. Photos taken, interviews given, the train set off only for Prescott to get off at the next stop where his ministerial car was waiting to take him the rest of his journey - unfortunately for Prescott he didn't realise that some of the press and photographers had got on the train with him and the headlines the next day were hilarious.


Its not enough to simply tax people off the road, you have to provide some alternative to personal transport usage otherwise many local economies will simply collapse - things aren't like they were 30 years ago and many people simply have to travel some distances to work and to shop.

Take Leeds as an example.

Leeds is a city built on a cartwheel design, it just happened that way by accident but the city is almost like a perfect cartwheel with all of the major routes into the city being the cartwheel spokes, the outer ring road around the city being the wheel itself and the inner ring road being the actual wheel hub.

Leeds City Council already have in place some of the expensive equipment that will eventually be used to introduce road charging and we can see that the plan is obviously to introduce road charging on all of the major "spokes" into the city centre and also within the circle of the city centre that is the inner ring road.

What this plan fails to address is that there are numerous other minor routes into the city which people will simply use instead, moving the congestion off the major routes onto housing estate rat runs. It also fails to realise that when travelling from anywhere north of the city to get to the M1 motorway (which is south of the city), you simply have to go through the centre, there is no other way to get there other than a 45 minute trip right around the often single carriageway outer ring road.

The plan also fails to understand that unlike many other major city's Leeds does not have a huge out of town shopping mall but has instead spent millions on regenerating its victorian/edwardian centre to the extent where the city centre shopping experience in Leeds is actually a tourist attraction now and earns the city millions in revenue every weekend - charge for driving into the centre and you lose the attraction when people can simply drive to malls and shop and park for free.

The plan also fails to understand that by far the biggest use of private vehicle usage is for getting to and from work and whilst a lot of people work in the city centre who would benefit from a better public transport system, by far the biggest number of people work outside of the outer ring road on the industrial estates which ring our city - they were placed there to keep industry out of the centre (quite sensibly) but there is no public transport provision that uses the outer ring road route, you cannot use a public bus to take you around the city you have to catch one bus into the centre then another out to your destination - its quite ridiculous.

And finally the plan also fails to take into account shift workers - there is simply no public transport available for early morning, late evening or night shift workers, up to a third of all employees are simply not even thought of by our public transport policies.

There is more to congestion charging than just raising tax to pay for more bombs Gordon.