Pay as you drive
A quote from the Red Rag this morning: "Motorists would pay around £5 a time to queue-jump jams using American-style pay lanes".
Even though its summer and our hard-worked, underpaid MPs are supposed to be taking eco-friendly holidays in Suffolk or Cornwall, some of them just can’t resist announcing unpopular policies whilst sunning themselves under a knotted hankie.
Seemingly the Department of Transport is going to start trialling the technology and systems that will eventually pave the way for all car journeys to be tracked and charged. Ignoring the obvious intrusion into our mobility – every journey monitored, including speed (automatic fines, anybody?) – the intention is that by charging drivers for using roads, journey times will be cut as the cost of using a popular road at a busy time will deter all but the most necessary travel. Doubtless the government think that people commute to work at 8am and home again at 6pm because we enjoy it, rather than because our jobs demand it.
It’s not as if paying will make the slightest dent in the clogging of the road network. We will pay £5 to sit in the same jam, as this daft scheme will do nothing to cut congestion. I was in the US this summer and the reason this works there is that they have built extra lanes, rather than open the hard shoulder on a temporary basis, which is what our brain surgeon of a transport minister, Ruth Kelly, is proposing.
Instead of charging us to drive on motorways we have already paid for, why not invest a fraction of the £50bn annually taken from motorists to build a new network of toll-only motorways? That I would pay for, assuming it was as efficient and empty as the M6 Toll Road. However, this is as unlikely, since it would be greenwashed if it ever got past the idea stage.
Even though its summer and our hard-worked, underpaid MPs are supposed to be taking eco-friendly holidays in Suffolk or Cornwall, some of them just can’t resist announcing unpopular policies whilst sunning themselves under a knotted hankie.
Seemingly the Department of Transport is going to start trialling the technology and systems that will eventually pave the way for all car journeys to be tracked and charged. Ignoring the obvious intrusion into our mobility – every journey monitored, including speed (automatic fines, anybody?) – the intention is that by charging drivers for using roads, journey times will be cut as the cost of using a popular road at a busy time will deter all but the most necessary travel. Doubtless the government think that people commute to work at 8am and home again at 6pm because we enjoy it, rather than because our jobs demand it.
It’s not as if paying will make the slightest dent in the clogging of the road network. We will pay £5 to sit in the same jam, as this daft scheme will do nothing to cut congestion. I was in the US this summer and the reason this works there is that they have built extra lanes, rather than open the hard shoulder on a temporary basis, which is what our brain surgeon of a transport minister, Ruth Kelly, is proposing.
Instead of charging us to drive on motorways we have already paid for, why not invest a fraction of the £50bn annually taken from motorists to build a new network of toll-only motorways? That I would pay for, assuming it was as efficient and empty as the M6 Toll Road. However, this is as unlikely, since it would be greenwashed if it ever got past the idea stage.
