4x4 drivers face huge charge rise in London

Who'll be providing them when we can't get to work?

Powered personal transportation should be a right though. This country has an attitude that 'every one else' can live with catching the bus to work but the reality is a car is far more than a luxury. Yes it can be argued that we can live without cars but boy would we find it a drop in living standards.

jack in da house:
Incidently there are many scientists, really properly good ones with really properly good qualifications, who maintain that man’s impact on the environment is minimal.

Like the scientists who did some research for GM or Ford and found out that farting cows (yes cow flatulence) created more ozone gases than all the cars in the world, sounds real comforting living out in the country with a major dairy farmer just around the bend......

DP says: Save the car, eat a cow.....

As was discussed in a previous thread, it's very hard to get true, unbiased schientific reports and statistics about these things as there's always someone with a vested interest who will select the figures that best suit their cause.

indeed. Volcanoes are apparently produicing more "greenhouse gasses" than cars.

When I worked in Ionospheric Physics (this thread is turning into all the jobs I h ave had by AlistaiK aged 36 and three quarters) we studdied the effects of solar radiation on global temperatures.

There is a direct demonstrable effect of solar activity (measured in sunspots) and average tempteratures on earth. The sun's activity rises and falls as self sustaining reactions build up and then burn themselves out. During the 1970s there were warnings from some scientists about a coming ice age due to global temperatures falling.

The last two decades have seen the highest ever recorded level of solar activity. Hmmm... wonder if that could have something to do with global warming...

The thing is that the globe is also cooling from the core. It was a molten ball of glowing liquid rock when first it was born. Without some global warming the temperatures will eventually fall off so far that all that will be left is a big old ball of frozen rock swinging slowly round a dying sun waiting for the implosion and resultant black hole to put it all out of its mysery for once and for all.

Yes, my point exactly.

Best I carry on working my way up the ladder until I can afford to drive a Jeep Cherokee into central London every day.

Then I'll become a politician. ;D

As said these charges are getting closer and closer, london today, (yes I hated driving through london!) every other City, then every town centre, parking fees are already killing my crappy old town! thats why retail parks and internet shopping work so well. not helping local economy I fear, making curse word towns worse.

I don't trust any of these strategies. As a cyclist, yeah less traffic is a good thing, but we need more reason than more cost to coax paople out of their cars, £'s spent getting on the road - of course its gonna get used! We need manned trams etc everywhere for commute, trip to town etc, maybe then using a car can be a luxury.

Said in jest I realise but eating more cows is not going to help, eating less might, every cow eaten is replaced! LOL

One thing that hit me; UK is gonna be a country separated more by class. rich afford to drive where the hell they like, send their kids to university - for the best jobs, and provide housing for them from the Monopoly board!


And breathe

Where I live now, we have the luxury of being one of the few villages which not only is not losing its local shops but there is active competition for retail units. This is one of the reasons we live here. I walk to the shops to get my bits and bobs, I have a local hardware store run by and old fella in a brown store coat who calls me sir, and has almost everything B&Q has but in a shop the size of a newsagents. And he remembers me (usually) when I go in. Now B&Q has a really tasty lass working up there but I lost track of which days she was in there... But I digress. Tesco wanted to open a Metro store here and the planners threw it out as it would impact the local businesses. Hooray. However we still do our weekly shop at a supermarket superstore. Its the only way to get everything we need really.

But the thing is to live where I do you pay a premium. Not everyone can afford house prices here, and to be honest thats another reason I live here...

A mate of mine is a good example of how this is about more than transport. He earns, let me guess, £14K. Some years ago he decided that buying made more sense than renting and back then houses were cheap up here. He bought a nice 2 bed terrace in a quiet street in a decent working class suburb for abut £28K. He went to work in the city centre on the bus every day. Not a bad trip, and 90p each way.

but then they sold the place he works and relocated. The old city centre offices are now a bar complex. Just what we need, more p!ssed up people... So he still went in on the bus but had to walk a fair distance to get to the new office on its new development. So he lived 4 miles from work and now it was taking an hour by bus and walking each day...

So then they expanded the local retail park. Most of the local shops in the centre closed and many are still boarded up. The older folks on his street died or moved to homes and other people moved in. Mostly noisy people. The streets started to fill up with kids up to no good. Stuff got vandalised lots. Now they have mounted police patrols there all weekend, and Thursday / Friday too mostly. There were a number of stabbings. My mate got a lot of grief off the local yobs because of his "stupid old car" and they stole his tools and broke in his lockup and stuff. Generally gave him abuse for being a "posh knob head" - he's apparently "posh" because he has a job! So he was desperate to move out. But now hopuse prices are so bad the only way he could afford to buy something that wasn;t in a sheet hole was to buy in a small town maybe 10 or 15 miles from the city. Even that cost him best part of £140K.

So now he drives to work.