Road Pricing..

National road tolls could be brought in within a decade, Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander has said.
He admitted a "still sceptical" public had yet to be won over to the benefits of road pricing - but said something had to be done to prevent gridlock.

Right, so NuLabour have had report done by an airline executive, which was commissioned, not by the Dept of Transport, but by the Treasury. Which means its not about the congestion, its another way of raising revenue, for the greedy bastard Brown.

As I understand it the Road Fund Licence was first robbed by Winston Churchill, thereby setting a precedent for all the other thieving chancellors. So they have felt safe in using the Car Tax to pay for anything other than the roads. So whilst over the years the road infrastructure has deteriorated through lack of investment, and improper use of monies that should have paid for the roads. Not a lot has physically been done to help the motorist.

As I see it, we the car driving public have paid for the roads twice over, once with car tax and the other with duty on fuel! Yet they still expect us to pay yet again. Because make no mistake this money will not go on repairing the roads or reducing congestion, it will be syphoned off into some hairbrained scheme of Gordo's.

Instead of spending the monney on other things, why not ring fence 30% of it to actually pay for the roads, after all thats what the monies supposed to go on.

Now I don't know if its true,( but it does seem fairly plausable given this governments use of spin and downright lies) it has been mentioned on some blogs. That in order to push through the Congestion Charge in London, they altered the sequencing of the Traffic Lights, so that they actually created the problem, so it would appear that congestion was worse than it actually was, and that the charge would be seen to be working from day one.

I would have thought, that given the mass of freight on the roads, HGV's etc, all with governed engines so they are unable to reach above a certain speed. How about reducing the time they spend on the roads, ban them during the day from 7 am to 7pm, so that all deliveries have to be done at night or go by other methods ie. the train. They could deliver to localised hubs and then the deliveries made by transit vans during the day. This would free up the motorways and most of the A Roads which should reduce congestion.

Then set the traffic lights to speed up the flow of traffic, as they do in europe, where traffic moves smoother and somewhat quicker than here.

Next take back the buses and start them running a decent service at reasonable prices and at times to suit those going to work, if your shift starts at six you need to be on a bus (dependant on journey times) usually an hour beforehand.

But road pricing is a big no no, even if they gave the incentive of reducing Road Tax and Fuel Duty, these roads are not the governments not the councils, they did not pay for them, We did and as such we own them.