Campaign group, the Drivers’ Alliance aims to be the voice of Britain’s beleaguered motorists. Tirelessly working to address issues such as road infrastructure, traffic management and motoring taxation. In an interview with ContractHireAndLeasing.com founder, Peter Roberts addresses the key issues of national road pricing and congestion charging.
1. Do you think that congestion charging has any part to play in the management of the traffic on our roads?
Congestion charging has little to do with congestion. Government is keen to see this introduced as a new way of raising tax revenue.
People need to travel for business, pleasure and family commitments. Everyone has the right to travel where they wish, when they want to and by whatever means they choose.
Congestion charging restricts that option and limits your freedoms through your ability to pay. If you cannot afford the charge you cannot travel and this is simply unfair to those on lower incomes.
2. If national road pricing were to be introduced, what do you believe the effect would be on UK motorists, businesses and UK citizens as a whole?
A national road pricing scheme would mean many people could no longer afford to visit their relatives or even get to work. Public transport is not an option for the vast majority and it never will be.
Personal transport with a car is simply the most efficient and flexible form of transport possible. Denying people this choice through a national road pricing and hitting the depths of their pockets would be deeply unfair.
We often hear politicians and supporters of road pricing say it would be ‘revenue neutral’. This is a misleading statement as the collection, technology, administration and enforcement costs surrounding road pricing are huge.
Even if drivers were to pay the same in taxation, the operating charges would add to the overall costs to the driver. The government’s own estimates to run road pricing show a significant cost of between £130yr to £536yr per vehicle depending on the type of scheme and complexity of the technology.
This is in addition to the £50 Billion we collectively pay in taxation today.
Road pricing could add an additional burden of £8.5 Billion each year to motorists. This must come from people’s family budgets and is the equivalent of £137 a year for every person in the UK.
How will this affect UK Business?
It will take about £8.5 Billion out people’s pockets and influence people’s ability to travel. If your employees live a long way from work, they may well look for a salary increase to cover the additional costs or leave altogether. Companies who rely on mobile sales and technical representatives will see far higher costs. People will not travel so far to shop or avoid areas with a congestion charge. This might be the government’s intention, but impairing the free flow of goods and services could well damage business if every mile travelled costs anything up to £1.30?
3. Your website mentions that the Drivers’ Alliance seeks to minimise the environmental impact associated with motoring, how do you believe this can be achieved?
Freedom of movement is essential in a modern society and, as with everything; there is an environmental impact from travelling.
At the Drivers’ Alliance, we believe current efforts from car manufacturers to produce lighter, more efficient vehicles have moved forward at incredible speed. In just ten years, the average CO2 from a car has fallen from 189.8g/km to 164.7g/km, a 14% reduction*.
What does concern us is the way our roads are being smothered with traffic lights, reduced carriageway widths and speed calming measures which have the effect of forcing traffic into a stop/start routine. Congestion has increased not so much because we are driving further with more cars, but because there have been so many traffic light installations, chicanes, speed humps, bus lanes and never ending roadworks. We are strangling the arteries of our transport network resulting in a very inefficient use of vehicles.
The kinetic energy stored in a moving vehicle is wasted every time we are forced to stop at a red light. Every time you use the brakes you waste energy and with it fuel. Every time we sit at a traffic light controlled junction when nothing is coming the other way, we are creating emissions for absolutely no benefit. Yet we still see a rush towards installing lights at every possible opportunity instead of trusting the driver to make the choice when to stop and when to go.
The Drivers’ Alliance seeks to minimise the environmental impact associated with motoring, not stop people from exercising their choice. We champion the use of efficient vehicles and sensible road policies which trust the driver to make decisions without forced compliance to a box of coloured lights flashing from red to red/ amber to green and back again. We also wish to see new roads with new capacity where needed to remove specific pinch-points and thereby relieve congested hotspots.
4. Drivers’ Alliance campaigns against ‘unnecessary traffic lights’, does this not conflict with your commitment to ‘maximising safety’ of our roads?
Not at all. Cities across Europe are now turning towards the ‘shared space’ idea which has been demonstrated in a town called Drachten, Holland.
Drachten, a small Dutch city with around 50,000 residents, has removed almost all of its traffic lights. Major intersections have been converted to roundabouts; smaller intersections just let drivers make decisions on their own. Basically, it’s anarchy; anarchy that has completely eliminated dangerous crashes and road fatalities and created a surge in bicycle and pedestrian traffic.
5. How do you feel current road management conflicts with safety?
We have roughly the same number of deaths on our roads today as in 1992. Before this we enjoyed many years of falling death rates along with rapidly increasing car use.
