I find myself stuck in a traffic jam, in Ruislip.
I can imagine Ruislip was quite a pleasant little place fifty years ago. Happy schoolchildren played in the streets, housewives paused to exchange pleasantries with the butcher and the baker, and occasionally a Singer Sunbeam, an Austin Healey or a Ford Zephyr would pass along the high street. Not any longer.
Subsumed into Greater London, Ruislip is just an ugly suburb, indistinguishable from a hundred others, and ruined by constant traffic. I am part of it, so I can hardly complain. But I can complain about some of the fatuous comments that I hear every time the subject of motoring is discussed.
No radio phone-in is complete without somebody arguing that motorists should be punished. ‘They are burning precious fossil fuel and they are destroying the environment. Hit them where it hurts. In their pocket!’
I can only assume that these do-gooders assume that each and every day motorists jump into their cars just for the sheer joy of motoring. If this was ever a relaxing pastime it certainly is not any more, and the basis of any debate on our overcrowded roads should be that people drive because they have to get from A to B and not for the fun of it.
Unfortunately our whole social-economic system has been built on the premise that driving is quick, easy and cheap.
There is no better example of this than the out-of-town shopping centre. It was in the 1970s that urban planners decided that it would be a good idea to situate our supermarkets miles away from where anybody lived, and I am sure that the cost of petrol never entered their heads.
So today we are obliged to use the car to go shopping and, with public transport not offering a convenient or cheap alternative, the same applies to visiting friends, going to the hospital, taking the family to watch the football or whatever.
They’re crazy in Nottingham
Many of us have to drive to work. But I hear that employers in Nottingham are going to be taxed on the number of parking spaces that they make available to their staff. They could be asked to pay as much as £185 per parking space, rising to £350 by 2014.
Why? Because Nottingham city councillors say that will encourage commuters to use public transport, and lead to a cleaner and less congested city. This is a crazy idea and simply does not get to the root of the problem. Nobody is going to walk to a bus stop, hang around waiting, and suffer the frustration of late running buses if he can drive to work in half the time.
So if Nottingham goes ahead with this ridiculous scheme it will make no difference to patterns of travel. Instead it will just impose a cost upon those doing business in Nottingham and persuade some of the city’s employers to up sticks and reduce the number of jobs on offer.
All too often I hear these money grabbing measures dressed up as environmental initiatives. Take the government’s plans to slap a higher road tax on older gas-guzzling cars. As it happens my own car is so old that it would not be affected, but still the proposal is utterly disgraceful and wrong.
Under any circumstances at all it is wrong to levy retrospective taxes, punishing people for perfectly reasonable and valid decisions that they made several years ago. But aside from the moral issue and the suspicion that this is just an excuse for the Government to raise yet more tax revenue, it will not address the real problem which is that our society and economy is ordered on the basis that travel is cheap.
Today we also have the debate about lorry drivers. I reckon that Shell tanker drivers earning around £35,000 a year for doing nothing more complicated than driving a tanker have nothing to complain about. But for our other truckers who are faced with the soaring cost of diesel the matter is quite different.
Again I hear plenty of people saying that there are too many trucks on the roads, and that the cost of road freight should be increased to discourage it. But this is unrealistic nonsense. Any UK road haulage firms that are forced out of business will simply be replaced by those from the Continent.
Unless somebody can come up with a new way of getting goods from central warehouses to supermarket shelves, they will go by road. It is just a question of whether they are carried in British trucks or foreign trucks and I know which we should be encouraging.
The point is that we drive because we have to. You could double the cost of motoring and it would make precious little difference. If you live, as we do, in what might be described as a de-localised society, people have to drive.
This is the case in this country, and doubly so in the USA. So Governments need to be a bit more imaginative about this. Slapping extra costs on motorists in the hope that they will leave their cars in the garage will make not work.
Instead the Government should immediately reduce fuel duty for UK road hauliers so that their livelihood is not taken by rivals from across the Channel. It should do everything possible to improve public transport. It should encourage town planners to ensure that essential services are within walking distance. And it should recognise that the biggest burden of all upon our road network and the environment in general comes from our ever increasing population.
Regards,
Tom Bulford
for The Penny Sleuth
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