Adrian Stott wrote (in amongst a whole load of illogical drivel) ... > Poorer people generally don't drive, so they will be little affected > by road pricing.
Yeah Gods! I thought I was passed the point of being surprised by the b*ll*cks you peddle but this really takes the biscuit! I won't quote masses of stats (tempting though it is ... the relevant link is http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/hbai/hbai2008/contents.asp ) but there are about 5.6 million adults in the UK below the poverty line and they're not all state benefit scroungers by a long chalk. Anyone on national minimum wage in a one income household is officially living in poverty for starters. And that's poverty mind you, not just being poor. Mind you, poverty isn't what it used to be! "Poorer people" generally DO drive, you [insert appropriate expletive of choice] because they've got no damn choice! Try doing the weekly shop for a family of five by bus. It's not an option when either you're home or the cheaper supermarkets is not on a bus route. Try getting to work by any other means that a car when the only job you can get is working shifts with weekend work included in a warehouse built beside a motorway junction miles from the nearest large population centre. In the REAL world that most of us live in, the car is quite simply a necessity. The fallacy in your blithe assumption that road pricing will significantly reduce the number of car journeys is that very few people outside of London, and perhaps one or two other major cities, are making significant numbers of avoidable journeys. Road pricing as a replacement for fuel duty is a daft idea too. Fuel duty is actually a very logical method of collecting income from motorists. The more miles you do, the more you pay. However, the more economical your car, and the more economically you drive it, the less you pay. Fuel duty, along with the graduated rates of road fund tax, to some extent discourage ownership of larger and less environmentally friendly cars. It's for damn sure the reason why these days I drive around in a 1.9TD MPV rather than a 3.5 V8 Range Rover. And if I didn't need to be able to shift lots of PA gear around I'd swap the Scenic out for something even smaller and cheaper to run. However, if the cost of the journey from A to B was going to be the same in either vehicle, I'd be back to having a Rangie like a shot. You simply cannot solve problems like this through simple market economics. It's this Thatcherite view of the world that has led to the "I'm all right Jack" culture which is prevalent in our society today. And if you are going to insist on trying to apply a market economics solution to a social problem, a good starting point would be to develop some understanding of a> the basic facts and b> the basic principles. For starters, try to grasp the fundamental difference between an essential good or service and a luxury one and then realise that for most of the population a car, and most of the journeys made in that car, fall into the first group. In any case, putting up the cost of goods or services may have a short term impact on consumption but, with an unstoppable inevitability, earnings will rise to catch up within a few short years. Trying to price people off the roads just will not work as a sustainable long term solution. Bru
