Former British Airways chief Sir Rod Eddington has made his report into how motorists should be made to pay for using the UK’s roads (using a tracked road charging scheme)
What a novel idea! Some countries I know of do this already by levying an emissions based tax on cars and also a large tax on fuel so the more you drive, the more you pay…….oh, wait…… Sir Rod apparently want’s us to carry on doing that and then pay for road use on top.
Well, I’m sure that will go down well with the motoring public and businesses who are already about the most heavily taxed in the world. I’m sure the poor (and even not so poor) will jump for joy as they are taxed off the road to leave just the rich and wealthy driving their oversized 4×4s.
Better yet, the charging would be greater in the inner cities creating a class divide where on the abosulte most wealthy can afford to live and work.
Sir Rod’s response would presumably be ‘Use public transport’. Mine would be “Have you ruddy well tried?” I don’t mean use it once or twice, I mean use it every day for the commute to and from work. After a week or so of being abused, sworn at, mugged and arriving at work stinking of both tobacco and ganja, Sir Rod might see the situation differently. This would, of course, lead to the immediate injection of the idea that all this extra tax would be spent on public transport. Like hell it would, it would just go back to the government coffers to be squandered the repair of the broken road pricing scheme and other such folly projects. Public transport has been getting progressively worse since privatisation and their profits (or at least the board salaries) have been getting steadily greater.
Finally, to give you that warm and fuzzy feeling inside that the government always knows exactly where you are (and how fast you’re driving) they will undoubtedly try to implement road charging via GPS tracking.
Entries (RSS)