Congestion

Why is it that all of the solutions these fucking morons in the Government and in local authorities can come up with to reduce congestion culminates in making the motorist pay money to them?

Why?

If I have to commute to my workplace and there is no viable alternative, then I have to use my car whether they charge me to drive it or not. It's not going to reduce congestion at all: rather make the local authorities more money to waste on frivolities.

These people need to understand that cost is never going to stop people driving, because there are simply no alternatives that are appealing enough, accessible enough or cheap enough.

Driving your car means you're in your own space with your own tunes on, your own air conditioning, your heated leather seats, and so on. It means you are in your car from your house to your destination and you don't have to keep changing forms of transport.

The only way they will get me or anyone else to walk to a bus stop and stand there freezing hoping it's not late, then sit crammed into rock hard seats with chewing gum on them behind plastic windows decorated with graffiti with the dull drone of a large diesel engine for aural accompaniment is to make cars simply unaffordable or make bus journeys take 50% of the time in a car. (And I didn't even mention that bus journeys these days cost the same and often more than the equivalent in a normal family car).

But they wont, because their evil schemes rely on people driving. If everyone suddenly decided to use public transport, it would be in crisis and furthermore they would have no income from motorists to pay for it. Since buses rely on the same roads as cars they will never be much faster. Bus lanes, yeah, but not many places have them and it's not much of a time saver anyway: buses don't take the direct route you'd take in your car since they have to go around the houses to pick up passengers.

There are also trains of course, but who has a train station that's near them? Trains are only practical for commuting between towns or into cities from suburbs. The shorter the journey by train, the less of a time saving it is compared to the car, since you have to go to your nearest train station and again hope it's not late or cancelled - plus your destination station probably isn't near where you actually want to go so you have to find other means of transport to complete your journey.

Train carriages are also just as bad as buses and in many cases worse when using local commuter trains. Personally I just hate having to sit next to tramps that smell of shit, or gangs of youths that go out of their way to make trouble. I don't have to suffer any of this in my car.

Trains are overwhelmingly expensive too.

If the Government wanted to take some positive steps, it needs to lose the ideology that taxing motorists reduces congestion and emissions: because it doesn't. It's one of those things where if they tell you it enough times you start to believe it despite their being no evidence to suggest that heavy taxes on cars works.

A bit like climate change.