Safe Speed Forums

You should be grateful that you get to travel on the roads that the motorists have paid for

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

No I'm not joking. My employer makes no provision for staff to cycle to work. It spends nothing on sustainable and active commuting by staff. Have we done with this now? If you wish to include cycle lanes (lines of paint where the road's width will permit them) dotted around the county and not specific to employees (excuse me: not included in our "package of benefits"!) then we'd need to add all road improvements and new road building and county wide municipal parking provision into the credit column of car commuting staff. If you don't get it now someone else will have to explain.

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Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?

Funny that, because the road I live on was put there when there were only about 60 motor cars in the entire world...

I'm less sure about that. I think LA's need to be wary of spending tax take on organisations opposed or unsympathetic to their policies. I think it can be very embarrassing for them to be found putting custom the way of organisations working to thwart their policies.
And for a contractor you're very intimate with the pay round concerns and practices of council employees.

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Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?

Surely any local authority should be politically neutral in recruitment.


Umm, I talk to them. Is there anything wrong with that?

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Oh I do get it, I got it a while ago, it's just that you originally said "...general tax-payer's money every year...".

Yes, we have to consider the bigger picture, which is what I said to you right from when you first posted. For you not to would be mere cherry picking on your part.

Yes I have.

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Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?

More obtusity. They aren't being subsidised. Despite your assertion above, you haven't shown us the alleged vast sums of subsidy being directed at private motoring. Just because an LA is allegedly spending money ('RAB accounting' issues notwithstanding) doesn't make it public subsidy, they're not doing anything private employers aren't, and I believe they are also taxed for it!

Except they're not just to the benefit of car commuting staff, or private motorists either. Investment in the roads benefits all users, cyclists and public transport too, as well as commerce, both in the sense of logistics and access to businesses, as does parking, though again we have your issue with trying to suggest that parkers should be sharing the retail cost of the land they are parking on, rather than the fact that the owner is extracting a profit from land they already own.

So it sucks that your employer won't buy you a bus pass, my heart bleeds for you, or even give you some trouser clips for your bike. Given that public subsidy has made these options so much cheaper for them than your sugested cost of parking provision, you really do have to wonder why. Are they actually squandering money in favour of the motorist, or is it because they already own the car park, so giving a space costs them nothing whereas a bus pass would.

Perhaps you and smeggy could get a chat room and illuminate each other.
Commuting by car is subsidised with public money by my LA employer. Sustainable and active modes of commuting aren't.
This is enough to disprove E's wild claim.
Vast sums are a different but related issue which have been discussed on other threads. I've linked you to the Green's analysis of the shortfall between motorists contribution and costs. And I've pointed out that a report linked to by beard seems to make no mention of the cost to us all (@£19billion) of road casualties.
Post Stern I'd expect to see motorist's endebtedness to the rest of society increase. At least until fuel is £3 a litre.

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Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?

I wasn't worried about his claim, I’m more concerned about your "...general tax-payer's money every year..." comment.


I say, yet again, imagine a world where people hadn't bothered with personal motorised transport, can you? Where would you get your bike? What would you ride it on? Where would you get your ... food and supplies?

The fact is we humped our way to a high population density. Without the advent of personalised motorised transport there would have been no quick way to sustain such a good quality of life. Factor that into your calculations!

"Bring out your dead!"

edited for silly error - twice

-Bet it looks a bit different today to how it did then! Do you reckon it's been paid for yet?

So, that was it was it Glaikie? Your ace-in-the-hole? We now find that the "subsidy" for motorists you've been bleating on about for this whole thread is basically the fact that your council doesn't charge you for parking?!

To say I'm "underwhelmed" doesn't really cover it!

Commuting by car is not a public subsidy merely because your employer is public sector, how do you not understand that? It is unlikely to cost them anything in 'real-world' terms, if they already own the land, and any cost there is would be part of the recruitment, remuneration and retention budget. Your employer doesn't offer an alternative, and that is something the employees will have to consider when taking or renegotiating jobs. If it makes recruiting and retention enough of a problem then maybe they will start, as many private sector businesses do. We cannot bemoan their contribution as public subsidy.

'The Green' (ahem) analysis seemed to lay all the costs of the roads on the door of private motorists, without consideration of the financial benefits for the nation, let alone public transport use and quality of life benefits. As for the costs of road casualties, did we not also see mentioned in the other thread the factors of accessibility to medical care, and research and distribution of immunisation and medicine?

Haven't you had enough mileage out of deliberately collapsing and then separating two distinct issues in this thread? Top spamming!
There's the issue of the sweetener with which car commuting colleagues, exclusively, are encouraged to keep driving to work, courtesy of the tax-payer. On the basis of outdated, hence probably too low, Dft figures which may include, but are not limited to, opportunity costs, this can be valued at £300 - £500 per annum. I'll continue to be guided by the Dft's assessment of parking costs to the provider, as seconded by pfizer. This simple, low key, small scale example quietly and without fanfare does for E's claim that motorists pay the full costs, more than the full costs, of their motoring, all the time.

