Safe Speed Forums

Then why haven't you then, that's if you have a car?

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

If it were true than it would be happening. The fact is that the market has settled itself and the population have made their choice.

I do have, and enjoy having a car.

Doesn't change the basic argument that it would probably be cheaper to ditch it and get he occasional cab when I needed to do something that couldn't be acheived using public transport.

"Probably"?

For me, PT is hideously expensive (as well as slow), even though the motorist pays for the roads. Middlemen mean 'middlemoney'!

Well...

If I'm honest, I must (Oh NO!) agree with weepej to some extent!!!

There are many people who could replace their car use with a mix of public transport and taxis.

I have actually known someone would did exactly that and coped fine. BUT it depends very much on your lifestyle and commitments.

I also suspect that those who could do it (at an economic saving) are very low mileage drivers, so the overall benefit in big picture terms might be lower than you thing weepej.

I thought about this re myself. I have work commitments which require me to drive (and cannot be substituted - use public transport where convenient but it often isn't due to time - and hence cost to my employer - factors). Also, in my case, many my social activities are car-focussed so they would be a problem - I couldn't get to many of them any other way at affordable cost).

However - if you are town based and don't have regular travel needs either medium distance of odd times of day, then it could well be cheaper to go down the bus and cab route.

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I won't slave for beggar's pay,
likewise gold and jewels,
but I would slave to learn the way
to sink your ship of fools

Roads are paid for via general taxation, and council tax.

Motorists are not the only people that "pay for the roads", we all do.

Sure motorists should pay a bit more for using them and that's right and proper in my book.

Motorists damage roads, require special signage, expensive traffic controls, as well as specific policing, and there are roads that are specifically designated for motorists alone to use (motorways).

Motorists need to get off this hobby horse that they own the roads because "they pay for them", its complete bunkum from so many angles, and leads to the very mindset we're discussing IMO.

Yup, and if people who could didn't use their car as often as they did then we probably wouldn't need stuff like congestion charges, road pricing or punative taxes, and we patently do.

Indirectly - EVERYONE uses the roads - they pay through taxation etc for that. Those who use the roads DIRECTLY are ALREADY paying extra above that (and enough I think) - except for certain two-wheeled users

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I won't slave for beggar's pay,
likewise gold and jewels,
but I would slave to learn the way
to sink your ship of fools

So, you want me to pay VED on my pushbike?

VED is primarily about covering damage caused, where do I send my 4p per year?

I see no 'fact' here.
The predominance of private motoring is not a result of 'pure' market driven economics.
The "great car owning economy" has been the ideologically pursued goal of 40 years of political decision making that has favoured and facilitated use of the private car. Which is why motoring is cheaper than it was 30 years ago, while public transport costs have risen by more than 50%.
The status quo is not the spontaneously occurring, normative, natural order of things. It's a rigged outcome of diverting subsidy towards motoring and away from the alternatives.
We needn't despair though. With a more intelligent and far-sighted political will wonderful things are possible. Take a look at this clip:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 7670&hl=en
Warning! You may need a box of tissues to dab at your tears of joy that such enlightened loveliness is possible, and at your tears of rage that UK transport planners have served us so poorly for generations.

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Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?

How do you think everyone is able to afford their council tax to pay for everything?


There are roads that are specifically designated for cyclists alone to use (cyclepaths).


What mindset is that?

If it wasn't for motorists, we simply wouldn't have the road network that we all use and enjoy today (unless you prefer the occasional cobbled street). Further, many reliant on pedal power probably wouldn't even own bikes (how could they be so available?) Also, cyclists paying for their roads would financially ruin them - cycling wouldn't be a viable option.

I'm not saying 'pay your way' (for obvious reasons), nor am I saying people should always use personal motorised transport, I am saying that people who complain about personal motoring really should consider the bigger picture.

I notice it's never pouring with rain or snowing when those movies are taken.

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

yeah, so they can screw the motorist!


... but more expensive than 15 years ago? I repeat: don't be biased with your baseline. Also, do try to take into effect the other financial factors such as those I have already mentioned.

No, especially since a baseline of 1977 is after the mid-70s oil price shock. I expect it would come out as more expensive in real terms if the baseline was taken as 1972. The real cost of motoring has certainly increased substantially in the past five or ten years.

And, as said before, the prime reason for the decline in the claimed "real cost" is the reduction in the price of new cars, which is similar to the reduction in the cost of most manufactured goods. But, in practice, all that means is that the budget motorist ends up with a slightly better sub-£1000 shed. It has no impact on day-to-day running costs.


