Science4 mins ago
UK road congestion
What is the answer to the UK's road congestion problems?
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Well the basic problem is that motoring is too cheap. Eek I hear you cry it's an arm and a leg! No not nearly expensive enough to stop the addiction to the car. Governments tinker around the edges and never really have the guts to get radical. Now if petrol was �100 a gallon and public transport was next to nothing most car journeys would be avoided, did you know that around 65% of car journeys are under 2 miles, a staggarring 25% under one mile! madness. The trouble is politicians know it will take longer than one parliament to sort it and they dare not risk upsetting the masses of car junkies. 3 empty seats and a ton of steel to transport one person! We must radically improve public transport and reduce the cost dramatically by subsidy, "but Loosehead I hear you cry surely that's a socialist policy and you hate socialism" yep but I do take on the socialist transport policy the rest is cack of course. You are never going to get people out of their cars while is costs twice as much on the train as it does to drive. Undo what Beeching did to the railways, reopen all those branch lines again, let's get public transport working, stop pi55ing money down the drain on trendy public sector jobs and spend it on public transport. Make motoring prohibitively expensive at the same time, It'll take 10 years and it'll hurt but it's the only way!
In my local area the public transport policies are hindering the traffic not helping. Many bus stop laybys have been filled in so the bus stops in the road (thus jams behind the bus). Traffic lights with a green phase for cyclists only (never any cyclists using it but the lights don't know that and change anyway).
The biggest cause is Schools though, everyone notices the difference scholl holidays make, I would bet that the 65% of journeys under 2 miles that Loosehead mentions would be school runs. This is the place to start getting pupils to school in bulk not individual cars.
The biggest cause is Schools though, everyone notices the difference scholl holidays make, I would bet that the 65% of journeys under 2 miles that Loosehead mentions would be school runs. This is the place to start getting pupils to school in bulk not individual cars.
LOOSEHEAD IN TALKING SENSE SHOCKER!
Cant really add much to what loosehead says but just a couple of things:
Scrap road tax and insurance. Have a government operated insurance scheme - the more you drive, the more you pay.
Charge parents at the school gate for driving their kids to school!
Also close all the tax loopholes which make road freight transport so cheap in this country (i know they are always moaning they are being squeezed but ask yourself "If its such a unprofitable business why are there so many haulage firms about?) and shift most of the freight back onto the railways. Nationalise the railways and forget the idea that they should be a profit making exercise. Motorways arent expected to make a profit so why should the railways?
Cant really add much to what loosehead says but just a couple of things:
Scrap road tax and insurance. Have a government operated insurance scheme - the more you drive, the more you pay.
Charge parents at the school gate for driving their kids to school!
Also close all the tax loopholes which make road freight transport so cheap in this country (i know they are always moaning they are being squeezed but ask yourself "If its such a unprofitable business why are there so many haulage firms about?) and shift most of the freight back onto the railways. Nationalise the railways and forget the idea that they should be a profit making exercise. Motorways arent expected to make a profit so why should the railways?
And if you're fat, you are not allowed anywhere near a car for any journey under 2 miles: a neighbour of mine is circus fat and works more or less opposite me, we left at the same time this morning, me on dobbin (my push bike) her in a seriously right hand leaning overloaded Seicento - how she gets in that thing defies all the known laws of physics - Well, I was in my office supping on a mug of tea before she had arrived. If she got off her seriously fat arse and waddled to work occasionally, she might lose some of her huge bulk!
Yes, that is largely tongue in cheek, but there is a serious side seeing as there appears to be more and more people who are just absolutely massive - or is it that they are just inherently fat lazy slobs.
The obvious, and incredibly stupid, answer would be to charge the motorist even more for motoring. Stupid because people still need to travel and, unless you live and work in London, we don't really have much of a 'public transport' system. Actaully taking a scientific approach: What IS congestion ? Congestion is when the roads are too small for the traffic. The answer is either to make the roads bigger or have less traffic. Making the roads bigger is the easy solution. Motorists already pay such a fortune in taxes (road fund license) that there is plenty of money around for building roads. It would also help if there were less goods vehicles on the roads - encouage hauliers to use railways more, like in Germany. Various other 'policies' could be implemented which would help a lot. Encourage, rather than discourage, motorcycling. Less fuel used, less pollution and a lot more fun ! The only problem with motorcycling is other road users. Also, 'the authorities' could try giving us an effective public transport system - like one which actually did transport the public effectively ! Preferably NOT by running additional busses on the roads but by implementing 'light railway' services. There would be no need for penalising charges to motorists as, is the public transport system was good enough, plenty of people would want to use it anyway.
We shouldn't keep building more roads to accomodate the cars. Most new roads are built on previously undeveloped land. If we keep building on greenfield land one day there will be barely any countryside left.
Measures need to be put in place to discourage car use. Travelling by train should be improved. If more people used trains they could reduce their prices. Some train companies have also recently stopped allowing bicycles on in peak hours - for people who use the train but needed a bicycle at one end, they are now forced to take some other form of transport instead of their bicycle to/from the station and some have probably gone back to using their car for the whole journey as it's less hassle.
A lot of county councils have car sharing schemes on their websites but few people know about them. These should be advertised more in local papers. There must be hundreds of people within one small area who are travelling to and from the same area each day. If everyone shared, cars on the road in peak time would halve, improving journey times and saving people lots of money.
There's also the issue of greenhouse gas emissions from traffic, which is one of the major forms of air pollution. Without significant reductions in car use, the UK is going to find it difficult to reach its emissions targets.
There should also be more school buses to significantly reduce the number of parents driving their children to school. Bring in some nice big yellow ones like they have in the US!
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