Pay to drive :(

Do they ever?

How about a system which inescapably means the more fuel your car uses (By being in a traffic jam, for instance), & the more you travel, the more you pay?

Sorry, they've ignored that one this time. We already use it:-/ (Fuel Duty)

All road pricing will do will be to increase wage demands to account for the extra cost of getting to work. (IMHO)

Next proposition will be that you have to prove that you *need* to own a car. Now that would make sense. ( Again, IMHO)

They'd likely not go for it, though. They'd lose too much revenue.

Tciao for Now!

John.

The devil will be in the detail. Hopefully there will be at least a few benefits.

Or am I being to optimistic?

What an excellent idea ! I wonder how much the charge is to drive over No.10 in a Challenger or how much to blue light to AE or the charge to ministers in their gas guzzling luxury perks. Perhaps they wont be able to afford the protection vehicle for politicians in their convoys :-)))

On or around Tue, 22 May 2007 16:43:49 +0100, John Williamson enlightened us thusly:

not to mention the price rises in *everything* 'cos transport rates and production costs will go up.

On or around Tue, 22 May 2007 15:54:15 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@btopenworld.com (Tim Jones) enlightened us thusly:

I fear so. I've yet to see any action by this lot or indeed the lot before that actually reduces the overall tax burden.

little-heralded bit of legislation that's upcoming apparently: all school transport to be done by licensed hire vehicles. Of course, the people doing this haven't thought about the resultant large increase in cost. Speaking for Carmarthenshire, it will have no benefit whatever in terms of safety over the current system.

Shouldn't worry about it too much. Not for a while anyway. It will be largely unworkable. There are 20 million vehicles on the roads and any system that tries to log the movement of this many vehicles will struggle. The amount of data is huge! Governments are very bad at installing and running large computer systems and this one will be the biggest yet.

If they use GPS tracking then these have already been subverted by dodgy truckers who are sent on pre-planned routes. At it's most basic just wrap the antenna in tin foil and it can't get a signal. I'm sure enterprising hackers will find a better way by then anyway. Also as owners of many sat navs will attest, they can loose the signal all by themselves, in built up areas or tree lined routes for example. A GPS based system will need someway of sending the information back to base which will lead to further vulnerabilities.

If they install toll booths then the cost will be astronomical and will only concentrate on the main routes. They will have to be manned so that will add to the costs. What about foriegn registered cars? All you'd have to do is buy and register a car in Ireland and then drive for free!

I really hope it fails as I do between 80 and 100 thousand miles per year and my boss would be skint if it came in!

A

I'd stand a bit of extra tax if it could be structured in such a way as to discourage folks from long commutes to work. Anything that has the potential to ease already crazy rural property prices is good IMHO.

The problem with that of course is that a lot of people who live in the countryside but work in the towns aren't the wealthy middle-class lot that everyone hates despite them shouldering almost all of the tax burden. Rural jobs are hard to come by so those on lower incomes would be priced out of the countryside and into the towns, which is what is already happening to a degree so it would just get worse.

It's an interesting and very complex problem and one which I'd love to discuss in more depth. Sadly after inadvertantly treading on a few toes over the weekend I think I'll "take the fifth" and shut up ;(

Regards

Tim Jones

On or around Wed, 23 May 2007 06:25:37 +0100, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

nowt new. it's been happening for about a hundred years.

It has accelerated in very recent times. We now the sort of situation where a commuter travels 40 odd miles from here to Brum and on the way meets the farmworker who would once have lived in his cosy country cottage travelling in the opposite direction as he commutes out from the tiny in town ex council house that is the best he can afford.

Add in the fact that the commuters cottage is very often an entirely new hous ebuilt on the site of the perfectly good cottage that they demolished just so they could have something bigger and theres something tragically wrong here.

There are no easy answers, but discouraging commuting may just do a little bit. We need some sort of answers and some of us aren't going to like them I guess ;(

The reason there are no easy answers is because there's no simplistic situation. It's not the commuter in the countryside displacing the farm worker, there's a whole shitload more to it than that, as a result of this there's not even a single "it" to complain about, e.g. another side is cheap affordable housing in rural areas eating the countryside and turning merging villages into identikit towns. If there's a single cause it's population increase, which is the root of much of all such issues. My own village is about to sprout several new identikit housing estates to add to the ones that appeared in recent years, and is now joined together with the neighbouring village. I don't give much of a toss but the locals don't want it, but at the same time don't want their kids to have to move to town.

Plus of course I hear of villages in holiday destinations where complaints about houses being bought for inflated sums so that locals can't afford them, well it's the locals who sell them to the rich second-home bods, and then go and buy an expensive house in a village somewhere and get moaned about by the residents of the new village!

We seem to be an island of scapegoats ;-)

I'd have to beg to differ for our area at least, few people take the decision to sell their home just to cash in. Most of the sales are the elderly, dieing or moving closer to the shops, there are plenty of youngsters that would love the property but just get priced out of the chance. It doesn't help when some fancy country living type magazine does surveys that highlight areas of the country with comparitively low incomes as highly desirable palces to live ;(

I still tend to think that a gloriously simple starting point would be to include the true cost of housing in the headline inflation figure.

