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its alright for people who dont use their car that much - yeah a great benefit but not those of us who have a 50 mile round trip to work every day!
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The problem with a scheme such as this is that the revenue collected from tolls will not be matched by corresponding cuts in tax (either car tax or tax on fuel). Firstly, the technology will be hugely expensive, and will obviously all need to be paid for from taxation. Secondly, no government, of whatever stamp, will be able to resist the temptation to fiddle the books and generally increase the burden on the paying public.
Take the congestion charge. Where is the "rebate" of tax that Londoners are getting as a result? How much did all that infrastructure cost?
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i can understand tolling motorways perhaps to reduce congestion but not EVERY road as planned, as said this is just another fleeceing the motorist case.
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Not only that, but it appears that they also plan to FORCE people onto the roads.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/33083...m
Don't blame the Local authorities if this happens, they wouldn't be able to do this if central government hadn't proposed the whole scheme.
Integrated transport? Don't make me laugh.
Jonathan
From the BBC link above.
Since 1944, local authorities have been obliged under the Education Act to provide free transport for all children living more than three miles from school (two miles if the child is under eight years old.)
Local authorities have provided free transport
But in the Queen's Speech, the government unveiled plans which could force parents to pay for their children's school run.
Twenty local authorities around the country will be invited to take part in a pilot scheme which will allow them to opt out of providing the free transport.
After three years, the government will review the results of the pilot, and some people believe it may lead to all local authorities being ordered to follow suit.
At the moment, free school buses cost local authorities millions of pounds.
Part of the thinking behind the new plans is to get parents who can afford it to pay for their children to make their own way to and from school.
Afford to pay
It could be argued that the free system effectively subsidises wealthy families who could easily afford to make their own arrangements.
The new system will be means tested, so that children from poorer families will still be entitled to free travel.
North East school transport
Cumbria 15,000 pupils, costing £11.2m
Durham 20,000 pupils, costing £10m
Northumberland 11,000 pupils, costing £8.3m
North Yorkshire: 20,000 pupils, costing £16m
Some of the figures make interesting reading.
Every day, the four big authorities in the North East provide free school transport for 66,000 schoolchildren.
The total bill for this comes to £45.5m.
Council tax payer to benefit
On the face of it, these local authorities could save council tax payers millions by removing free school buses. But it is not that simple.
Under the terms of the pilot scheme, councils which withdraw free transport are obliged to make sure a paid service is made available to all children who live further than one mile away from their school.
In a busy urban area, this wouldn't pose much of a problem, there are plenty of commercial bus services which the children could use.
But in a place like rural north Northumberland, there are few if any commercial buses running.
This means the council would have to make provision for such a service, so that even though the child would have to bear the cost of the bus journey, the council would bear the cost of providing the bus.
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Let me give you a likely scenario for this latest piece of nonsense.
Current scenario. Council pays for bus, everyone uses it because its free. Finish.
New scenario. Council pays for bus (as it has to provide a paid for service) and charges kids to get on it. Some kids go free due to means testing so charge falls disproportionately on the paying kids as they are cross-subsidising the non-payers, so charges are high. Parents say s** this and take kids to school by car. So council still paying for bus but bus half full as the would be paying kids are now being transported in cars.
Brilliant.
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This is all so daft it's bound to come to pass.
My children are among the 1000's in Cumbria getting the free ride to school - why? because all the schools are miles away from the village we live in. It's not that we're exercising "choice" in where we send them - they attend the nearest secondary school.
I live in a rural part of the world and we NEED our cars - we don't need any more tax on them.
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The government has, as usual, got hold of completely the wrong end of the stick. You simply cannot price people off the roads, the roads are there for a purpose and it is to enable people and goods to move around. If you stop people and goods from moving around you are basically strangling the economy. So, I'd far rather see money spent on improving existing roads so that they can be used more efficiently, than on idiotic high-technology big brother ideas like this.
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One thing you can guarantee with this scheme:
there will be 1000s if not 100,000s of people who currently don not tax or insure their cars who will not pay these tolls..
Now if the Government would enforce current laws and ensure all these people paid their taxes like the rest of us (insurance has insurance tax..) then there would be less need for more taxes (and fewer accidents too I suspect..
