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Sorry, but road pricing gets my vote--in theory. Fuel duty is all well and good for making us use smaller cars and drive less overall, but it taxes all driving equally. The rural village dweller with no bus service is taxed at the same rate as the London driver.
A variable-pricing scheme could make it most expensive to drive on the most congested roads at the most congested times. This is something the complainers don't seem to realise--they seem to think it will all be charged at one rate.
I'm also somewhat disgusted at the attitudes expressed--that somehow we have a right to drive, and that it's practically immoral to charge us to use roads, and "we've paid our road tax". Road tax is a bad name. it doesn't pay for roads; it's a charge for the privilege of having your car. As it is, road use is massively subsidised. They're built out of tax funds and then we use them for free. Compare that to trains--by motorists' logic, we shouldn't pay to use the railways (or at least pay for their upkeep) because we've already paid taxes to build them.
Other countries manage with tolls, yet even simple things like the M6 Toll get an outcry here. I'm used to tolls--I take them as a matter of course. If I want to drive on the Thruway, I pay for it. Simple. If I want to drive on the M25 at rush hour, I should pay for the privilege there too.
I can understand distrust of the government, I can understand worrying that this might be a sneaky way to push taxes up, I can understand worries about surveillance. But I have no time for this sense of entitlement. And I say this as a motorist, not some self-righteous eco-campaigner.
Of course, like I said, this is in theory. It all depends on the specifics of the plan. It needs to be a double-pronged effort with fuel duty, as they work in concert; the overall burden of tax on motorists should not be hugely increased (I could accept a small increase, as if it's revenue neutral it might have no effect at all); it should not rely on some super-spy method of tracking (then again, I suppose E-Z Pass tracks you and I've never hesitated to use that...) and it needs to be variable, so that people who really do live in places where they don't have an alternative pay little or nothing.
A variable-pricing scheme could make it most expensive to drive on the most congested roads at the most congested times. This is something the complainers don't seem to realise--they seem to think it will all be charged at one rate.
I'm also somewhat disgusted at the attitudes expressed--that somehow we have a right to drive, and that it's practically immoral to charge us to use roads, and "we've paid our road tax". Road tax is a bad name. it doesn't pay for roads; it's a charge for the privilege of having your car. As it is, road use is massively subsidised. They're built out of tax funds and then we use them for free. Compare that to trains--by motorists' logic, we shouldn't pay to use the railways (or at least pay for their upkeep) because we've already paid taxes to build them.
Other countries manage with tolls, yet even simple things like the M6 Toll get an outcry here. I'm used to tolls--I take them as a matter of course. If I want to drive on the Thruway, I pay for it. Simple. If I want to drive on the M25 at rush hour, I should pay for the privilege there too.
I can understand distrust of the government, I can understand worrying that this might be a sneaky way to push taxes up, I can understand worries about surveillance. But I have no time for this sense of entitlement. And I say this as a motorist, not some self-righteous eco-campaigner.
Of course, like I said, this is in theory. It all depends on the specifics of the plan. It needs to be a double-pronged effort with fuel duty, as they work in concert; the overall burden of tax on motorists should not be hugely increased (I could accept a small increase, as if it's revenue neutral it might have no effect at all); it should not rely on some super-spy method of tracking (then again, I suppose E-Z Pass tracks you and I've never hesitated to use that...) and it needs to be variable, so that people who really do live in places where they don't have an alternative pay little or nothing.
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