Date published: 2007/08/14
The Cambridge Evening News says:
Cambridge's controversial congestion charge will not be introduced until "huge improvements" in public transport have been put in place.
And every penny raised by the toll will be ploughed back into those improvements, including possibly subsidising bus fares.
The pledge comes from Brian Smith, the county council's deputy chief executive for Environment and Community Services, and the man with overall responsibility for traffic in Cambridgeshire.
Of course no definition of "huge improvements" is made. Nor is any reason given why drivers should subsidise bus fares. Indeed, each bus probably causes as much congestion as ten or twenty cars, because they are constantly stopping and starting and blocking traffic.
In an exclusive interview with the News, Mr Smith said he was keen to dispel "myths" about the scheme, which would involve charging people up to £5 for entering the city between 7.30 and 9.30am, Monday to Friday.
He also said he wanted to reassure people that nothing was cut and dried in terms of its introduction.
He said: "There has been a lot of misunderstanding since we announced our plans several weeks ago, and I want to set the record straight.
It's funny how the bureaucrats, when they introduce an arbitrary and disruptive policy, and everybody jumps up to point this out, then claim there are lots of "myths". Here one of the problems is the lack of details provided by the bureaucrats and politicians pushing this policy, which is astonishing given how disruptive it would be and how much money is involved. And to say that nothing is "cut and dried" is meaningless, these people always claim that and then proceed to do exactly what they wanted no matter what the argument is to the contrary.
"The first thing to say is that Cambridge is facing a problem we simply cannot ignore. At present there are 85,000 car trips into the city during the morning peak, and by 2021, given the growth in housing, we are expecting that figure will have risen by 32,000.
"Even with the improvement of the A14 and the introduction of the Guided Bus, our research tells us many of those car trips will take half as long again as they do now - for example, a 20- minute journey will take 30 minutes. Surely nobody can deny we must do something about that?
"We know where the pressure points are, which key junctions are already gummed up now, and which will be even more so in future years.
"If people feel we should try to do nothing about it, and they are prepared to sit in their cars for even longer than they do now, fine. But I know, and I think most people know, that our successors will not thank us for that. They will ask, and rightly so, why didn't the council see this coming and do something about it?
How touching, the bureaucrats are really only thinking of drivers. What Smith fails to point out is that over the last ten or twenty years, the bureaucrats and politicians have spent all their time and effort reducing the capacity of the city roads (e.g. closing down many roads, introducing wacky bus lanes on Newmarket Road, etc.). So he is a bigger part of the problem than he can ever hope to be part of the solution. Further, the bureaucrats now have every incentive to reduce capacity and make the congestion even worse, since it will justify a higher and higher congestion charge. (And we all know how addicted bureaucrats and politicians are to tax.) And nowhere does Smith actually suggest asking drivers if they would rather "sit in their cars for even longer than they do now", rather than pay this congestion charge. And you can guarantee he never will. (Of course he might ask cyclists, who of course are all falling over themselves to say what a jolly idea this is.) It is up to Smith and the other proponents of the congestion charge to justify their proposals, and in particular to prove to drivers that congestion charging is better than doing nothing.
"I believe a number of myths have sprung up since we first announced our plans for a congestion charge.
"The first is that a decision has already been taken to go ahead with it.
"That is not correct. Yes, a decision has been taken to bring proposals forward to the council's cabinet for discussion, but the essence of those proposals is that the Government would also have to accept the idea. If it doesn't, then we can forget the whole thing. It means that a decision about whether a congestion charge will be introduced in Cambridge is still at least a year away, possibly two years.
"The second myth is about lack of consultation. I can say quite clearly that there will be full consultation. We are not in any way pretending that we have done that yet. All we have had is early consultation with some of the key stakeholders in the area, but full public consultation is scheduled to begin in October and carry on until January next year. That consultation will not amount to asking people 'do you think it's a good thing, or not?' It needs to be more detailed and reflective than that, and we want to hear from people in detail.
"When we came to the News to explain our initial proposals, we realised we only had threequarters of the picture to tell people, but we felt it was important to start the debate. We are still putting information together, including the technical issues of how a scheme would work.
"Bringing in a charge is a big decision - and it's not a case of our minds already being made up."
Smith is rather taking the piss. Unbelievably there seems to be no business model to show that the congestion charge makes any sense. Or at least there is no business model they are willing to show to the public. This all seems to have been put together on the back of a fag packet. And these so-called consultations are always fatuous. The academic middle class who run Cambridge and who generally hate cars, will dominate the proceedings. And in all previous public consultations, practically no detailed information has been given to allow an informed analysis, and it's hard to see this time being any different. The city (county) always reduces everything to "do you think it's a good thing, or not?"
