Lib Dem's plans to tax motorists 649

Brimstone

If you are disabled and you live in a penthouse in Knightsbridge, Park Lane or Regent Street, are you allowed to park a car outside the building where you live?

If there were any force in your question, the answer would have to be "yes", wouldn't it?

If the answer is "no" (which, of course, it is), that means that the community's use (however defined) of the roadspace outside those premises is deemed to be more valuable than the individual's pre-empting of it. That being the case (and it is), there is no principle left to defend in the "but, but, but... I haven't got anywhere else to leave my car" line. It is not up to one's fellow citizens or the local authority - to provide the individual with a garage space. If one were simply flatly enbreastled to a space no matter what, that would justify parking the car in someone else's driveway.

If a rule were introduced whereby parking a motor vehicle on the road near one's home were an offence, it would clearly be highly worthwhile for LAs to patrol the affected streets (at night would seem best), checking the registered addresses of vehicles parked there, issuing tickets to vehicles registered in the area and building a database of vehicles registered elsewhere, so as to detect (in the medium to long run) fraud and false declarations. Because the system would have to rely on trust in the short run, the penalty for abusing that trust would have to be severe.

What is it, then?

That's interesting.

If the area round a particular address is attractive to car-commuters, that must mean that it is (a) adjacent to employment-intensive areas like town and city centres or industrial-trading estates, or (b) near a transport link (eg, a railway or Tube-Metro station) that allows easy-ier access to such employment-intensive areas. Either way, the only logical argument is that other things being equal, there should be less need for local residents to use cars, since they are either physically near to prime employment sources or they can gain more ready access to the transport to work than most people can. Additionally, such areas are very possibly better served by road-going public transport.

There might always be specific reason to exempt people with certain sorts of disability, but no area is dominated by the disabled.

The road is not the property of those who live near it and it is difficult to justify its effectively being handed over to them when it has so many valuable alternative uses.