Road Tolls – That Old Chestnut Gets Aired Again
The courier services team at ANYVAN is a little frustrated; it’s that time of year again when the old chestnut of road tolls is rolled out on lean news days. It’s obvious what this country needs when it comes to transport policy, so why can’t we do it?
We need joined-up and progressive thinking when it comes to transport policy, not the usual ping-pong that politicians and special interest groups indulge in every time they get a chance to voice their own agenda.
If there’s not much happening in the world, then the media can be relied on to fill their pages and airways with talk of road tolls. It’s the one thing that is guaranteed to get Middle England in a sweat over the cornflakes and toast. And it seems to have been talked about for so long, that you can almost see Ben-Hur worrying about the likelihood of road tolls on the way home from racing around the coliseum.
Nothing polarises opinion amongst motorists more than the question of road tolls, but, as we at the ANYVAN courier services team and others in the transport industry know, unless something is done to alleviate traffic congestion, then the country will grind to a halt well before any decisive action is taken. The recession might have ironically given us a few more years grace, but when the economy really starts to grow again, then the nightmare of regular road network gridlock will start to raise its head again.
The nay sayers now have a rallying cause – a recent report which states that the privately built and operated M6 relief road doesn’t actually relieve the original M6, nor does it make a decent return for its investors. This might reflect more on the way the investment and build were handled, rather than proving that road tolls don’t work, but the campaigners now have a banner to follow. This also conveniently ignores the success of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge which has paid its investors back and represents a major Government asset.
The anti road toll lobby has many valid arguments of course. The Government already squeezes the life out of road users like a hungry boa-constrictor, so why should they pay even more? And will the coalition be brave enough to introduce road tolls, on top of the autumn round of austerity measures, and thereby further hurt people’s pockets? The ministers need to scrap road tax, persuade private companies to fund a road-tax charging system and then resist the temptation not to use tolls as a means of easily increasing tax revenues.
Sound arguments, but unless someone comes up with a solution, the courier services team bet that we’ll all have plenty of time sat in traffic jams thinking that something should be done. Remember that one of the definitions of a third-world country is a poor transport infrastructure. If the Government fail to solve this problem quickly, then we’ll threaten the very recovery we’re all pinning our hopes on.