National Road Pricing is to be scrapped.

[goldoni]

The Daily Telegraph is reporting today that national Road Pricing is to be scrapped. The Government has bowed to the groundswell of opposition which saw 1.8 million people back a Downing Street petition run by Peter Roberts calling for the proposals to be ditched. Link

One senior Government source said national road pricing had fallen down the list of priorities – "it has been back burnered." The retreat will be signalled by the Department for Transport this week in response to a back bench committee's report into the draft Local Transport Bill.

A statement from Peter Roberts: Personally, I am still concerned with the proposals for local schemes which could see places like Manchester, Shrewsbury and Cambridge introduce a Congestion Charge which is totally unjustified.

The London CC is hailed as a model of success, but London has the underground system, a very high population density and even here, the Congestion Charge has not shown any real reduction in journey times. It has also added cost to business and been hugely expensive to run.

Local schemes can only be justified if local people really want to see it happen. The only way this can be decided is through a genuine referendum and all the proposed local schemes should be put to this democratic test. However, the demise of national Road Pricing is welcome news and I for one will be opening a bottle of bubbly this evening.

Peter Roberts has been selected to stand as a parliamentary candidate for the UK Independence Party to contest the Labour-held seat of Telford.

[Robster]

This seems like a sensible decision to me, there was no way this was ever going to be less than very unpopular. They were talking about charging per mile, which seems like replication when we pay per mile anyway in the 60p or so per litre paid in fuel duty and VAT.

Having said that I agree with local congestion charging providing the money is spent on improving, or introducing alternatives.

[Rita Malone]

Excellent. Finally the climate change policy is getting a kick in the teeth. National road pricing would be expensive, inaccurate and unrealistic.And yet another tax.

[TheNorm]

Originally Posted by goldoni

...national Road Pricing is to be scrapped....

What a shame. Not only is this:

... a sign that the Government had a lack of vision.

(yet another change of mind - what are we paying these guys for anyway?), but more importantly a missed opportunity to deal with the British love of the automobile. Why oh why have we turned so many of our beautiful towns and cities into gridlocked queues of cars? Take York for example - an historic, fine city, completely spoiled by choking fumes and large lorries trying to get around narrow streets that were designed for horses! It would be a joke if it wasn't so sad!!

And don't get me started on the tacit acceptance of deaths due to road traffic "accidents". We get all worked up about C difficile but barely mention the number of children who die on our roads every year.

There is no doubt that Congestion Charging has made central London a more pleasant place. I don't agree with everything he has done, but do admire Ken's courage and determination to take the capital away from the internal combustion engine and give it back to the people.

[BBKing]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10..._gps_governor/

the Congestion Charge has not shown any real reduction in journey times

BS. It definitely has, I'd have never considered using a bus in central London in rush hour before, now it's often the quickest way to get around. The obvious comparison is with the times when the CC isn't operating, when it snarls up again - 'no real reduction', forsooth. Until you've seen a weekday London street with nothing but taxis and buses on it you aren't qualified to comment.

Peter Roberts has been selected to stand as a parliamentary candidate for the UK Independence Party

Obviously a prat then.

OTOH he's right that you need proper public transport before introducing it, though - I'd never have driven into the centre of town anyway, there are two perfectly good routes in (heavy rail and tube). In order to have proper public transport, of course, you need Ken Livingstone, since there's absolutely no one else with anywhere near the track record (except, slightly, the Scottish Executive). He's a pragmatist who's quite willing to use the private sector, as long as they do what they're told (build his railways, set his fares, accept his tickets and paint their buses/trains his colour, basically). He just doesn't buy in to the whole competition idea when it comes to urban transport, which is just as well, because it doesn't work.

Finally the climate change policy is getting a kick in the teeth.

Cos that's just what it needs, isn't it? Or have I missed something?

National road pricing was and is an over-elaborate, expensive and ponderous solution to a problem that can perfectly well be tackled by putting up fuel duty, which has exactly the same effect - it encourages more efficient cars and reduces the attractiveness of motoring for short journeys on congested roads where public transport is available. It does, as with CC, require a genuine will to make public transport easier to use, safer, more comfortable and more widespread/frequent, and I suspect you'd need to provide help in rural areas where there isn't an option (for instance in offering tax relief on purchasing hybrid/ultra efficient cars for the poor, disabled or elderly).