Too simple I think for any politician to think of....
Muppets by name and muppet schemes by nature...
madf
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Am I reading this right in that one of the least populous areas of England - i.e. the one where transport to school presents the most problems - is to be the pilot for this scheme? If so, it's even more mad than the initial reading suggests...
Also, the figures look a tad wrong. £45.5 million over 66k children is £690 per child per year. Strikes me it would be cheaper to give the kids a travel pass - at over £17 a week there can't be many counties where it would cost more than this for a weekly pass.
Also not sure of the population of these counties combined, but even if it's only 2.25 million, that's only 40p a week on council tax - which I'd happily pay if it helps keep the road clearer and gets the kids to school safely.
Strikes me the problem here is that councils aren't allowed to own or run their own buses (so I'm told by GMPTE anyway) so they are at the mercy of private companies. Around here, Stagecoach have taken advantage of that fact to blackmail GMPTE in to raising their subsidies on many services, including school runs.
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Steve,
Whilst I agree Stagecoach are probably screwing them, can you IMAGINE a council run bus service? If it ever ran at all it would have to stop every 5 minutes so that the driver could have his stress levels analysed...
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Whilst I agree Stagecoach are probably screwing them, can you IMAGINE a council run bus service?
No need to, we had several very good examples in the North East before Deregulation. Busways, Hartlepool Borough and Darlington were all very well run and when they ended up being taken over (all I believe by Stagecoach) the quality of service dropped considerably.
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Steve
I should have said ...
travel passes no good because there's no suitable bus/train service. I suppose that's why they run the special service.
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Please do not drop road tax. For one thing in ensures that a car must have insurance and an MOT to obtain tax and it is some small deterrent to people like my former neighbour who would have as many as six cars (or eight if you include his dad's)parked on the road making it difficult for everyone else. Only half of them were taxed at any one time but to the best of my knowledge he was only done twice in several years. There should be an easy method for reporting it anonomously and stop these selfish Richard Heads. Also lack of road tax is a good indication of a car being abadoned.
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Alan, give your local plod station a ring if the untaxed cars are parked on the public road + complain that they're obstructing the rest of you - they should be able to sort him out some tickets. If they aren't actually being used they might be a bit sniffy, or if they're parked on the verge etc. - in this case, ring your local district council and report the untaxed vehicles being an obstruction or whatever - you shouldn't have to struggle to pass/park etc. in these circumstances. I've had the need to complain in the past, and although it may take a couple of calls, that's what you pay your council tax for - One things for sure, if you don't complain, they'll not make work for themselves.
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There is not the faintest chance that ANY government run and computer based scheme for charging for road use will EVER work. Just look at the small scale foul ups over the last 5 years; passports, Tax credits, MOD supply network and inventories, the errors in the Congestion charge, magistrates courts, NHS records. Does anybody really believe that 20 million vehicles can be tracked day and night and their owners (if registered!) be sent a monthly bill for their road use? What if your sat tracking device fails? What if you don't pay but keep driving? How will tourists pay? The list of questions is long and the list of answers in very short. It will never work in the proposed form IMHO.
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it is some small deterrent to people like my former neighbour who would have as many as six cars (or eight if you include his dad's)parked on the road making it difficult for everyone else. Only half of them were taxed at any one time but to the best of my knowledge he was only done twice in several years.
You've just shot your own argument in the foot (to mix a couple of metaphores). It obviously doesn't work as a deterrant when people can park untaxed cars on the road and not get done. Also, the road tax disc could simply be replaced with an "insurance" disc, for which you would need to show insurance documents and MoT certificate at the post office just like you do now, only difference being it doesn't cost you £165 a year to get it. Remember, a valid tax disc does NOT indicate that a car has a current MoT or is currently insured.
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I should have said ... travel passes no good because there's no suitable bus/train service. I suppose that's why they run the special service.
Granted there will be a lot of this - one of my points is that this is more likely to be the case in the areas they have chosen than in many other parts of the country. Even where PT is readily available it is common to run special school services as it is cheaper to do it that way than to pay for travel on normal buses. After all, most companies have spare vehicles for the rush hour traffic or that aren't being used on (mostly weekend) hires.
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