Looks like tax per mile is coming

Who said that happened in Europe? Not the Europeans that I work with!!

Checkity check :
moneycentral.msn.com/content/Taxes/P148855.asp

We pay more tax than some and less tax than others...

Are we talking about the 1984 Orwellian system as is being proposed now, or just motorway tolls?

i saw that and used it to come up with the figure i have.i would use mainly a roads,always in peak hours and six days a week.public transport was not a possibility,as to get to work would have meant a train a bus and a whole load of walking and about 2 hours travelling time,on a good day.i wouldn't mind so much over the charges but so far no body has offered a viable alternative.buses are pricey,unreliable and usually cramped,trains are expensive ,smelly ,infrequent and don't always integrate with other public transport,trams are ok but rare.
maybe the asians have the best idea- pushbikes! but then gordy and his cronies will work out a way to tax them too.

do you think gordy has been watching johnny english ? and is trying to get rid of us all? ;D

Problem with the whole scheme is enforcement. How are they actually going to know how many miles we are doing. Fitting some sort of transponder to every vehicle in the country surely isnt viable as the cost would be astronomical and i for one am not having any one screw some box of tricks to the floor pan of any of my cars. Bit O/T but all this is comes down to is some nice back hander from a technology company with the capacity to make this work. Hello Mr. B. Lair have all this money. 'Oh thank you and err here, have this contract to make 15 million transponders' IMO of course.

that brings up another point,if they know where we are then they will also know how fast we are going too.instant speeding fines galore,its simple basic satnav technology,nothing special except fot the scale of it.

oops.

I'm sure they'll fix this to suit themselves.

The Tory proposal was a black-box system. They were proposing trails in the South East with it, don't know if they came to anything and they got voted out shortly after.

The problem is they were expecting the black boxes to be included in all new cars and that older cars would be retrofitted at the owner's expense. "only a couple of hundred quid" they said on the radio. So if you have 6 cars thats £1200 or so to find... When your 6 cars may not even be worth much more than £1200 all in...

I'm with Mr Balderdash on this one, trains and efficient busses should be the option in a co-ordingated transport infrastructure. However planning for an integrated infrastructure is a lot harder to introduce and co-ordinate now the train operators are privatised and the busses were deregulated.

I also knwo a guy who did a study for the government a few years ago. The plan was to show how much polution would be reduced and how much congestion would be cut if everyone went by bus not car in a major city. They chose a large city they had already doner a lot of acurate proven modelling on and set to work. The problem was that using real world variables the all-bus solution actually created more polution. They had to build in so many false assumptions to the model to make it work - eg - all busses would be brand new very low emission ones, all busses would be run at full passenger capacity at all times, and all cars were single occupancy and based on older 1992 emissions specs... They had to factor in additional bus routes and all sorts to get people who lived off bus routes IIRC. It was a mess and the report was burried.

Freight needs to be off the roads as much as possible. The decission to move it off the rail and onto the road was a political one. Back in the 70s and 80s British industry was crippled when the railway workers went on strike. By removing what the Thatcher government saw as a union stranglehold on industry British industry was supposed to become more flexible and competitive. As well as cutting the power of the RMT and ASLEF... Two of the top targets Maggie had to "take down a peg or two" after the NUM...

The result of this is that we have continental drivers - especially those from Eastern Europe contract driving British trucks commiting tacho fraud and killing British motorists, forcing British truck drivers to follow the same dangerous and illegal practices and a recent report showed that 60% of truckers admitted having fallen asleep at the wheel in the last year, about 80% admitting having falsified a tachograph record and more than 50% admitting to having driven in excess of 12 hours in one day in the previous month.

Other countries have rules preventing mass haulage by road. IIRC Sweden has a maximum transit distance of goods by road of 15KM.

Trucks aren't the only issue but they are significant.

The other thing is that development in this country has been biased in the favour of property companies for years meaning that development of quality housing (ie where people want to live) is easier, cheaper and more profitable in greenfield areas outside of developed areas meaning outside of regular public transport links, and development of factories (do we still have them?) and business parks are again typically in green field locations. Meanwhile the cities are left by and large to turn to rotten no-go areas nobdy wants to live in and suddenly everybody has to commute 40 miles a day to work or shop... Proper coordinated develoment putting houses, schools, shopping and employment in the same zones would reduce the number of vehicle journeys and shorten them radically. (with the attendant reduction in congestion and pollution).

I thought this was the whole point of joining the departments of Transport, Environment and The Regions in the late 1990s...

And what if you are accellerating out of danger. or is that bad practice!

Stink Stink Stink! 'Fuel crisis' style get together? count me in!

Freedom will soon be a thing of the past!

I work in one of those civil service departments and it isn't entirely as you suggest. It's often the way that the problems you see now were cause by the policies of the previous Government. It takes an awful long time to make radical changes.

Taxation, like death, is ineveitable. We happen to live in a country where successive Governments have used taxation as a means of controlling behaviour. You don't pay more as a result, you just pay it in different ways. Is it fair that someone who works, lives healthily, doesn;t drink or smoke or in any way be a burden on society pays a lot more tax as a chain-smoking pie-eater who drives everywhere and lives on benefits by choice?

What everyone wants is to pay the minimum of tax but have the best services and it just cannot be done unfortunately.

I love cars, always have. But I also love being alive, I want my kids to love being alive too. We are slowly killing the planet we all live on with our cars, demand for consumer goods and kebab consumption. Something has to be done to get us out of our cars. I could get the train to work quite easily. It would be cheaper and is quicker but I like my car. However, if it's going to cost me £X to get here, plus a fiver congestion charge, plus £6 to park, I'm coming by train.

More people will use the train, hence more money goes into the railways, the companies invest more, the services get better.

Think of your kids' kids, and their kids too. When all of East Anglia is flooded and the ice caps melt and Polar bears have migrated to Kensignton High Street to look for food. They'll say "Never mind at least Grandad had fun in his car."