"Motorists have ruined England - and they need to pay the price"

"tapzz" (tapzz) 09/01/2014 at 09:22 • Filed to: i feel gassy

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It gets better: "We know that price controls, in general do not work well and capitalism, by and large, delivers the goods. [...] So what I want to know is this: why, the moment we get into our cars, do we all turn into screaming, pinko commies?"

This is clearly not from the usual suspects in green transport matters, but from the Daily Telegraph, a right-of-centre quality daily in the Washington Post vein. The discussion and issues are clearly more than a little London centric, but it's the strongest argument for road pricing I've read in a long time. That, and author Alex Proud's characterisation of Jeremy Clarkson: the nation's pet oaf.

What do you think?

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Conan > tapzz 09/01/2014 at 09:26

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What an ass (and probably clickbait.) They can come from the left or right in Britain. I hope he gets blasted by Top Gear et al.

The Transporter > tapzz 09/01/2014 at 09:34

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The Daily Telegraph is a hack rag, anyway.

djmt1 > tapzz 09/01/2014 at 09:38

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They go about it the wrong way but they are right there are too many cars in London. However pricing people out of cars is a stupid solution. The problem is our 200 year old transport network, simply put it needs addition capacity and now. No point telling to get on buses when the buses are full and there isn't enough of them.

davedave1111 > tapzz 09/01/2014 at 09:39

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He's not wrong on any part of it. Just doesn't go far enough. Cars should be almost entirely banned from Zone 1, without a doubt, and probably Zone 2, too.

There really are alternatives, it is ludicrous for London to be set up the way it is, and one of the main reasons, as he's identified, is that the true costs of road usage are not being passed on to those using the roads.

It would be quite possible to organise London so that the heaviest vehicles on the road most of the time were things like Piaggio Apes.

It would be better in pretty much every way, including air quality, ease of getting around, and so-on. It'd become a hell of a lot safer to cycle, or ride a scooter, or even use some kind of light commuter vehicle that currently doesn't exist - think a covered shifter kart or something.

djmt1 > davedave1111 09/01/2014 at 09:44

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Banning cars from zone 1 & 2 is terrible idea. Trains and buses are chronically overcrowded now (thus why I want a car) there is no way they could handle a sudden influx of new riders.

davedave1111 > djmt1 09/01/2014 at 09:46

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I intended to include buses too, at least in their current form. I wasn't envisaging a big increase in public transport, but in much more manageable private transport - scooters, bicycles, ultra-light commuter vehicles, and so-on.

The point I was making is that we don't need cars as we currently know them for driving in London.

Conan > djmt1 09/01/2014 at 09:47

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That seems to be far more your problem. Like many places in America they don't want to do the real transportation expenditures needed because they will be tremendous.

duurtlang > tapzz 09/01/2014 at 09:51

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He does have a point, but there need to be actual alternatives. People will still need to get to work, supply their shop and the like.

As someone not from the UK but who does pay €1150 a year in road taxes for my daily driver (Peugeot 406 coupe with LPG conversion), another €250 for toy#1 (Peugeot 205 GTi) and another €600 if I were to register my project (BMW E30 320i Touring, total €2000/$2600/1600 pounds) I very strongly agree with the following:

Why do we agree that, for a once-a-year fee, you can drive as much as you like, wherever you like and whenever you like?

Get rid of ownership taxation completely, replace it with paid usage of certain overcrowed roads at overcrowded hours. Something digital, without toll ports. Do not tax lightly used roads.

djmt1 > davedave1111 09/01/2014 at 09:55

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But what to replace them with?

I'd say replace the buses with trolley buses. Massively increase the cycling scheme and make it free for low income families and students. Create a north south Crossrail and create a centre London version of the DLR.

Problem is this will cost a shit ton of money and I'm skeptical that there is any space left to build all the infrastructure needed.

GhostZ > tapzz 09/01/2014 at 09:58

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Automobiles on the road do have a free market for space, and you do pay the price. The price itself is what he's complaining about.

What he really wants is to be able to pay that price purely in dollars, not a combination of dollars and labor (which he currently pays) as a form of exclusion to reduce the market size.

