Road Charging impose by Goverment, £1.43 for motorway use?!?

Hi Guys and Dolls

What are peoples view on the goverments propose road charging system?
Is this a rip off or what?

£1.43 a mile i'm sure is a rip off esp. when i have covered 300 miles on motorways. That would be 1.43 for every mile x 300 = £429!!!! Total utter rip off! If that was the case no one would afford to drive or ride!

They say they will lower tax and petrol prices, but its just another stealth tax, whats ya views?

One would expect there to be a maximum charge for using the motorway. Hopefully us bikes will be exempt

look on the bright side... would be interesting to commute everywhere using country lanes.




til other drivers all have the same idea.

then there would be chaos on country roads lol And make our fun, no longer any fun

Motorways would probably be desserted!!

[Biker Biggles]

What they are doing is flying a kite to wind everyone up. That price is absurd as the economy would grind to a halt overnight,but what they are really at is a softening up policy.It wont seem half as bad when they introduce the system at a fraction of the price.They then have their big brother spy in place,which is what they really want.Oh,and it will be a great revenue raiser too.

I think its a hell of a long way off.

This press release was slipped out quietly a few weeks ago

http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/art...682519,00.html

Toll plan crashes over cost of pilot scheme
By Ben Webster, Transport Correspondent



THE Government’s plans for nationwide road tolls were in tatters after it cancelled a pilot scheme for 440,000 lorries.



Ministers had planned to test the technology from 2008 before extending it to 30 million cars. But the scheme was abruptly abandoned yesterday and tolls are now unlikely to be introduced before 2020.

Road pricing had been proposed as the solution to congestion. Drivers would have paid up to £1.34 a mile on the busiest roads to encourage them to travel outside peak hours or use public transport.

But the Treasury was alarmed by estimates suggesting the lorry pilot scheme would cost up to £2 billion to introduce. Every lorry would have been fitted with a satellite tracking device to monitor its movements and deduct the appropriate payment. A similar scheme is operating in Germany after a series of delays which cost the German Government billions of pounds in lost revenue. Even now, a fifth of the scheme’s revenue is absorbed by running costs.

Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, said that road pricing would still go ahead over the next ten to fifteen years. He proposes to reduce or scrap fuel duty and replace it with a charge based on the distance travelled.

But ministers are privately questioning the benefits of an expensive road toll system when fuel duty is so cheap and simple to collect and provides a direct incentive to drive a more fuel-efficient car.

The RAC Foundation said that road pricing might never happen because it could prove too expensive to implement.

My sis is working on this stuff as part of a transport consultancy thing.

The £1.43 is newspaper rubbish to get people jumping up and down. Even if there were charges that high, they would be on very short stretches that have awful traffic and really need it. Don't believe the BS out there that you'll be paying that much every mile for an entire 100 miles on the motorway... it's to reduce congestion, so you're only likely to rack up a higher than average cost if you specifically use the most congested routes, and then you'd expect to see a decent reduction in the congestion as a payoff for it.

Sadly she says bikes (almost certainly but not 100% definite) won't be completely exempt, but they can expect to be on a reduced rate, seeing as the main drive has switched to congestion and not mileage/pollution and bikes don't cause as many congestion problems.

And it's still 8 years away. At least.

Watch accidents soar as people (cagers) switch to country lanes, then cause crashes through dangerous overtakes when they get frustrated at being stuck behind a tractor/lorry that refuses to pull over to let the queue behind get by...

The ideal situation would be that bikes are exempt and it get more people onto bikes, so cagers become more aware of bikes presence and abilities (filtering, acceleration, etc.) and also the image of bikers as hooligans.prejudice towards them is further eroded.

That said, road charging is a gash idea and the only people who will save money on it are the grannies who use their volvos for the 3 minute jaunt to tescos once a week.

I wonder if they will charge push bikes -- ha ha ha!

Now, where is it in the shed.

Anyone foolish enough to belive that your typical road user will not be worse of under the proposed scheme need only ask themselves this:

Why would the government go to the hassle and controversy of introducing this, if it was simply to ensure those who use the roads more pay more road tax? Do you really think that "fairness", in terms of who pays for road repairs is their primary motivation?