Will Road Tolls work in the UK?

Question

Knowing the government we have it is obvious that road tolls will not be cheap. Most other countries apply small tolls which the motorist does not mind paying - here in the Uk we will be paying many dearly to use the roads.

Will this really work?

Will motorists rebel?

Will this be Blairs Poll Tax and force the Labour governemnt back to where it should be in opposition?

Here is a great idea for all motorists:

Lets all stop using our cars on Monday morning and go stand at a bus stop like the government want us to do. This will:

Bring the country to standstill.

Lose millions in fuel tax revenue for Browns party.

BUT we would all be living in a Green UK.

So Will this stupid idea of road tolls work in the UK?

Answer 1

You are right, it won't work because no one is fooled they are doing it for "the environment" so much as to screw more cash out of us. We have some toll roads already and they are pricey. In the USA a toll road is about 25 cents (about 12p), the M6 near Birmingham, which this government made a toll road is £2.50! We already pay road tax which other countries do not which is like a advanced road toll anyway! Labour are liars and cheats and will use any excuse to fleece the public.
A few years ago they put up our National Insurance to help fund a better NHS and now the NHS is in crisis and facing big cuts everywhere!
The sooner Blair and his bafoons get booted out the better!

Answer 2

No this wont work.
If they do this they risk losing millions in tax revenue which then can't be pumped back into public transport unless they increase tax on the public transport. The money has to come from somewhere!

Public transport in the country is a shambles at the moment and there are more and more cuts in bus routes etc every year.
They need to look at that first before they start 'driving' the public off the roads. They simple cannot force people off the roads and then expect them to start using a poor public transport system in the hope that it will improve.

I simply despise using public transport because, it's dirty, expensive, unreliable, virtually shuts down to minimal service after six, takes a long time (by car I can get to work in 13mins, bus and metro takes me 1 1/2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening), this additional time spent at work would earn the government 3 hours worth of income tax and NI every day.

The joys of a socialist government...I wonder how long it will be before we pay all our wages in tax and the communists...sorry socialists provide everyone in the country with just enough food and clothing to live a basic life in exchange for long hours and all our hard earned cash.

This could well be the labour parties poll tax if they are silly enough to go through with it.

Answer 3

If you mean the British Airways idea of Road Pricing Taxation while improving airports then it will only work to the detriment of honest people. The 20% who do not pay road tax or insurance will not pay road charging.

The rich couldn't care less as their accountants will claim it back as a justifiable expense anyway so poor honest average Joe will end up the suckers again and they will be unable to afford to travel to work having been forced out of the cities by the cost of housing into long commutes the proposal is for the average commuter to pay about £50 to £100 a DAY to use the likes of the M1

This proposal is so ridiculous that when something a bit less expensive is put forward people will accept being ripped off that way because they will think they have defeated this stupid idea.

Answer 4

I couldn't agree with you more!

Why is their answer to everything to tax us? And they seem to have a vendetta against people & their cars.

Like everything they put into place it probably wouldn't be set up properly then the whole system would come crashing down anyway, so no, I don't think it will work.

I'd like to think motorists would rebel but we all seem to moan about things then lay down & take the punishment.

The bus stop thing is a great idea, if that's what they want we could give it to them &show the equal amount of chaos it would cause, I think it would make them think twice but how do you get more than a couple of people to do it?!

I think it's wrong for Labour/Blair to keep targetting the motorist, when we're using our cars in the mornings & evenings we're not doing it for the sheer hell of it, people are going to & coming from work! Most people need their cars to travel to work, no-one wants to pay out for a car AND incredibly expensive public transport, its just ridiculous.

I'd rather be in my car with myself & friends/colleagues than on the smelly bus with people I don't know practically rammed up my jacksy because there's hardly any space & paying £2 to go all of 4 miles.

Keep pushing your ideas, I think you're on the right track!

Answer 5

It wont stop conjestion, I'm sure if people didn't have to, they'd be sitting on a bus rather than rush hour traffic. The government will just make money out of it. WHAT DO YOU THINK I PAY ROAD TAX FOR!?
What's the bets the Public Transport fares sky rocket at the same time, so no matter what we do, the government are robbing us. AGAIN.
Oh, what about EVERYTHING else going up in price as well?
The food etc has to get to shops somehow - mainly motorway from Disribution Centres. Retailers will recover their loses from the consumer. We pay AGAIN.

Answer 6

Road tolls already work well in the UK. When you drive south over the Dartford bridge, you go through the toll booths on the south side before continuing your journey. There are plenty of other examples of toll gates on UK roads - the Tamar Bridge and also (I think) the Severn Bridge going into Wales.

Road tolls are a better way of paying for the roads because the tolls will be paid by the people who use the roads and not by us stay at home drivers who rarely venture beyond the nearest Sainsbury's once a month in our bash waggons.

