Cost of travelling

Well, despite widespread protests, huge petitions and generally the public screaming a big fat NO!, road pricing schemes. This is an expensive system that uses GPS and a satellite receiver in every car to track when, where and how long you are using your car. Now we already have a great system of pricing journeys per mile that even rewards fuel efficiency, its called fuel tax, but this won't use oodles of contractable technology (Should be worth a directorship in the company after you leave politics eh?) and of course doesn't allow charging depending on what road you use at what time, so if you use some farm track at 3am, it will be really cheap, on the other hand if you use the M8 at rush hour, boy will the cost rack up. This all goes with the strange opinion that those in power have that we all take to the main roads, and indeed swamp all forms of public transport between around 7-9am and 4-6pm because we like causing congestion.

Now we've also had an announcement from Scotrail that fares are going to rise 6%, the maximum they can. Do we get newer or longer trains, or a more frequent service, well no. But they are allowed to raise fares 6% and unsurprisingly that's what they've done. Some rail firms have also expressed an interest in making peak time fares more expensive in order to "Reduce overcrowding on trains" because when I'm off work I often decide to take the train in with the commuters for the company as opposed to waiting till 10 when its quiet.

No, all these systems are revenue raising in the oldest traditions of capitalism. More people want to use trains in the rush hours, and so as a result you can get more money from them. Indeed our trains are already monumentally overpriced and I would start enforcing fare reductions without service or rolling stock cuts, and if that means no one wants the franchise then you can re-nationalise without too much hassle. Of course if you were a shareholder in First you may complain but we need cheap and efficient public transport and at the moment nationalisation or not for profit companies similar to Network Rail seem to be the way forward.

As for cars, well the government has clearly realised that there is more money to be squeezed from the motorist of we can charge them more for using the roads at rush hour rather than just charging for the fuel they burn. Of course a side effect of this will be the migration of rush hour traffic from the expensive motorways and by-passes to back roads and villages, increasing road deaths, noise problems for residents and pollution from stop/start motoring. Yes its folly in the extreme but as Blair said when he received the petition "We know best"