We seem to have a strange national double standard here. The cost of food, light, heat and water can't be allowed to rise without a major uproar, whilst we seem quite blase about spiralling house prices. Good nutrition and the ability to keep warm are obviously important and no-one should be unable to afford them, but the omision of the actual physical roof over our heads from this calculation of basic values astounds me.

Aren't folks starnge ;)

I would guess that a lot of the 'office' work could be done on computers? That being the case why can it not be done from home, via the internet? This would cut down on a huge number of daily commutes. Even if not doing office type work, I used to work for the electric company. They were looking into a system where I got up at home, logged in, read my daily callouts etc and got on with it. This thieving government at one time announced we were going to be brought into the 21st century via the broadband revolution etc. Well use the bloody thing. Pricing the poorer off the road is not the answer and never will be.

No they don't but what I meant is that the seller has the option of selling at much below the market rate, but of course they'd be a fool to do so because they'd then need a similarly alturistic seller so they could buy another place to live in! Some kind of co-operative effort amongst the less well off might help but getting it started would be very hard. Plus it doesn't solve the problem of increasing population in rural areas as the old folk don't die quickly enough to keep up the the sprog-droppers.

Double-standards are totally rife. We expect perfection from our own country and government and wax lyrical about other countries who "get it right", as long as you don't put them under the same scrutiny that we put our own under. We think cheap rural housing is a must but please build it elsewhere, and no I want lots of loot for my house please, we want a nice quite area to bring up our kids, which of course immediately ruins the nice quite area and so on.

There's quite a lot of grumbling about house prices regarding first-time buyers and the difficultly of finding houses in London for essential workers who aren't wealthy.

It's rare for people to have to sleep rough in this country, the homeless are very small in number and are normally the real basket cases who need locking up. Back in the 1990s I was homeless for about

3 months but at the time there was plenty of empty housing and squatter's rights still existed, not sure about how it is these days. Squatter's rights were bought into existence because of real problems with homelessness and the large amount of derelict or abandoned housing that was perfectly suitable for desperate people to live in, despite high house prices you don't see legions of street waifs begging for food, just a few around christmas time who mysteriously don't need to beg at any other time..

I actually put one of them thar no.10 petitions up saying just that some time ago, call centre workers and other such people, in fact most who do desk jobs, could work from home. Of course you then get the issue of people heating their homes all day rather than collecting into one large office which is heated, so using more heat per person..

The petition closed now, no answer so far, but only got 209 signatories but then I didn't spam it across a million forums like others do.

In message snipped-for-privacy@btopenworld.com (Tim Jones) wrote:

A postitive attitude from the planners is the first step. While it might be nicey-nicey for villages (ours wins Britain In Bloom most years), there has to be industry. Our village has a small industrial estate at one end (proper industrial, not imported teddy bear distributors and so-called "country" shops) which keps the locals in work, in the village, and the townies out - why, who knows, thus keeping the village alive. Belle mixers are slap bang in the middle of the Peak Park providing dozens of jobs, but were it not for the owner being prepared to fight his corner it would have gone a long time ago. Planners are supposed, by Goverment edict, to be encouraging rural enterprise, but they pay far more attention the wingers going on about the value of their property than they do to people who live and work there, the very ones using the village facillities. We also have loads of quarries, and there is constant winging (mostlty from incomers) about lorries and the landscape being ruined, despite the thousands of jobs quarrying supports, and the fact that the whole lanscape that they love so much has been created by quarrying in the first place. We have 4 pubs in the village (one each!) for th time being, a shop and a butcher. They are kept going by the very people the wingers are trying to put out of jobs, as the village is a real, working village, not all pertty-pretty and full (or rather empty) of weekenders or away-all-day types who pride themselves of buying their shopping cheaply in the supermarket on the way home. Then there's the social side of it - I keep seeing loonies on the telly who "get a better job" to "improve their lifestyle", and then leave for work at 5.00am, returning at 9.00pm and somehow think this benefits their kids - yet they never see their kids in the week, and often live in ghost vilages with no life as they are deserted; the shop, pub, school, village hall etc all having gone. Quite how that improves anyones life is beyond me.

Richard

On or around Wed, 23 May 2007 09:40:37 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@btopenworld.com (Tim Jones) enlightened us thusly:

Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that any government scheme will actually achieve anything other than to add to the burden of the least able to pay.

It shouldn't be necessary for a large slice of the workforce to commute *at all*. But they do, still.

I agree about the price thing. However, for the last 100 years or so the agricultural industry has been getting increasingly mechanised and automated to the point where 1 person now runs a farm that used to employ 100, and while most of this happened a long time ago, it's still ongoing even in your and my working lifetime - take hay bales, for example - when you and I first started working with 'em small bales were the norm, most often stacked and dealt with by hand and big round bales were unusual. Now it's unusual to find anyone making small bales, apart from to sell to the horsey types, and mostly handled by machine I expect at that.

Having the option of working from home while empolyed by DEC, I can say that unless I needed to do something (doctors etc) I aways went to work (Portsmouth to Reading) rather than stay at home. I think a better idea would be to provide some form of "shared work place" in the locality where anyone can can telecommute, that way avoiding the isolation, providing social interaction and solving your heaing/lighting problem. Of course, that would need a lot of thought as to how it would be funded (half the cost of commuting, thus putting more wages into pockets?), and companies would have to trust their staff not to interract too much (on many levels!)

Richard