Countering criticism that Cambridge's park and ride sites are apparently situated within the proposed congestion zone - meaning that people using them would have to pay the congestion charge - Mr Smith said: "No one will have to pay to get to the park and ride sites. They will be outside the zone."
This claim is false. Anyone driving to the Park and Ride sites from inside the city will be charged. (But why you might want to do that is another question.)
He also urged local businesses not to have a "knee-jerk reaction" to the scheme.
"Some have suggested it will drive them out of the city, but I would ask them to ask themselves what value they place on their time? Is it good for business to be stuck in queues for three quarters of an hour each day?
Our aspiration for Cambridge, our vision for the future, is a Cambridge like it is now out of term-time - all the time."
Many retailers were "comfortable" with the scheme, he said, because they knew they could switch shopping hours, perhaps from 10am-7pm.
"Retailers are already looking at expanding the evening economy, and it will balance out the day better," Mr Smith said.
This is the one clever wheeze the bureaucrats and politicians have come up with. You reduce business opposition to the congestion charge by only making it occur from 7.30 to 9.30 AM. Not many stores are going to complain about that. On the other hand, once the bureaucrats and politicians have introduced the scheme, you can guarantee they will soon enough expand it to other hours of the day. But by then it will be too late for the stores to do anything about it. (Anybody who knows anything about Cambridge traffic knows that it is just about as bad during the whole day as it is during the rush hour.)
Under the council's proposals, residents would be charged for driving inside the zone or for leaving it.
Mr Smith said he understood why residents were upset about that, but said: "They must realise that if they use their cars, they are part of the congestion. Every junction they drive through means that they slow things up for cars coming in."
He said the question of who should be exempt from paying the charge was "something we have yet to come to a view on".
There are two reasons the bureaucrats and politicians want residents to pay the full charge. The first is that the county council (which is unbelievably in charge of Cambridge transport) is run by the Tories yet the city council has no Tories. Can you imagine any Tory allowing their own voters to pay something yet allow a bunch of Lib Dem and Labour voters not to pay the same? It would be electoral suicide. Also, the London congestion charge is barely economically feasible, and since Cambridge is so much smaller than London, there is no way the scheme would come even close to breaking even (never mind making money) if Cambridge residents were given a discount. But Smith is disingenuous when he says that all cars "are part of the congestion". If you want to take that statement literally then yes it is true. But it's like saying that airline passengers with ten suitcases should pay no more than airline passengers with one, because they all are adding weight to the airplane. It's true but blatantly misleading. When you drive north on Histon Road in the morning, you are not causing nearly as many problems as when you are driving south. (And vice-versa in the evening.)
He said the council had no intention of introducing tolls and then ramping up the charges.
"People have said that imposing a charge for two hours each day is the thin end of the wedge. But we do not see it that way. In 20 years, people might look at it and ask if the timing is right and whether it needs to be changed, but we are confident it is going to work as we have proposed at present."
He admitted the introduction of the bollards in Cambridge, which bar cars from entering some of the city centre's streets, had been unpopular at first, but he insisted that people now realised it had been "the right thing to do".
More disgenuous statements from Smith. The idea that the charge and the hours will not change in 20 years is ludicrous. Perhaps he would be willing to agree to lose his pension if it proves to be otherwise. And the bureaucrats always claimed that everybody loved the bollards, even "at first". Now he admits otherwise, but still makes the totally unsubstantiated claim that everybody thinks now it was "the right thing to do".
"If the congestion charge comes in, there will be some people against that too. Some of the letters to the News have been from unreformed car drivers, and there is not much we can do to persuade them to change their views.
"But we would not try to change their thinking. There are those who always try to travel in a way that does not damage the environment, and they too are not our target.
"It is the people in the middle, the people who are willing to consider changing, that we want to get to most.
The only "people who are willing to consider charging" are either rich (because £5 for them is mere change) or hate cars (e.g. Cambridge cyclists). This is a regressive tax, to be brought in by the academic middle class, and against the interests of the working class. The day Smith and the other bureaucrats have anything nice to say about drivers is the day drivers might believe that perhaps he has their best interest at heart.
And one thing that Smith conveniently doesn't bring up (perhaps he doesn't care) is that there is even a chance this new tax will hurt Cambridge commercially. Why would a company want to locate on the Cambridge Science Park when practically every single employee will end up paying this tax, when they could locate their premises on the other side of the A14 in Milton or Histon or Landbeach, and have only some of their employees (those who live in Cambridge) pay the tax.
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