Answer 7

Well Seeing As Lady T's government screwed up public transport in the 1st place by selling it off, prices for train and bus tickets have rocketed! make public transport comfortable, affordable and more reliable i think more people will use it. Additional road tolls are nothing new each and every government has tried to bring them in. What annoys me the most is the foriegn lorry drivers on our roads - they don't pay tax they cause rta's etc - tax those culprits!

Answer 8

Forget all the moral and logical issues.
Affirmative action is the only way to affect government actions as you suggest.

Road tolls will be introduced becuase the Politicians need more money to fund thier idiotic schemes and cant think of anything they havnt yet screwed the public on.
They must find $1 billion per month for B-liars Iraqi war - it is a digrace as they do not have an electoral mandate to take our country to WAR, who voted for that?

Answer 9

It is yet another ill conceived and badly thought through plan of this governments.
It's totally unworkable and will affect the economy as a whole.
I drive approximately 45K miles a year on business, often on the most congested routes in the busiest times, who will pay my fee? Not me, my company will, we will then pass that onto our clients who in turn will pass that to their customers, that's you.
It's ridiculous, they need to come up with some proper alternatives rather than more taxes to solve issues like this.

I'd also like to know what the government propose doing with the extra £28 billion in revenue, will it go into alternatives or be given to immigrants to help them out?

Answer 10

This is such an enormously complex subject, but perhaps one thing should be taken into the equation right from the start.

It is obvious that "green politics" is about to become a political hot-potato, and anything which appears to be a "green issue" will be trotted out as a vote-catching ploy. However, as a "green issue," modern motor-vehicles only make a small contribution to green-house gases, which suggests that wilst it will be "marketed" as a green-issue, the real reason behind road-charging would be economic.

I am personally very suspicious of a Chancellor who invites the sort of report released this week, which proposes massive taxes on motorised trasnport. Knowing how the Chancellor massages the employment figures by juggling the benefits and public expenditure hand-outs, and then finds every way possible to tax middle-income earners in order to fund it, the whole thing starts to look like a tax-gathering exercise. Add to this the enormous black-hole in the government pension-funds, and the whole thing is just too tempting for any politician to ignore.

I haven't read the new report about road-charging, but of course, the technology for that realy doesn't exist, and might even conflict with issues concering human-rights and the right to privacy. Furthermore, the report must, by implication, make the assumption that the UK economy will grow year-on-year, and road-traffic increase in direct proprtion. Considering the trade threat from the Far East and India, that is a dangerous and over-optimistic assumption to make.

What strikes me is the fact that the recommendations in the road-charging report appear to amount to litle more than a fire-fighting exercise; taking as its basis an upward curve based on the present status-quo.

There are so many 'what-ifs' which the report fails to address, and one of these 'what ifs' would be the basic price of oil. In actual fact, an increase in oil-price or petrol-tax would have a similar effect, and would be very much easier to implement.

However, the most depressing fact about these "forward thinking"
experts, is the fact that they seem utterly incapable of the most basic alternative-thinking.

Stop to consider the UK to-day, which is a fairly crowded place.

For reasons which escape my comprehension, the UK is a place where people commute long-distances on a daily basis. The kids get taken to school, people shop with their cars and business takes place in head-offices and swish hotels. If we have a special problem, it is to be found in the fact that accountants, over the years, have lulled everyone into the idea that public and private-money is best spent on large, centralised control and command centres.

Colleges are large regional affairs, schools cater for upwards of 1,000 pupils, hospitals are "centres of focused excellence" covering an entire region, post-offices are increasingly found only in the larger towns and cities, supermarkets and designer stores now grace the green-field sites out of town, social services and benefits now work from large, purpose built offices, local authority administration is similarly centrailsed, the police, doctors,ambulance service, banks and other vital institutions now occupy larger and more economically efficient buildings.

Then look at the supermarket distribution-chain, where food and provisions move in one direction; only to fan out again in another, using huge fleets of lorries. They are distributed to centralised superstores, and ordinary people then have to drive to them. So in order to get 6 bananas, the bananas must first of all travel by ship, arrive at the docks, get transported to a centralised warehouse, placed back on a lorry, sent to the shops, and then the buyer has to drive to collect them. The bananas may look cheap on the shelves, but if that is all that one wants, the cost of actually getting them would be astronomical.

What chance the humble postage stamp?

The simple fact is, the acountants may utilise "economies of scale" in order to maximise profits and reduce expenditure, but that is only possible because people are daft enough to drive around constantly, doing what the local shops and services once did......bring them to the front door.

What I wonder, is the economic advantage of all this travel, except to those who wish to spend less institutionally, or to those who wish to maximise profits?

If people were able to WALK to get things, or take the children to school, the prices may be higher in the shops, but a great deal of that would be offset by savings in fuel etc.

By introducing blanket road-charging, not only would traffic volumes be reduced, there is the very real possibility that the whole system would collapse.

As for the idea that road-charging will fund public-transport, that seems to be completely the reverse order in which things should be done. If you wish to change the behaviour of people, then they must be given an alternative BEFOREHAND, and this rather suggests that the report, the idea and the Chancellor are really living in cloud-cuckoo land.