pay-as-you-go car charges in the UK

Fuel duty doesn't tax you more for travelling on busy roads, though.*

for relieving congested roads can there not just be similar schemes as congestion charging in london?

Well, essentially, it *is* a congestion charge, just applied nation-wide.

It's very unlikely that there'll be any more limited area congestion charges, other than extensions to the existing two schemes, because of the result of the Edinburgh referendum.

There are two big problems with road pricing. Firstly, we will become a nation of rat-runs (unless *every road* has differential pricing for residents and non-residents, which would hugely complicate the scheme). Secondly, making sure the necessary equipment is fitted to every car *is* hard. It's starting to be rolled out for the Leeds trial scheme, but making sure everyone in the country gets it is non-trivial - politically, it's an even bigger problem than ID cards.

without any breathtaking benefits that cannot be achieved through much much simpler means.

Go on, suggest a simpler way to tax cars proportionally according to use but inversely according to need (which is essentially the root of what we need to do).

I'd just as soon return to the fuel duty escalator and try and tackle congestion by other means, zonal charges like london, but added to motorways and busy trunk routes, heavy taxes on parking spaces. bigger Road fund differentials for more inefficent and even cars that are less safe in colisions with cycles and pedestrians.

Plus we need some serious heavy rail investment. We need the Great Central back as a UIC guage freight corridor, for Rolling Road and Swap Body services and we need a London to Scotland TGV line. Plus improvements in other areas, reinstatement of local rail as both light and heavy rail, local wagonload freight, investigating the possibility of reguaging some key routes to allow double decker stock.

More seriously:

As long as we get the money for high speed heavy rail from London to scotland I'm all for it.

It would be nice, but it's a pipe dream. You can point at CTRL and say "look! see! it can be done!" all you like; but there are just too many people in the way.

The same applies to restoring a Great Central-style route.

Wagonload freight would be an ideal way to serve all those freight flows that are too large for convenient road haulage and too small for trainload services, but since the market was destroyed in the 80s and 90s, bringing it back requires a lot of effort. Slowly, though, it is starting to build again - next time you're passing through, say, Doncaster, look at the amount of shunting going on at Decoy Yard. The biggest problem still is the tiny number of freight depots and private sidings about.

The private sidings we do have are hugely underused, too. There's a freight-only branch passing my office. It was relaid about a year ago with good, heavyweight FB track. There are private sidings off it to three or four large chemical plants. In the nine months or so I've been working here, not a single train has gone past.

plus, i don't believe them when they say it'll be revenue neutral, the temptation will be too great.

think of the increase in road rage when people are not only stuck in slow moving traffic but realise it's costing them £1.30 a mile for the privilege.

For most people, it won't reduce their privacy at all; they can already be tracked to a similar level from their mobile phone records. Most people won't realise this, though.

Sounds like they need to get the cost of air travel sorted too as a priority, cos as it stands, this scheme will make flying even cheaper relative to road travel for medium to long distances, which obv. ain't great from the point of view of reducing carbon emissions.

As far as sorting out some new rail lines we have to get a bit french about it and tell anyone in the path of the trains to furque off, with money of course.

Let's work it out for a distance of, say, 40 miles for convenience.

The average family car (40mpg) will take one gallon of petrol to cover the distance, which under the current system costs them £4.07 (I'm leaving the road tax element out of this)Under the new system this will cost them around 89p in fuel cost, meaning as long as they spend less than £3.18 on road charges (an average of 7.9p a mile) they'll be up on the deal.

For a 4x4 at 20mpg, it'll take two gallons (£8.14). They'll spend £1.78 on fuel, meaning they can spend £6.36 on road charges to stay in profit (or an average of 15.9p a mile).

When figures of £1.30 a mile are discussed, it's not difficult to see this as a cash cow.

only if you have them / use them and then they are only snapshots. the car tracking will have to be continual. (although, yes, cars can have multiple drivers / passengers and proving someone was in said car will be tricky)

It will make my current job (at a traffic analysis firm) rather redundant though. Why bother hiring people to count cars when you can obtain real-time information from everybody's car?

Only if you have them/use them!

that's the whole point isn't it? to *stop* people using their cars.

The geek in me is salivating over the potential (non scary big brother) uses of all this real time data on road use, accurate real time route planning is one, efficiency would be massivley increased with computer systems planning peoples routes based on a realtime map of current road useage.

it is dependant on the phone being switched on, though.

well yeah that's true - but what i meant was the means of applying it - why not just have toll booths/camera on the entrances of motorway congestion spots and be done with that? sure seems easier than installing a tracker on every car with a satallite thingie working out where every single car has gone where?

it just seems like unnecessary fanny-dangling.

Because then people will just go around them and take a different route. To work, charges have to apply on the whole network within a given area. Imagine what driving in London would be like if you were charged for driving across Waterloo Bridge and London Bridge but not Southwark Bridge.

I'll try to explain it another way. How well would the congestion charge work if there were toll booths taking money on major roads into the zone, but there was no other method of enforcement or obligation to pay? That's what you seem to be suggesting.

which obviously goes back to the point of whether the revenue generated are being used for public transport..

xpost

Everyone who considers that they *have* to drive - nearly everybody on the road, in other words. I go by train whenever it is practicable, and often when it isn't. In the past nine months I've travelled maybe 500 miles by train, and about 7000 by car, because 90% of the journey miles I want to take are just not practicable using the available public transport.

omg this is bringing me back to childhood holidays in france. my dad is this kind of people.

My point, anyway, is that even planning a tortuous route through narrow country lanes is *still* more convenient than train travel, because for most people's journeys train travel just isn't on the cards.

(xpost - you can get from all the major places in Fife to Bristol with one change of train at most; but I bet you would never have thought to do that, Aldo, just because it would have been awkward for other reasons.)

£230.60 by rail, only one direct train and no others with less than two changes (and it's only to Inverkeithing, so no internal Fife changes). One of the routes offered involves changing IN LONDON.

(yes, I *know* how unreliable Usenet is)

90% (if not more) of travels isn't practical at all with public transport

If you're getting that 90% from my figures; then the percentage is even higher if you go by number of journeys. Most of my train mileage in the past year consists of one return trip to London; most of my car journeys are commuting, 6 miles in each direction.