Mind you, try and suggest putting 10p on petrol and watch what happens next...

[TheNorm]

Originally Posted by BBKing

...Mind you, try and suggest putting 10p on petrol and watch what happens next...

Exactly. Even if Mr Brown knew it was the right thing to do, I doubt he has the spine for it. So, the roads continue to become ever more congested.

Can I send No. 10 the bill for my wasted hour(s) next time I'm sitting in a queue on the A14?

[BBKing]

There's the crude way, of course, which goes like this:

1) Building more roads encourages traffic (pretty well known)
2) Therefore not building more roads should discourage traffic.
3) Best of all, it doesn't cost any money

QED! Trebles All Round!!

[TheNorm]

Two thoughts (amazing what a treble scotch can do):

- Wasn't Galileo pivotal to this scheme? The responsibility of some European transport commissioner, or something?

- Most motorists see roads as free at the point of use, unlike public transport. This is the mind set that has to be changed.

Is it my round?

[BBKing]

Would have been some kind of satellite tracking, but I bet it would have been GPS. Didn't get far enough to be chosen definitively, I suspect.

On similar lines, did anyone notice that the ID Card scheme still hasn't got anyone to build it, as even the big IT sharks have noticed it's not a flyer.

http://forum.no2id.net/viewtopic.php?t=18999

The procurement process which will lead to the issuing of the five key contracts - worth between £50m and £500m each - has only just begun, and according to early reports BT has already ruled itself out of the running while similar rumours have apparently emerged from formerly-state owned defence business Qinetiq amongst others

[Rita Malone]

I support congestion charge in London. I don't think it would be good to make it nationwide. London is congested and too many cars enter London. Going by bus into London on the weekends is murder. i think congestion charge should include the weekend.

[BBKing]

Going by bus into London on the weekends is murder.

I can relate to that, having been sat on one for a while on Sunday morning. Outside congestion charge zone, outside CC hours, naturally.

[Chris]

Originally Posted by BBKing

National road pricing was and is an over-elaborate, expensive and ponderous solution to a problem that can perfectly well be tackled by putting up fuel duty, which has exactly the same effect - it encourages more efficient cars and reduces the attractiveness of motoring for short journeys on congested roads where public transport is available. It does, as with CC, require a genuine will to make public transport easier to use, safer, more comfortable and more widespread/frequent, and I suspect you'd need to provide help in rural areas where there isn't an option (for instance in offering tax relief on purchasing hybrid/ultra efficient cars for the poor, disabled or elderly).

Mind you, try and suggest putting 10p on petrol and watch what happens next...

You suspect you'd have to do something for rural areas?! Shame on you for such a blatant exhibition of metropolitan navel-gazing.

Fuel duty is an appallingly blunt instrument and is not even remotely suited for use as a means of tackling congestion. Its impact would be even more severe in our rural areas than it would be in town - we already pay over the odds for our fuel due to the higher costs of operating filling stations off the beaten track. The £1 litre has been a permanent reality at our local garage for quite some time.

You couldn't even get away with it if you packed it with a system of rebates for rural areas. There are plenty of places where you don't have to go too far out of town in order to fall off the edge of the public transport map, yet which have postcodes that would never qualify as 'rural'.

While I detest the satellite tracking and data retention necessary for working the Government's scheme, I think road pricing is essentially a sound idea.

[BBKing]

You suspect you'd have to do something for rural areas?! Shame on you for such a blatant exhibition of metropolitan navel-gazing.

I am *from* the country, although you might not know that. I was born and grew up in rural Suffolk where, apart from anything else, my grandparents never learnt to drive and relied on rural public transport. A true metropolitan navel gazer wouldn't actually have considered it. Shame backatcha, 4p a litre more isn't enough to offset the fact that you've got much cheaper housing and I bet your council tax is several hundred nicker less, too.

