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.

It’s about enabling everybody to travel wherever they want, whenever they want, and critically, it’s about keeping choke points moving so that road-freight remains viable.

Taking a step further back, it’s also about understanding how the road network is used, so the rail network can be more effectively improved, and so public transport services can be devised that meet the dynamically shifting demands of the population.

I love having a car, it gives me the freedom to move around without having to stand at a bus-stop for thirty minutes in the cold. It gives me the ability to chop down the never-ending supply of garden-overgrowth and take it to the local tip. It enables me to go to the local DIY store and buy (always too heavy) materials for doing up my home. It enables me to go and visit friends who live in the middle of the countryside, et cetera… and most importantly, it lets me do this whenever I want to.

If I want to go shopping at the huge Tesco in Port Solent at 3am, I can; and it costs me no more, or no less, than if I travel at 08:15 just as the same roads are getting really congested.

If I can shop at 03:00 but I choose to do so at 08:15, then I’m contributing to the congestion, yet there is little incentive to make me prefer the 03:00 option.

The polarization I mentioned previously was a massive simplification to make a point. There are as many arguments as there are counter arguments, and providing everybody starts discussing the issue, we all win.

As you suggest, nobody has the right to “dictate” how much anyone else travels, but we do have the right to come to a democratically debated consensus on how to fairly tax travel, because it effects everyone. I certainly don’t have all the answers, nobody does, like any other citizen I have experiences which cause me to have concerns and hopes, those are what I’m writing about; they’re my input to the debate.

The petition, and the supporting email, were not trying to promote democratic debate, they were merely trying to win the argument without any discussion; calling on the government to abandon its research. The emails disingenuously suggested that the government was purposefully not advertising the petition, suggesting it was a conspiracy, when in fact, no petitions are advertised. It further stated that if 750,000 signatures were gathered, the government would have to act on the petition, as if it were a referendum.

This is why the lobbyist news reports of the government “back peddling” and the petition system “back-firing” seem so silly. They’re seizing on the factually incorrect emotive content of the campaign, and waving a politically biased flag from the top of a million signatories, most of whom only learned of the petition through misleading spam, whilst ignoring the success of the petition system in encouraging debate.

Until (if ever) we get cold fusion, where does the electricity come from? – fossil fuels (note that analogous arguments are already running about wind-farms, wave-power farms ). The electronics for electric cars are also quite dirty if one does the complete cradle-to-grave analysis .

To suggest that “electricity is not taxed as a fuel” is also incredibly naive. There is a general provision (in the UK at least) that ALL fuels used for road transport are taxable, and in practice they are taxed. Concessions for bus diesel and the like are exactly that – CONCESSIONS or discounts. If mains electricity ever looked like becoming anything other than a tiny minority interest, does anyone seriously believe that the civil “servants” in HMT will be happy to let it remain “untaxed”? (It is of course actually taxed at a politically-conspired special low rate of only 5% VAT – odd, when all householders are polluters, and only some of them are also motorists).

I absolutely accept and agree with the need for debate and research, but that must look at the whole problem holistically and for the long term. By any stretch of the imagination, we need more roads in some places, while also needing some systemS (sic) to reduce demand for travel, and hence some congestion. It is stupid to suggest that we can get rid of congestion, since that would demand an infrastructure that could cope with the highest peaks of travel demand 24/365. The best we can hope for is to optimise it so that the fewest are subjected to the least amount.

But the mobility genie is well and truly out of the bottle. We will NEVER get it back in, no matter how piously we hope. In a democracy, if the overwhelming majority (especially those who know that there is life outside the M25, even if it’s low on public transport) want mobility, then that is what we should have. The issue – the challenge – is to manage it realistically (?!?) and sustainably, and that is a job for government.

We are where we are, and need to move forward, not hark back to some mythical halcyon days.
Just because YOU don’t seem to want to travel much, gives you no right whatsoever to dictate how much I should be able to travel, so long as it’s for a legal end-purpose; and my travel is undertaken legally.

A car is a luxury, not a necessity, but many of us have become reliant on it to the point where our lifestyle could not continue without it, we’d still have a life, but it would be more village based.

The car gives us the illusion of choice and freedom, but, as we reach gridlock, sadly, that choice will disappear.

So who uses the roads? Polarizing the issue I can see two kinds of road user: those who need to use the roads, and those who don’t. Obviously it’s not that simple, but for the sake of the discussion lets simplify.

Those that need to use the roads include the emergency services, national freight and deliveries to local shops.

In contrast, among those who don’t need to use the roads are parents on the school run, or people with sports cars out for a Sunday drive, going nowhere, just driving, with the top down and probably wearing a scarf.

Parents are the first good example because cars have given parents the opportunity to choose schools that are further away from their homes than would otherwise be possible. As we approach gridlock, it will become harder and harder to reach those schools, so the choice disappears. The petition doesn’t help those people.

Next, recreational Sunday drivers. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love to put the top down on our little convertible and go for a Sunday spin in the countryside, heated seats and all, but I know it’s a privilege, and I recognize that I have to pay for that.

Now lets say my neighbour likes the idea of my Sunday jaunts around the South Downs so much, that he buys an electric car to do likewise. We drive similar routes at similar times, but because of their low emissions he pays zero road tax and his electric batteries are charged straight from the mains socket, which is not taxed as a fuel.

The result is, we drive the same mileage, on the same days, but whilst I pay for the upkeep of the roads through my fuel tax, my neighbour contributes nothing. We end up with twice as many cars on the road, which doubles the wear and tear on the asphalt, whilst maintenance and improvement funds remain static.

Taxes per-se are not unfair, but failing to “tax the motorist at every opportunity” results in taxation that is really unfair because people end up being taxed unequally.

Taxing the journey, not the fuel is the only way we’ll be able ensure people are fairly taxed and thus afford to maintain a viable road network for the next 100 years.

The government knows that a car is a necessity not a luxury and that is why they tax the motorist at every opportunity.

Does “had enough of taxes” mean you’re in favour of the current system, where your insurance is annual and your road usage is taxed through fuel prices (which will soon become ineffective and thus unfair to anyone without an electric vehicle).

Or does “had enough of taxes” mean you’re signing up for the pay-as you drive scheme which at least has the potential to be fairer – poorer people will pay less, heavier road users will pay more, and thus those that can will shift their travel to less congested, cheaper times, reducing congestion.

tell the government motorist have had enough taxes

Thanks Rich!