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| Sunday, February 18, 2007 |
Road pricing folliesOne of the perils of democracy for politicians is that sometimes the voice of the people sounds a dissonant note. The mass petition against road pricing on the Downing Street website is a case in point. 1.5 million signatures have now been added and still the government claims that its policy will not change. Clearly the government is within its rights to take this view - 1.5 million signatures represents a very large number of people, but by no means a majority of the people. This is not to say, of course, that a majority of the people support the government policy - we rather doubt that this is the case.In any event, on the day before the London Congestion Charge Zone is expanded to approximately double its size, we reiterate our position that the proposed scheme for vehicle tracking and road user charging is inappropriate, inefficient and fundamentally flawed. It is typical of this government to seek to instal a hopelessly bureaucratic, intrusive and inefficient system in place of a relatively simple and straightforward one. We already have a system of road pricing: it is called fuel duty, and it is already very high. In addition we also tax vehicles directly. And although an argument might be made for congestion charging in a few limited cases, we doubt whether this approach is generally applicable in medium sized towns and cities, where car parking charges are frequently very high in any case (we doubt whether many sane people drive into major cities simply for the pleasure of driving out again, and in that case parking charges represent, in a sense, a form of congestion charging). It would be preferable for government transport policies to address root causes rather than symptoms. The main cause of congestion is the failure of our transport infrastructure to cope with modern conditions. The solution to the problem must be in updating the transport infrastructure, and in particular to address the high cost and poor availability of public transport. This would be far more useful and far less objectionable than a fantastically bureaucratic white elephant scheme for universal vehicle tracking in order to charge road users by the mile. |
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