Between 1980 and 1993 fatality rates for car occupants more than halved from 6.2 per billion passenger km’s to 3. In the past 10 years, this figure has only fallen to 2.7.
Since 1992, we have engineered cars to be far safer with ABS and airbags, better tyres, better brakes, better handling and pedestrian safety considerations in frontal impact areas. Even with all these engineering improvements, we still kill about 3,000 people every year on the roads. Do our current efforts to improve safety work? Not as well as they should.
6. In terms of taxation against motorists, what would you like to see?
Road users pay about £50 Billion in taxes to the treasury every year. In return the government spends just under £6 Billion on our roads. Hardly surprising we have a problem with poorly maintained surfaces and inadequate capacity. We would like to see more of our money being spent on the roads to ease congestion and make journeys more efficient.
We also believe road tax or VED is a tax on ownership. This is deeply unfair and does nothing to manage vehicle use. When you have a car sitting on the drive costing you regardless of use, it is tempting to drive that short journey because you are paying towards it anyway.
I would like to see VED abolished along with a small increase in fuel duty to compensate. As the collection and enforcement costs of VED can be removed, it would result in a more efficient tax collection which charges those who drive furthest in the least efficient cars more whilst rewarding those who travel less.
It would also be impossible to avoid so we would not need quite so many ANPR cameras and enforcement efforts.
7. What advantage does membership to the Drivers’ Alliance offer and who should join?
Motorists are under threat as never before. Government policy is to force ‘modal change’ and ‘smarter choices’ along with ‘behavioural change’.
If you are unaware of these ‘buzzwords’ they are basically about forcing drivers onto public transport or walking and cycling. The bottom line is stop using your car.
There is a huge lobby funded by public transport companies and even the government itself working towards this goal. The EU fund groups pushing road pricing and companies developing road pricing technology fund conferences and research into its benefits.
If you drive a car, your future transport choices are in serious jeopardy. The Drivers’ Alliance aims to be the balance. We believe people must have the freedom to travel when, how and where they choose.
We need road users who share our views to join us. Politicians listen to groups who have sound arguments, especially when they have millions of members. We need to be that voice and counter the argument that car = bad, but public transport = good.
Our members benefit through offers from partner companies and we have a fantastic discount on tyres. We provide access to information relevant for drivers and can help with issues concerning our members. Through the blogs, we actively encourage debate about driving issues. At present, the three areas of most concern are road pricing, speed cameras and traffic lights.
Ultimately, we will represent the collective views of our members to government and policy makers. We will balance the debate.
8. How do you envisage the future for UK motorists over the next ten to twenty years if the UK government’s transport policies go unchallenged?
We will see far higher taxation of cars and personal transport. This is being discussed already and will become policy if it is not defeated.
Satellite vehicle tracking and road pricing will be introduced with automated vehicle speed control based on GPS mapping linked to the speed limit of the road. Speed limits will continue to fall and average speed cameras will be introduced on all motorways. These technologies are already being trialled.
Cars will become more efficient thanks to technological advances, but they will be less affordable. Some car manufacturers will fail and these will be spectacular disasters for their employees and suppliers.
9. With an ever-rising number of car-mobile people in this country, how can our roads be expected to cope with them all?
Clearly an increasing population needs more infrastructures to serve its needs. We would not expect to reduce the number of schools and hospitals when the demand increases, so why do we refrain from the strategic building of roads where they can reduce congestion and maximise vehicle efficiency? Even those pushing for road pricing accept that more roads will be required.
We have an option. Limit the population increase or build the infrastructure to cope. Restricting personal freedom by pricing people off the roads is not good enough in a democracy and has no place in the United Kingdom.
10. Surely building more roads is just an expensive, short-term solution?
If our fathers had taken this approach, we would not have the roads we enjoy today. It is madness to suggest that by building a new road we are causing a problem rather than solving one.
Take the M25, M1, M6, M40 and A1 (M) for example. All these relieve traffic from the surrounding trunk roads. Imagine for one minute they had never been built. Would congestion be less on the surrounding roads or worse? Would the economies of the towns and cities around these roads be as successful?
New roads provide the flexibility for people to work, visit, and live where they choose. The whole economy relies on people having the ability to travel. Goods and services would grind to a halt without roads. People travelling to meetings, delivering samples, going to the doctor, the dentist, the shops, the gym, the relatives, the family all rely on cars and roads.
It is absolute folly to restrict this freedom by increasing costs through road pricing or deliberately causing congestion in the belief it is a method of demand management. So the answer is no; building roads is not an expensive or short term solution.
Road building is relatively low cost, relieves expensive congestion and provides a long term benefit to the economy
* http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2008-10-28b.226742.h