It's like Wal-Mart choosing to only pay their employees in stock options (instead of cash) in hopes of drawing away prospectives because they have too many incoming applications.

djmt1 > Conan 09/01/2014 at 10:00

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We have no problem spending ludicrous amounts of money on infrastructure heck we built a railway under the sea. Problem is that simply isn't enough space to build anymore in London and upgrading the current network would cause too much chaos in the short-term.

You guys were smart enough to think a head and built your cities in pleasant grid systems. Here in jolly old England we just drew squiggly lines on a map and said fuck it, pub.

Conan > djmt1 09/01/2014 at 10:02

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Ha ha ha. Yeah. We've only got real issues with the cities that weren't gridded or we overwhelm the resources/land for. Hopefully you get some logical folks to straighten it out before you're all stuck walking and using pushcarts instead of lorries.

Pockets > duurtlang 09/01/2014 at 10:17

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The taxes on fuel cover the "how much are you using the roads" more effectively than complex road pricing schemes which would end up with loads of people clogging up smaller un-priced roads, creating far worse bottlenecks.
Just look at the colossal failure of the only toll motorway, where traffic levels are really low despite the regular M6 still being awful for traffic like it was before. Scaling pricing like that would just result in lots of country lanes, small villages and residential roads being filled with commuters instead of the main roads, which is insanity.

It might improve the situation a little in central London, but would create havoc in a lot of other places which don't have London's overcrowded-but-kinda-fuctional public transport system.

Adding costs does little to improve the situation; adding the congestion charge hasn't caused a big reduction in traffic in London for example and most other UK cities have terrible public transport options compared to London.

What's needed to reduce traffic in the UK is fundamentally a combination of several things:
1. Stopping the ridiculous London-centric everything that there is at the moment.
2. Proper, cohesive public transport systems from a local to national level which are designed to cope with the volume of traffic.
3. Making public transport affordable.

1. would distribute traffic more evenly across the country, 2. would enable other cities to rely less on cars and 3. would drive up usage in places where the car is a practical option, as at the moment the UK has some of the most expensive public transport anywhere. And it's total shit.

kanadanmajava1 > tapzz 09/01/2014 at 10:17

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Driving to work is one thing that I really don't like use my car(s). I'd rather live close enough to ride with my bicycle to work. I'll do it for the whole year even though the weather might be against me. But I don't have wait in traffic. Some of my friends live so far away that their only possibility is to drive their cars for 45 minutes to get to work.

I don't know how but somehow commuting has to be made suck so much that people would live near where they work. This might be hard for many as many couples tend to work in different places. But big cities have plenty of places to work to choose from.

GhostZ > djmt1 09/01/2014 at 10:35

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Ironically, most US major cities were designed by people from the UK, business-minded and wanting to get out of London, where lineage, family, titles, and convention kept them down.

tapzz > davedave1111 09/01/2014 at 10:39

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or even use some kind of light commuter vehicle that currently doesn't exist - think a covered shifter kart or something

Something like this?

;-)

GhostZ > Pockets 09/01/2014 at 10:44

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Bingo. It's been long realized that fuel taxes are far more realistic for building infrastructure than flat taxes to own a car.

Give it 20 years. Property rates in london are going to be so high that businesses will start slowly spreading outward, and with them, local taxes and higher demand should necessitate larger roads in those areas. The problem is space, but being an American where land was once cheaper than water, I have to think a little more before answering that.

Cé hé sin > kanadanmajava1 09/01/2014 at 10:52

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Living near your place of work, in London or any other large urban centre, is fine if you're some Master of the Universe earning billions playing games with money. If you're a person on the minimum wage cleaning the Master's office or selling him his lunch it's not quite such an attractive option, or even a possible one. Long distance commuting for many people isn't going to go away without a huge increase in affordable housing in large city centres, and that's an oxymoron.

Pockets > GhostZ 09/01/2014 at 12:43

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A lot of industries are so heavily focussed on London that no matter what the cost, they'll be there and just have secondary offices out in one of the commuter corridors for the less 'sexy' jobs. In American terms, imagine a city that combines New York, LA, Washington DC in one and you'd be almost getting towards the level of control and self-importance that London has.
Hence HS2, really; it's entirely about making commuting from other more affordable large cities to London possible.