Yes, but you would be able to make only a tiny proportion of the journeys.

Earlier this year my elderly father took the wise decision to give up driving. He and my mother spend £10 a week to go to the supermarket and back by taxi for the weekly shop. That on its own is considerably less than the cost of running a car. But if they did that every day, or wanted to do journeys of 20 miles rather than 2 miles, it would become hugely more expensive.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

You don't watch very many, then. Try episode 5 from this series:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ibCcp0Y3O ... re=related

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Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?

My VAN doesn't depreciate by much at all.
The taxi cost to town would be £25.00 PER DAY, and that is the TOWN near which I live. I WORK in another town in another COUNTY. The taxi cost would be £37.00 ONE WAY (that means TO work **OR** FROM work, but not both.

The BUS cost would be about £13.00 per day, one way....but since the service involves several changes and several timetables, it is unreliable and timewasting.

The vans admin costs are about £378.00 per annum, the service costs are about £237.00 per annum.

The amount of time wasted waiting for PT to arrive, being dragged about stopping every few miles for nobody would cost me more than the WHOLE costs of the van. Not to mention the cost of PT borne disease upon my body and finances, since everyone seems to have a cold on every bus in the country.

The governments current obsession with towns is because it sees towns as the hope of the future, where everyone will live in a town with economies of scale making-up for the horrors of illegality and social crime.

Now, to go off theme....towns are going to get worse, crime is going to get worse IN towns, with social crime (personal crime as opposed to property crime) getting worse....social crime is the nice way of saying your personal safety is not guaranteed.

But look on the bright side, when you or your family is beaten stupid and raped at least the whole horror will be recorded on a cctv system. Although the data protection act won't allow you to see it, or the police probably, if they ever tear themselves away from the speed cameras.

Did you notice how few cyclists were riding during the wet scenes? The numbers were nothing like that of the dry days.

"70% of cyclists continue to ride in winter" - is this a case of riding the same amount, or just once when the sun was out and they thought 'I've tried it, it was crap. Sod it I'll take the car instead'

I didn't see any snow in the video.

This very morning I awoke at 3am to take a friend to Heathrow. She lives within walking distance of a train the runs straight into London. She has an Oyster card and as she works in London know her way around. However there are no trains. A taxi ride from here to Heathrow is generally £80. She paid me £30 for the petrol/tax. I know, I know it takes more to run the car than petrol/tax. But I because of the petrol/tax situation I've cut the miles right down to a bare minium, so the car will still have to be serviced in april even though it will have barely made the milage, besides it's just been working in traffic for months on short journies and needs a run out.

Later on this morning I did a cross country race in the middle of a field the other side of the county. You don't get trains in places like that and a taxi ride would be in painfull. So the car is really the only option for those journies, as will will be Christmas morning when I go and see the family 190 miles away in rural shropshire.

I do use taxis when I go out for an adult beverage, but it works out at near £1/mile. Which will nearly run 3 of my cars.

Roads are too flexiable to ignore and to have a public transport system to offer that kind of coverage would require biblical levels of investment, then where is Gordon going to get the £90 billion he fleeces out of us lot from?

...thinking about it, I didn't get change from £30 on friday night for a 12 mile-ish round trip.

Interesting that the European city bicycle debate has been raised.

I've been to many European cities that have this large cycling culture, and they've all shared some similar characteristics:

* They are a real pain to get around on foot. The cyclists will run you down rather than slow down, and often act in an unpredictable manner.
* The cost of living closer to the centres of commerce/employment is much, much lower than in the UK.
* Once outside a 5-10 mile radius of the city centre, bike use drops off exponentially, as car use rises.
* Fuel is significantly less expensive than in the UK

It amazes me that people can still imagine the government as a benevolent entity, who simply won't need to tax us so much on motoring if less of us do it, because they care so much about the environment. The government need tax money to do things to convince people to keep them in power, and if less people pay motoring taxes, then they need to raise that money elsewhere. They still need to spend the same on the roads, because of all the extra busses and taxis!

Incidentally, the poor lungs of innocent children, that someone saw a tv bit about, that mentioned some nebulous studies that proved evil cars kill all the children, seem to have only become a concern quite recently. Kids have been growing up in polluted cities since the Industrial Revolution, and most of them turn out healthy. I'd hate to think of the worse state we'd see kids in if we couldn't transport scientists and lab techs to work to develop and produce vaccines to common childhood illnesses, that need to be distributed across the country somehow, and families from all areas, not just the bicycle-friendly inner-cities, need to get their children to the doctor's to benefit from. What do we suppose is worse for a child's developing lungs, cars or polio?