"J. Chisholm" wrote in message
...
Oliver Keating wrote:

Those people who still think we should 'invest' in roads rather than
'subsidies' public transport should be aware that at least in Urban
Areas every pound invested in Public Transport reduces car congestion
more than the same money invested in building new roads. How much
reduction in congestion did the one Billion Pounds spent on the roads
from the M11 into London save?
The increase in ability to move people quickly and safely with Public
Transport, is huge compared with demolishing houses and concreting
green
spaces as required for roads. Create better quicker public transport
and
many will desert their cars leaving much more space for the Jeremy
Clarksons of this world

We have to be careful about investment in public transport too. It is
not on
unshakable environmental grounds. Many people assume that a journey by
public transport reprents a car off the road. But this is hardly ever
true,
only about 10% of people would have used their car if the public
transport
service was unavailable. I suspect, in the long term, that would
actually be
0%. If there were no East Coast Mainline, how many people living in
Peterborough would be driving into London for work? Because they can do
it
on the train in 45 minutes, Peterborough is a commuter town, despite
being
75 miles out of London. This is not environmentally beneficial.

Public transport does need investment, but it should mainly come from
fares,
rather than public money.

Have you been reading:

http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~jadams/PD...ityforRSA.pdf?

I am not convinced by some of the doomsday vision being put foreward by some
of these people (there are many people concerned about hypermobility).

I do think that transport infrastructure should be allowed to grow, but I
think a lot of growth in transport could be done by making things a lot more
efficient eg supermarkets using *local* suppliers etc.

This sort of thing reduces transport demand without any adverse economic
effects.

I agree that we shouldn't do things to encourage more and longer trips,
but isn't that just what we've done for private cars? FREE roads paid
out of general taxation, and cheap petrol obtained by beating up poor
and vulnerable countries?

But road travel geniunely isn't free. Fuel duty and VAT form 85% of the cost
of petrol and diesel, and there is also VED.

Now in terms of money spend on roads v money recieved in taxes from the
motorist, the motorist is definately *net* taxed, not subsidised.

Whether this is still true if you include the external costs of motoring
(accidents, noise, congestion, pollution) is a subject of hot debate - as
you can see motorists could argue for exmaple, that they already "pay" for
congestion as they are the ones who have to sit in it!

Since doing some stats on trips on Great Western Main line into London
from Reading in early 1970's I've felt we've made commuting fares too
cheap. Then an 'annual' season ticket gave a daily rate(assuming 220
tpa) cheaper than a cheap day return. Perhaps what we need to do is
ensure car trips pay true cost?

The problem is that fuel duty is an incredibly crude lever, because the
"true cost" of your journey depends strongly on time of day and location,
only a satellite based congestion charging system could account for this.

Jim Chisholm
(who cycles, drives and travels by train about 3k miles by each mode
each year, and hasn't polluted the sky for years.