The other thing is that they can't risk reducing property values; the Daily Mail brigade are so obsessed with the value of their houses that it'd be political suicide. The only thing they can do is slow it down in the commuter belt by distributing it elsewhere.
The problem is there's no interest in doing things like distributing jobs and infrastructure, it's purely about "how do we get people to into London" because of the London-first mindset of the powers that be.

kanadanmajava1 > Cé hé sin 09/01/2014 at 12:59

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Yeah. My suggestion can solve only middle classes commuting problem as they are the ones that are sitting in their comfy cars in the traffic jams.

I know that rent prices in the London area are very high (but the same applies to most capitols). I wouldn't want to live or work there. There are also plenty of high pay jobs which is probably the cause of the price situation. People with high pay are probably fine with situation but might be still be suffering from the traffic jams.

"The servant class" that aren't paid well but have jobs related to better paid occupations cannot live in the expensive areas and they probably have spend big deal of their time commuting as their jobs are still there.

Owning a car is fairly expensive in most European countries so many minimum wage workers don't have those and they are mostly using public transportation. I'm not totally sure about the US but I would think that keeping a car is quite cheap there if you can maintain it yourself.

davedave1111 > djmt1 09/01/2014 at 13:30

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I really don't know how much clearer I can make it: the alternative is much lighter-weight forms of private transport. Mopeds would be fine if there were no cars, buses and lorries to worry about.

davedave1111 > tapzz 09/01/2014 at 13:49

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Too big and heavy - because it's designed to drive in traffic with heavy vehicles, and go on out of town roads at a decent speed. Imagine what it would look like if it had a top speed of thirtyish, and no buses to contend with, so only needed crash protection for hitting a solid object at 30.

I'm thinking more soapbox-racer with a canopy and 50cc engine. While googling, though, I found this:

djmt1 > davedave1111 09/01/2014 at 13:56

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Replace double decker buses with mopeds?

You've told me twice so you must be serious but who exactly is going to pay for all these mopeds? People often use public transport because they are poor so suggestion everyone start adopting private transport is a bit unfair.

Plus will London's stupidly narrow streets able to handle such an increase in motor vehicles. Keep in mind the max capacity of a double decker bus is 95 that means 95 new private vehicles taking up that space or in other words, China.

davedave1111 > djmt1 09/01/2014 at 14:48

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I'm not quite sure what to do about buses, really. Perhaps just make them lighter-weight too. Obviously not just mopeds as a replacement, either. Hey, maybe travelators :)

Re the poverty argument, it doesn't really apply in London - if you work in the centre, it's motorbike, bicycle or public transport unless you have a chauffeur-driven car or some such. Also, a moped is cheaper than public transport, over time.

The road-space argument is an interesting one. Clearly, you can't get much higher density than a packed double-decker bus. Perhaps you can get much more creative with road-space in the absence of buses and heavy vehicles, though. Bear in mind that you could put two or three lanes in each normal lane, if you cut the size of vehicles drastically. That would let you take two-lane urban streets and split them 66-33 (or 20-80, or whatever) between directions at rush hour, instead of the usual 50-50, for example.

I hadn't thought about this side of it much before, so you've raised a good point. I wonder how efficient buses are at using the roadspace, rather than at just getting high density of passengers into a given area. That is, while clearly the area the bus is standing in is being used highly efficiently, that's not necessarily true of the road as a whole. (To give an extreme example, imagine a bus that blocked all traffic behind it every time it stopped, and stopped for five minutes each time. That would ruin the throughput of the road, wouldn't it?)

djmt1 > davedave1111 09/01/2014 at 15:08

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Travelators, I can get behind.

The poverty argument is based on real world experience. For example not to long ago I had a student oyster card i.e free bus travel what I didn't have was enough cash for a bicycle let alone a moped. So it definitely applies in London.

I was told this by policeman so I have no idea of the worth of this statement but I was told in a single lane closed of to traffic you are allowed two bicycles side by side max.

In the end the infrastructure sucks, the network is overcapacity and London is 4x over emission targets but contrary to French beliefs, the Olympics turned out great, so there's that.

davedave1111 > djmt1 09/01/2014 at 15:23

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I don't think you quite understood what I meant about the affordability. If you can have a subsidised bus pass, you can have a subsidised moped or bicycle, too. I mean, a yearly bus pass is worth, what, a thousand quid? You can buy a moped and run it for a year on that.

The current laws are irrelevant when talking about how to change the law to make things better.

Kanaric > tapzz 09/01/2014 at 19:26

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Do what Japan does and give massive incentives to use something like Kei cars.