[Let's talk numbers. Chris T lives in the Loch Lomond area, I believe. Between West Dumbartonshire and Hounslow there's about a £300 difference at Band E, which pays the extra cost of 7500 litres of petrol a year, assuming 96p for London and £1 for Scotland. That's 1650 gallons, which is 75000 miles in a car that does 45mpg. Annually. If you do this, you save more on the council tax than you lose on the extra cost of petrol. I've no idea if Chris T lives in West Dumbartonshire, incidentally, perhaps it's Argyll and Bute, where the difference is £265 at Band E. I've also got my doubts about a quid a litre for petrol in rural areas; putting postcode G83 8NT into petrolprices.com (west bank of Loch Lomond, found fairly randomly) finds petrol on average cheaper than round here, lowest price 95.9p compared to 96.9p here. When you start comparing petrol to other life costs it starts to look cheap]

Fuel duty is blunt, true. So's a hammer and like a hammer, fuel duty works, as it is easy to collect and encourages smaller, greener, more efficient cars. In other words, it does what road pricing does, rather more crudely, but is much cheaper to implement and actually works.

In fact, as the motor industry pointed out in a PR stunt yesterday (although I don't think they meant to) the higher cost of fuel, allied with the competitive European car market plus a nice helping of safety regulation (EuroNCAP anyone?) has lead to the average car round these parts being more efficient, more comfortable, more reliable, safer and *cheaper* than in the past. Yes, cheaper - for many years the cost of motoring *fell* under Labour, unlike the cost of public transport. This, being the precise opposite of their stated aims on transport, is doubtless down to the fact that they're clueless muppets, but it happened. It's gone up since because the price of oil has gone from $35 to $85 a barrel, because some idiot invaded somewhere sandy.

The obvious way not to do it is the US, where the price of fuel is much lower, so they've had no incentive (until recently) to drive more efficient cars or build proper alternatives and they're now in serious trouble with their planning system*, which is predicated on cheap fuel, which then affects foreign policy and as we've seen that has a tendency to blow-back a bit.

[Basically, the housing boom plus cheap fuel led to new housing subdivisions being built further and further away from employment, requiring more driving. The price of houses has gone up, the price of fuel has gone up so people have less income and cut back on spending or go bankrupt, which is ultimately recessionary. You cut the knot by having denser housing closer to work with subsidised, integrated public transport. The European model, in fact. We should be ensuring the planning system is based around this, but we've got the legacy of car-loving Conservative administrations from 1951 to 1997 to deal with, unfortunately.]

The big lie is that we're not dependent on cars because we like them, but because for forty years politicians (many with links to the oil, road-building and haulage industries) actively worked to create a society where they were indispensible.

[Chris]

Originally Posted by BBK

<snippage>

You wouldn't perchance be setting up a false dilemma would you?

Comparing Hounslow with one Scottish unitary authority hardly makes your point for you (and incidentally I don't live in either of the local authority areas you mentioned - the gap between your tax and mine is somewhat smaller than you suggest, although I grant you it's cheaper).

You have also failed to account for lower average wages between south east England and central Scotland. 2006 median is £30,511 for London, £25,535 for the Sotheast and £22,412 for Scotland. That, by itself, pretty much wipes out the extra cash you think the average Scot has to spend on fuel.

EDIT

Incidentally, if the difference between your annual council tax and mine was £300 - just to pick a round figure - at £1 per litre, that would buy me 300 litres of petrol. Not 7,500 litres.

Either your arithmetic is completely screwy or I'm missing something glaringly obvious in your post ...

[TheNorm]

Originally Posted by BBKing

..... fuel duty works, as it is easy to collect and encourages smaller, greener, more efficient cars. In other words, it does what road pricing does, rather more crudely, but is much cheaper to implement and actually works.
...

Yes, but fuel duty doesn't tackle congestion, does it? Road pricing, if properly implemented, can simultaneously encourage "green" transport and reduce the volume of traffic on certain roads.

Also, if every car in the UK was "tracked", one could remove tax, insurance and MoT dodgers at a stroke, I would have thought.