Dear Sir,
I read with interest your recent report entitled The Eddington Transport Study, which recommends, among other things, a national system of road tolls as an attempt to reduce congestion. On behalf of all Britain's motorists, I would like to congratulate you on a most insightful and professional piece of work. For a long time, we, car drivers, have been on the receiving end of all kinds of perverse anti-car policies from both local and national government. So far, we have defended ourselves vehemently against New Labour's War on Motorists. But after your report, we admit defeat.
Your report quite rightly points out that there are two peaks in traffic flow every weekday: one in the morning, and the other in the evening. You go on to say that a road pricing scheme should charge the most for driving in these peak periods. The truth, as has long been suspected, is that we drive in peak periods simply to annoy you. That's right. There's no reason for us to be on the motorways at nine in the morning; we just thought that with a twice-daily simultaneous effort, we could create needless congestion just for the hell of it. Obviously, there's no actual point to these daily journeys. You probably realised that our evening journeys are the same as our morning ones, but in reverse, so we end up back where we started, making the whole exercise useless. We were wondering how long it would take for someone to notice that.
You recommend that the highest charges should be on the busiest routes at the busiest times, ostensibly to cut congestion. It appears, however, that it will also give the highest charges to those areas where the public transport system is at its most deficient. Such enterprising thinking! That fundamental principle of the free-market capitalist society — the principle that a business, be it a commercial organisation or a government, will charge the highest prices it can get away with — has clearly come through in your report. Allow me to elaborate on this ruthless brilliance. I reproduce here part of a diagram from page 80 of your report, to which I've added some relevant labels.
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| Number of hours lost to delays per link kilometre in 2003. Blue roads represent 0 to 6,510 lost hours, light orange 6,510 to 27,670, deep orange 27,670 to 139,400, and red represents higher losses. |
In particular, note Witney. I refer to it specifically because I live there. However, there are no doubt similar towns all around the country to which the following points are equally relevant, if not more so.
Witney has no railway station, and hasn't had one since the 1960s. The nearest one is five miles away in Long Hanborough. The Stagecoach bus service from Witney to Oxford, a mere thirteen miles, takes nearly an hour to get there. And that's off-peak. And costs ten pence shy of a fiver. The A40 route — that's the big orange one linking Witney to Oxford — is one of the most congested roads in Oxfordshire, largely as a result of the above two points.
From the third point, your road pricing plan would presumably charge a significant sum for driving on the A40 during the morning and evening peak periods when we're driving up and down it just for fun. So, the congested roads, which are congested due to a lack of any other choice, are going to attract the highest charges. And due to this lack of choice, you can get away with charging ridiculous prices (this is called "Doing a Stagecoach"). Genius! I would never have thought of that! This sort of thinking, applied nationwide, should bring in huge revenues for the government. With luck, it will also mean that the local bus company can charge even more for their alleged "service", which is even better news for the transport industry! The implementation of the Eddington Report will drive the economy up and up!
I'm assuming you've already thought of what some people might do to avoid the road charges: move closer to their place of work. You have excelled yourself again, I see. What better way to increase the demand for homes in towns and cities! It can't come at a better time. Annual property price inflation in some areas is as little as 10%, and the average house price is a mere six times the average salary. You'll have provided a boost to the housing market, just when it's needed! At the moment, the average age of a first-time buyer is only 33. With your help, we'll be able to keep those plebs in rented accommodation for life!
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| One of the proposed signs advising drivers of a toll. |
You want to encourage the use of public transport. Of course, what could be better? Whatever people say, we all know that London's public transport system could be a lot worse. The tubes can take you between districts faster than any road transport can. As London is the centre of the rail network, despite being at the southern tip of the country, you can get a train directly from one of the terminals to anywhere. Even when the tubes stop at around midnight, night buses run until they start again in the early hours of the morning. And if all else fails, you're never far from a black cab. The car, then, is an outdated relic of a bygone age that's completely redundant in today's world, and we should all be taking public transport to work. After all, everyone who's anyone lives in our great capital, don't they?
Obviously, a man of your intellect would not recommend a road pricing scheme outside the capital unless the non-London public transport network were a viable alternative to using private cars. So the scarcity of railway stations and lack of any decent bus service in West Oxfordshire must be a figment of my imagination; I'm glad you set me straight on that. I must have misread the Charlbury to Witney bus timetable a few months ago; for some reason I thought it said the Saturday service stopped at 5pm, but I know that that can't be right if you and the government are prepared to introduce anti-car road pricing measures across the country. When I went to London on public transport last week, I thought that the bus took fifty minutes to travel thirteen miles to Oxford (and that doesn't include the twenty minutes waiting for it) compared with the Oxford-Paddington train taking an hour to go sixty miles. Clearly that must have been a miscalculation on my part, as areas with deficient public transport obviously don't exist.
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| A map showing Great Britain, which has an efficient and agreeable public transport system. The green area denotes land the DfT refuses to acknowledge exists. |
For many years now, we have been warned and warned again about the dangers of climate change, and how the man-made production of carbon emissions is playing a significant part in it. Particularly in the last decade, with the rising taxes on fuel and the excise duty payable on a car being linked directly to the amount of carbon dioxide emissions produced by it per kilometre, Britain's motorists have been encouraged to buy more fuel-efficient and less polluting vehicles.
It's a refreshing change, then, to see someone who wants to link road tax to distance travelled rather than environmental factors. I know you can't take all the credit; the replacement of fuel duty and vehicle excise duty is more a government proposal than an Eddington one. But let's all laugh at those naïve mugs who went out and bought Smart cars and hybrid cars out of a sense of duty to future generations!
If the government plan to replace the current system of vehicle taxation with road pricing is carried out, drivers of fuel-efficient vehicles will one day be charged the same per mile as that sensible and practical section of the motoring community: the 4x4 drivers. That seems sensible; it's a known fact that any vehicle smaller than an average living room isn't large enough to carry a seven-year-old three miles, so all those mothers on the school run must be welcoming your report. In a brave and appreciated nod to the gas-guzzlers, you'll have wiped out the incentive to buy clean and efficient cars, so we'll all be able to go round showing off our ridiculously overpowered vehicles! Yes, the oil might run out in fifty to a hundred years' time, and the oceans could rise a couple of feet, but you've intelligently realised that we'll all be dead by then, and it'll be a problem for our children to sort out. I don't know why we didn't realise this before.
We, the motorists of Great Britain, wave the white flag. You've discovered the truth that all the cars on the road before nine in the morning are just there for laughs, you'll have provided a much-needed boost to the public transport industry by increasing the level of fares they can charge, you'll give some help to the urban housing market and keep property prices soaring (yet more equity for homeowners!), you've bravely ignored the deficiencies in public transport outside London (that's the spirit!), and you're going to weaken the link between pollution and tax. I'm sure your name, like Beeching's, will be remembered for decades to come.
Yours sincerely,
Clobbage Whompton
British Association for Sensible Technological Advances in Road and Driver
Safety (BASTARDS).
Eddington Report Summary BBC News Online: Homes in the UK Stagecoach Bus Timetable for the 100 service between Carterton and Oxford via Witney (Winner of the Booker Prize for Fantasy Fiction 2006)
Sir Rod discovers the terrible truth about extra-London transport.