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

[Christopher Hunter]

On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 23:13 +0000, John G Walker wrote:

> Those who work in the countryside - as opposed to those who employ them
> - need cars just to be able to commute to work. The days of the
> countryside full of agricultural workers on bicycles is long gone.
> Now they have to battle through urban traffic jams in order to get to
> work. It's not clear to me how road pricing will help them,

Mostly agreed.  Road pricing is really a non-starter in many ways.  The
simplest and most obvious way of getting transport taxes from those most
able to pay is by fuel duties.

It's similar in many ways to the concept of VAT: if VAT was charged at
the right rate, almost all other forms of taxation could be discarded
(including Income Tax, National Insurance and most other levies).  The
government economic model demonstrates quite clearly that this is so.
However, there would be a major outcry from those most affected (the
rich), so like vastly increased fuel duties, it's a political
non-starter.

There is no simple, easy solution to the congestion problems.  London's
experiment with Congestion Charging doesn't work (and cannot work).
Despite Livingstone's bluster to the contrary and the manipulated
statistics, the London CC zone has failed abysmally in every way, and is
losing money.  (If is was truly successful, the revenue collected would
be vanishingly small, so the entire project is self-defeating!)

The "automated number plate recognition" simply doesn't work (and cannot
work with the chosen technology), and relies on innumerable lowly paid
operatives monitoring CCTV screens! 

Imagine this mess expanded to the whole country!

Also, any large scale government IT project invariably fails, always at
enormous cost to the taxpayer.  Tagging vehicles might work, but the
mass of data that is required to be collected, collated and manipulated
will be impossible without large scale human intervention.  I suppose
that the upside is that it will be the largest government "make work"
scheme ever and will do wonderful things for the unemployment
statistics!

The only thing that Livingstone's folly has achieved is to persuade
increasing numbers of large companies to move their premises to the
provinces or abroad, and to seriously affect the sales of major
retailers inside his zone - so much so that some of the bigger companies
are closing their central London outlets.

There is no real solution: anything that would actually work is so
politically damaging or utterly technically impractical that they're
really going to have to think again...

Regards

Chris


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