The company enforces a limited flexitime system with core hours which forces me to arrive no earlier than 08.00 and leave no earlier than 16.00.

The average journey time is just over an hour but recently I have experienced times exceeding an hour and a half with the extra time spent almost stationary due to congestion. The journey would take no more than 45 minutes in total on clear roads.

If I had any alternative choice of transport I would use it. There is a direct train service from Preston to Stockport that takes an hour and ten minutes but the station is a 15 minute drive from my house (or a 30 minute bus ride followed by a 15 minute walk) and the Stockport station is a 20 minute walk from the office. Adding this all up including contingency for catching the train comes to almost two hours.

That might not seem like a lot but in comparison to around an hour by car, the extra 2 hours a day would mean that I would hardly get to see my 6 year-old daughter.

As the contract is potentially of short duration I can’t consider relocating my family and I am not prepared to live away from home during the week due to the impact it would have on my family.

I am therefore stuck with using congested roads at the busiest times of the day with no viable alternative.

As I was sitting in a traffic queue a few days ago I took time to look around me at the other cars and drivers and came to the conclusion that there were probably very few people in that queue who didn’t have to be there due to circumstances similar to my own.

I then considered the government’s suggested solution - to make all those with no alternative pay even more for the privilege of sitting in queues.

Making us pay more will not stop us having to use the roads at busy times it will just make us poorer.

I am not against fair taxation for road users and consider the current system to be grossly unfair to light road users, those with disabilities and the caring services.

However, applying a road pricing scheme or any other taxation regime based on the premise that road users who have to pay will use the roads less or will travel at less busy times, is doomed to fail unless it is accompanied by further legislation to improve the flexibility of Britain’s workforce.

Encouraging companies to allow more flexible working hours and to allow people to work from home would both have a direct impact on road congestion.

I was amused to see that the government is considering providing tax breaks to people who work from home. A nice slap in the face for those who are crying out to be able to do so but are prevented by their employer.

The government needs to face up to real measures that will directly reduce congestion. Merely increasing the taxation of road users will only begin to reduce congestion when the financial burden reaches the point where it is no longer financially viable to go to work!

Forcing companies to release their workforce from the drudgery of commuting would have immediate, positive effects on congestion, family life and the environment and would cost nothing.

Tracking cars is simply not practical. Both from an implementation standpoint or from the perspective of personal freedom. Think ID cards + car tracking and you have the makings of the most efficient police state that the world has ever seen. Albeit one run by a bunch of incompetents with no clue how to manage that information.

If you want to reduce pollution and emissions then you have to tie emissions to cost. And, the simplest way to do this is to levy higher tax on fuel. If you drive more then you pay more. End of story. But that only solves half of the problem since you’re incenting people to drive less but not to buy more efficient cars and the way to do that is to levy a tax on vehicle sales so that you pay more at the point of purchase for your vehicle.

But, while you’re doing that then you might want to think of things which are just important such as tax on aviation fuel to curb the growth in air travel (the emissions from which will outstrip any gains we could make from cars) or making supermarkets responsible for recycling the monstrous quantities of packaging that they create.

That’s not going to happen though because the “Great” British public only care about one thing. The pound in their pocket. The reason for the outrage over the road taxing proposals don’t come from any moral basis but simply from the overwhelming greed of people so they have more money to spend on the latest gizmos or to keep their fix of Sky TV coming. The sad thing is that the Government is using the initiative as a way of raising funds whilst failing to address the actual issues. Both sides are acting solely in their own personal interest and both, in their way, completely wrong. Sometimes I truly despair of the human race.

Imagine a typical day in a small city where, ten thousand people are delayed by just 5 minutes. That adds up to fifty thousand lost minutes per day.

Assuming 200 business days per year, that’s ten million minutes per year, wasted sitting in cars (200*50,000) is ten million minutes.

Nineteen sequential years, or (since we’re talking about lost revenue) 57 man-years.

Obviously the real workforce is a lot larger than 100,000 so lets call it ten million, in which case the annual loss shifts by two decimal places and becomes 5700 man years.

