[Gllug] [OT] Times Article on ABD was Fighting a virus

[Adrian McMenamin]

On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 19:01 +0000, t.clarke wrote:
> I fail to see how the 'special case' of London congestion can be used to justify
> wholesale road pricing across the UK!

As the idea of any charge will be based on the externality it causes it
therefore is the case that in areas where there is low congestion the
charge will be small - essentially moving to the limit of the current
level of fuel tax


> In the case of the central London charging zone there are plenty of alternatives
> for getting to work, so penalising car travel is a viable strategy.

It's not penalising car travel. It is making car users pay the full
costs of their travel (instead of it being paid by everybody). This is
one element of why it is a progressive form of taxation. To repeat: the
wealthy have far greater access to car travel than the poor. But the
poor still pay taxes to subsidise the rich car users.

> In the case of the UK in general, for many people there is no viable alternative
> to the car for getting to work, since public transport networks are very often
> 'radial' in nature.

Actually, that is garbage. Most people live in urban areas and therefore
have access to a variety of means of getting to work. Yes, some people
will not, but why is it right that the rest of us subsidise their
journey to work?


> In my younger days I worked in central london, wlaked to the station and took
> the train.  Then businesses were told to decentralise - and I was forced to
> drive to work, since the alternative by public transport was hopelesly
> unrealistic.
> 

Your personal experience is not universal.


> If you apply the same logic to rationing food as some would do to rationing road
> usage, only the rich could afford a decent diet and the rest of us would be
> living on gruel !
> 

No, the correct analogy is that we have a system today that subsidises
food and the poor have to pay a disproportional (as against their
income) because the rich can buy more more and therefore access subsidy.
Road pricing is not a rationing system, it's a market for road use.


> If road usage HAS to be rationed,  doing it by price alone is not the answer
> in my view.  

It's not rationing.


> And of course the other things worth mentioning about the proposed
> 'black box' scheme are:
> a)  anything highly technological the Goverment gets into is either 1) a
> complete cock-up  or 2) costs ten times as much as estimated or 3) both of
> the aforementioned
> b)  yet another setp towards '1984'
> 


If you have civil liberties concerns (and I can understand why people
might) then that's a very different issue. As for the argument that all
public technology is broken, my Oyster card works pretty well.


I am a car user owner too. But I don't see why I should expect others to
subsidise my car use.

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