On Sunday, February 11, 2007 11:37 AM [GMT+1=CET], Steve Haywood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm not unsympathetic to the argument of rural communities. When I was > a kid I lived in a village with three connections an hour, six buses > in total, to Leicester and Loughborough. They're down to one an hour > in each direction now. I guess the only way kids manage to live in the > place is by persuading mum and dad to take them places. Some villages near the Wiltshire town where I grew up in the 1940s & 50s would have been glad of one bus each way per *day*. The most extreme route I came across had a bus in one direction on the second Tuesday of the month and the return trip a fortnight later. But there were plenty of routes that on ran on, for example, Wednesdays and Saturdays (which were market days in the town). So there's nothing recent about poor rural public transport. And car ownership was much less widely disseminated then. But almost all working-class people (a shorthand I'm not fond of) lived within walking or cycling distance of their work. > We HAD to have CC in London because following the Easter 2000 (?) > snarl up where traffic coming off the Euston Rd after the bank holiday > had led to total gridlock, not just in the centre but across great > swathes of the inner suburbs, it became clear that things were getting > critical. Livingstone made congestion charge a main platform of his > transport policy. He was an independent at that stage, remember. > People voted for him, knowing what they were going to get. > > Yes, we got the charge - but we got a fleet of new buses too. And tube > investment on a level we haven't seen this century which the next > generation will benefit from > > I wouldn't advocate charging in towns where there's no congestion > crisis, let alone charging as a matter of course, yet another tax. But > where town centres are dying from congestion, London has proved that > to a point, road charging works. > > BUT - and I say this to you who may be facing it soon where you live - > there HAS to be a quid pro quo. If they're gonna charge you for taking > your car into a town when there's no public transport alternative, > you have to ensure that that money is used to provide one. OK, apart > from one or two conurbations, there's never going to be the > concentration of population outside London to support a tube system > with trains running every couple of minutes or so. But surely a bus > service to a village three times an hour isn't beyond the wit of the > politicians? I agree with Steve. The opponents of road-pricing can't get away with all their arguments at once. It can't simultaneously be revenue-neutral *and* raise money to pay for improved public transport. And I can't go along with the "stealth tax" label either. Nothing that's been so widely discussed over so many years, and will have passed through Parliament if it ever comes into effect, can possibly merit the word "stealth". Mike Stevens narrowboat Felis Catus III web-site www.mike-stevens.co.uk Defend the waterways. Visit the web site www.saveourwaterways.org.uk
