Date published: 2007/03/06
John Ware says on the BBC:
Road pricing proposals have provoked a storm of protest but what is the alternative in easing congestion?
Downing Street's website may have melted under the 1.8 million petitioners opposed to the government's national road pricing scheme for dealing with congestion.
But how would the petitioners stop the UK from being the most extensively traffic congested country in Europe?
Many argue for the traditional "predict and provide" approach to traffic growth: more road building, more parking and removing bus lanes.
But are these credible alternatives to dealing with our insatiable desire to drive more vehicles more frequently to more places? Indeed, there is credible evidence that such measures only exacerbate congestion by inducing extra traffic.
This article was propaganda to advertise a four-part series by Ware called "Are We There Yet?", where of course the standard line is taken that cars are the source of all evil on the planet, and we need to throw billions more pounds at so-called public transport. (It is such a "sustainable" form of transport that it needs a whacking great subsidy in order to be sustained.) The BBC has never had a program about transport which is not blatantly anti-car, and this is just the latest in the line (from some chap who happily admits he doesn't like cars). So, most of the country understands how useful cars are, but the chattering classes in the BBC do not have a clue. The BBC is run by the middle class and so largely features the views of the middle class. They know best, and the 1.8 million people who signed the petition are just peasants to be patronised.
There are plenty of alternatives to road pricing, but they never, or rarely, get air time on the BBC. Option one is indeed to provide new roads (especially between towns, more so than in towns). Unfortunately the so-called environmentalists have managed to introduce the trite claim that building new roads just increases traffic. Well that is because the demand is not being met. Somehow these very same people always manage to argue that train journeys should be subsidised more and more. But of course subsidising train journeys just encourages more and more people who work in London (say) to live further and further from London. Thousands of people commute from Cambridge to London every day and if train fares were subsidised even more you can guarantee that thousands more of Londoners would move to Cambridge. The big difference between car users and train users is that the former pay way more into the tax system than they get out in return, and the latter do not even come close to paying enough for their journeys.
If Cambridge had fewer London commuters then more people who work in Cambridge could actually afford to live in Cambridge, and therefore not have to take their car to work.
Another way to reduce congestion is to stop encouraging parents to live further and further from the schools that their children attend. In Cambridge, whenever schools are not in session the traffic suddenly gets a lot better (of course some of that is down to people being away on holiday).
And the program does not even mention the serious negative consequences of road pricing. For one thing, it is bloody expensive to implement. For another, the government can permanently track your movements. For another, it is socially divisive, since it means that poor people are kicked off the roads for the benefit of the rich (as has happened in London). For another, it just introduces a perverse incentive in the government to make the roads worse and worse so that they can justify a higher and higher road pricing tax (this has already happened in London).
Somehow the best person the BBC could find to make a program on transport could not figure any of this out for himself. With junk programs like this, the BBC does not deserve its license fee.
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