On Fri, 20 May 2005 23:37:40 +0100, "Matt B"
Ah, so you were forced at gunpoint to live where you do? I have lived in a number of places, none of them more than 20 minutes' walk from the shops (for some values of shops, obviously). That encompbuttes everything from a leafy Oxfordshire village to Swaythling, Southampton.
For not considering cycling as a practical way of getting around. We frequently take the kids 3.5 miles each way to school on bikes, we also know people who drive their children less than 250 yards - and then turn round and drive back home.
Yes, it's very easy. Read Cyclcecraft.
Allow? Who's preventing anything? Driving is allowed, but I choose not to do it even where the alternative mode takes a bit longer (nearly half an hour longer if I cycle all the way to the office, it's over 20 miles).
Look at it this way: if the 50% of people who lived at or below the median journey from work all switched to cycling, which is shown to be practicable for such journeys, can you imagine what the roadscape would look like, and what would happen to the casualty figures?
Driving is a selfish choice. As a driver I have no problem admitting that.
First, yes, you do have the problem - it is not a road tax, it is an excise duty which is very clearly based on the type of vehicle and not the type of road.
Second, you are switching horses in midstream. The context here is clearly parking, not VED.
No of course not. You're the only one marching in step, aren't you?
No, I am not sure of myself, I am constantly wracked with doubts - that's why I so often feel compelled to go and find out more.
Parking. You were claming that parking charges were extortion, and that you had in some way "already paid" for that.
LOL! Give me one example where drivers have been "taxed out of existence" due to parking charges!
Driving is getting cheaper every year and has been since the 1970s.
For example, by erecting car parks that fail to cover their opportunity costs. Do KUATB!
False dilemma. Such subsidies are more desirable than subsidising private motoring, is all.
Every year three and a half thousand people stop paying tax and contributing to the economy due to motor traffic crashes. They stop because they are dead. Another 30,000 are seriously injured, with all the attendant costs. But even if road maintenance were the only cost, so what? Do you expect alcohol duty to be spent on building better pubs, or tobacco duty to be spent on improving corner shops?
If you want to beat the system, simply stop running a car! Plenty of people have done it. Many do it through lack of alternative.
They have done this, they are called motorways. The result is that more people drive, and use the little roads to get to the motorways. Were you out of the country during the 1980s?
Because the "obviously necessary" infrastructure is only necessary in order to pander to a selfish and dangerous group. And building the "obviously necessary" infrastructure, in the process disfiguring the countryside, turns out merely to further increase traffic levels. It has been tried, you know.
So you say. You appear to be in a minority of approximately one here.
But it is dependent on vehicle type, not road type. And there are vehicles which use the roads without payment of duty. Even some motor vehicles. So it is clearly not a road tax, but a vehicle duty. Call it a motor vehicle tax if you like..
Not quite. They call it vehicle excise duty, but refer to it (mistakenly) as road tax in a couple of places. The relevant primary legislation is, however, quite unambiguous.
Cyclists and the Treasury, at least. And the Police. And people who know what they are talking about ;-)
Except that it is vehicle related not road related.
Last I heard they were before the 1960s ;-)
And they were. But motor traffic requires that they be built to a mbuttively higher standard, which was done at the public expense, much of it at a time when motoring was a minority mode by journey numbers and by total distance.
Why? Why should the most elitist, selfish, exclusive and dangerous mode of transport be subsidised?
No, what we are doing is finally collecting form them something akin to the costs they impose on society through their selfish choice. It is a choice, you are free to travel by other modes.
You need to check the road casualty stats some time.
Guy --
"To every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong" - HL Mencken
