There's a petition doing the e-mail rounds relating to a draft proposal to introduce a 'charge per mile' system to encourage drivers to reduce their car usage and therefore reduce congestion. The petition's originator, Peter Roberts said this week on national radio that this system was not necessary as congestion was a 'London' only problem. You must be joking Mr Roberts, it may not be a problem in rural Shropshire where you tootle around but let me assure you it's a countrywide problem. A four mile cross town journey in Bury, Lancashire can take anything up to one hour, we have congestion 7 days a week.
I am against this proposal but will not sign the petition. This petition, and many other petitions, are merely a negative comment on the proposal without adding any positive contribution to the debate. Ask many people if they object to spending more money on ANYTHING and the reply would be 'Yes'. Whether six thousand or six million sign the petition means little, what we need is an alternative proposal and until one is suggested objecting to this proposal is futile. You can sign the petition and bury your head in the sand but the fact of the matter is the SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT CONGESTION.
I will add my suggestion. The governement wants people to identify the relationship between car use and cost to the individual so that when they see the cost of the journey they may think twice before taking the car out. However, installing a GPS tracker in each vehicle to calculate this seems a bit over the top, too complicated and smacks of unecessary state control of our daily lives. Journeys already have a cost per mile so why not simply make drivers more aware of the cost of their journey by installing a meter display in the vehicle, rather like the display that you see in a taxi. Many cars are already fitted with computers that can tell you most of this information. This is not to be used to charge the person but rather so that they can see the real cost of the journey mounting up as the engine ticks over. This charge is based upon the fuel used with a 'wear and tear' factor built in. I'm sure that with one of these cheaper devices the amount of car miles will fall and we don't need to worry about 'Big Brother' or a mechanism for collecting the tolls.
What do you think?
1 comment:
I signed up to this petition and was a little miffed when I realised that Tony hadn't emailed me after the close of the petition.
A week later I discovered that my spam filter had pushed Tony's email into my Spam folder........
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