Bag's Rants

Travel Woes or Business as usual for the Motorist.

Had to travel today and, as usual, got stuck in traffic. While I was there I made a few phone calls and then I got to thinking. It has become an accepted part of traveling that you get stuck in traffic. No matter what time of the day there can be queues for no apparent reason whatsoever. Coming back from Birmingham at 22:00 last month got stuck for twenty minutes but that is unusual. It is usually peak hour. Why it’s called hour is beyond me as it lasts from 07:30 to 10:00 in most places.

Anyway I was thinking about the obscene amount of money that is taken from motorists but spent on other things. Road tax for a car/year is now £170, for a lorry it is about £1.8K. What if, God forbid, the Government only took things and used them for what was intended. I’ve often heard the phrase ‘We can’t build our way out of the traffic problem’ Why not? We built the M6 Toll road and that seems to work OK. It certainly alleviated traffic around the M5/M6 junction. Seems the ‘We’ in the phrase must mean the Government because clearly they won’t make any more money out of it. Where ‘We’, as in the people, can clearly benefit from some selective building and improvements and not just speed bumps and cameras.

All in all, having a good re-look and not making any assumptions to start might be better than the last proposals I heard which was the X pence per mile and one trip cost more than the whole years road tax. I bet the government would like that but they can’t think of how to implement it without getting lynched. Or the best one. Businesses need to stagger their hours. Good plan. Double glazing call centres phoning at 03:00. Banks open 22:00 till 06:00. I’m sure that will work.

posted by Bag @ 10:09 pm