I’ve plucked these number from thin air based on some very simple sums, the cost of this lost time is far higher than the time itself because delays have a knock on effect, for example, when a meeting can’t start because someone hasn’t arrived, or when a building site has to stop work because the concrete is still en-route, etc.

It may come as a surprise to some but a great number of families live on the breadline already & what this proposal is saying is that we have just made those peoples lives a great deal more difficult.

On the other hand, if you can afford it, pollute & congest as much as you like. How fair is that. Contrary to some opinion, car use is in many cases essential to hard working families.

If we must ration personal transport, amongst other things, surely there must be a fairer way of doing it.

I appreciate that and the idea of a central authority knowing my whereabouts at all times doesn’t appeal greatly to me either. However, I’m sure you’ll appreciate that in most cases, they know where your car is anyway, as long as you’re on a road with a camera. Image recognition software that can read your numberplate has been around for a while.

I agree that this level of surveillance (including the ubiquitous CCTV cameras) is uncomfortably Orwellian but when I’m forced off the road for the nth time by some idiot who thinks that it’s impressive to drive at dangerous speeds, or I’m trying to cross the road with my 3 year old daughter, running to avoid being killed then I start to wish that yes, the police did know how fast motorists were going at all times.

Perhaps a less invasive means of achieving the same end would be amend the driving test so that people who are demonstratively and dangerously idiotic should never be allowed to drive a car in the first place, just as hopefully the DVLA wouldn’t give them a loaded gun.

I understand that some drivers are starting to feel that they are under siege. I would ask drivers to understand that the rest of us also have a right to get around safely and have been marginalised for far too long.

Tim.

I’m the Tim Lewis who started the petition. Thanks for your kind words regarding my petition and thanks for signing up. I’d like to respond to Mark’s comments as they’re probably echoed by quite a few of the million odd people who signed the opposite petition. I appreciate that Britain generally has a very poor infrastructure for non-car users and I would seek to change this situation. If I’d had enough space in the petition, I’d have advocated using the money from these taxes to fund an infrastructure that would allow people the option of cycling or walking safely and comfortably between every town, city and village in the UK. According to Sustrans (a sustainable transport charity), it would cost around £500 million to create such a nationwide infrastructure. A lot of tax payers money, you might say. However, widening the M25 cost £5 billion.

To respond to the ‘unless he lives in London or another major city he doesn’t have a life’ comment, I have lived in London and in other big cities and I’ll concede that the infrastructure for alternatives to cars tend to be much better in such places. In Swansea, where I used to live, the cycle paths were good enough to allow me to cycle 20 miles a day to work and back quickly (about 15-20 mph average).

Having recently moved to Sussex, I appreciate that not everywhere is so lucky. This is why I’m now becoming active in my new local community to try and advocate the creation of such an infrastructure. This is good for motorists and those who like to use their legs as the fewer cars on the road, the less likely you guys are to be stuck in traffic.

As for my car use, I like to think it’s appropriate: I’ll make a long car journey (30+ miles) maybe once every 2-4 months and hardly ever get in the car for less than 10 mile journeys - and then only if the missus has bent my ear far enough that I’ll acquiesce to using the car. I do almost of my shopping locally, using my bike panniers and trailer or just my arms and a bag or two. I also like to support local shops rather than just shop at big, inaccessible out of town monstrosities. I appreciate that lorries still deliver to local shops as well, thus using fossil fuels but the net savings from individuals not using yet more fuel to travel to out of town stores are real.

We can’t all win, but we avoid an all-lose scenario.

Losing in this game might involve:

1. gridlock
2. school-run mum not making it to the school and instead being stuck en-route
3. meals on wheels not getting through
4. emergency services having difficulty moving around
5. freight lorries getting stranded
6. ferry and cargo ports rendered ineffective
7. mums and dads not getting home from work to cook the kids dinner

Everything above happened in Portsmouth a couple of years ago when one car crashed on the M275 northbound mid afternoon. Cars were stuck outside the University building for so long (until around 10pm) that I ended up going to the local shops and buying Everton Mints and water, then wandering between the cars telling people what I knew, lending people my phone, and telling them where they could find the Uni toilets.

More congestion will only lead to such situations becoming worse.