The other issue is about overall national subsidy of the motorist. The national costs of motoring versus the revenue raised from motoring. I say whopping great shortfall because of this analysis by the Greens; this failure to include the £19billion cost of RTA casualties in an AA commissioned report which claimed the figures broke even; and a serious underestimation of the costs of managing climate change pre-Stern Review.
Again, I'm going to continue to allow myself to be led by Govt. estimates of the cost of road casualties. Perhaps you could e-mail them and ask if their figure takes into account that private motorists all do voluntary work ferrying vaccines and organs for transplant in their glove compartments. Let me know the answer you get.

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Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?

Is it just a stylistic thing that the first sentence of all your posts is going to include a barb or insult? Its really very puerile, and does nothing to show you as a confident poster with a well-founded point of view.

Once again missed the point beautifully, public transport and emergency services, not to mention much of the logistics that keep the country running, use exactly the same roads as the private vehicles. Despite this glaring fact, you are happy to keep laying the full costs of the roads solely at the door of the private motorists. Likewise, road casualties do not all stem from the use of private vehicles, but its clearly convenient to your assertions to purport that they do!

You still don't seem to understand that just because the money for an employee benefit comes from a local authority, doesn't make it a public subsidy for private motoring. Notwithstanding the fact that, without RAB accounting trying to insinuate that owned land continues to cost vast sums of money, the existing asset costs little or nothing, many private companies provide exactly the same thing. So Pfizer don't include employee parking in their remuneration package, big whoop, I am sure they are competitive in the employment market in other ways.

Lets turn this around to show how ridiculous your point is: I am a serving officer in the Royal Air Force. At my place of work there are literally hundreds of parking spaces across the unit, all free for those who work or visit. The MoD do not own the land that this, or many other, airfields are built on, it having been requisitioned by the Crown from local landowners, and must be returned to them, in original condition, once it is no longer required. Due to the fact that land used for military aviation is automatically considered to be 'contaminated', the return of the land would cost the MoD millions, if not billions, of pounds as the top 6' of soil must be replaced across the entire site. So, if you are saying that the cost of a parking space to the employer must contain a proportion of the income/costs of disposal of the site, then my parking my car at work must be saving the Government hundreds of tho9usands of pounds a year! Aren't I the good little subsidiser.

Finally, you had to go and toss in a comment about the environmental costs of motoring, despite not being able to quantify them, which is the first sign. If you can point us to any consensus that anthropogenic climate change is a reality, then of course we can start to investigate the costs. No such consensus exists in reality, of course, where we have diametrically opposed vested interests saying yes and no, and the more independent researchers saying there really is no evidence.

Actually, my own experiances sugest that in fact Motorists do not divide themselves in that way absolutly. Its more that *ALL* motorists experiance these feelings *some* of the time (25% each maybe)

I enjoy "recreational" motoring (cat 1)

I will use my car for short jorneys, such as from my gaff up to my parents. a distance of less than a mile but if I didnt drive, the journey would take half an hour out of my day (Cat 2)

I enjoy off-road cycling. I would probabally enjoy on-road cycling too but for the fact that I never learned as a child and only started cycling in my mid-thirties so probabally will never have the fearlessness required to cycle with othe traffic I do recognise that for short to medium urban/suburban journeys (and provided that you dont have to take anything with you like tool sets etc) a bike journey is unlikly to take longer than the same journey by car and might actually be quicker (Cat 3)

I absolutly hate driving in rush hour traffic and on busy motorways. I will structure my jorneys (and indeed my life) in order to avoid doing so (I am typing this at home since I dont go to work untill after the traffic has died down! IE arround 10:00hrs) so that makes me a Cat 4!

Simplistic "Box ticking" studies do not actually help the debate or the decision making process!

But politicians and campaigners just love them!

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

But, as before, you are dishonestly including indirect costs but failing to include indirect benefits. Do you not accept that there are great benefits to the economy and society as a whole by having cheap, convenient, fast and flexible transport of goods and passengers as opposed to the kind of transport system that applied two hundred years ago?


Once again, you cannot consider casualties in isolation, you have to compare them against something else. Indeed it is arguable (although I accept pure speculation) that a transport system in which private motoring was banned, but the roads continued to carry the same volume of goods, and obviously a much higher level of people in buses and coaches, the total casualty rate would be at least as high as it is now. No alternative is cost-free either. There were more people killed on the roads before the introduction of the motor car than there are now.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

I am a type 1 at heart. however it is very hard to find enough tarmac to be a type 1.

I would be a type 3, but the cost of public transport is more than motoring on the Southampton to london or inverness. locally it just dosen't get within a a mile of my destination let alone 1/4 mile. train stations are 5-11 miles away. My corner shop is a mile down hill.(the post office shut) but we shop weekly.

I do not want to free my self of my car. In truth I would like to go back to 1980 where the road network was expanding and trains were fixed price ticketing , not pinned to a specifit train time. I would love to be able to dump my car at the station and hire a g-whizz at the other end.

In reality I have to choose between three mainline stations, decide how early a train to catch on the possibility of parking and the premium of going through london before 10:00. I am coming to the conclusion London is cheaper to drive to.

I am a retired cyclist with 24 hour races to my name, 100mile day trips and used to commute 12 miles a day. I couldn't do it now. It dosen't interest me either. I don't want to arrive sweaty, wet or cold.

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Speed limit sign radio interview. TV Snap Unhappy
“It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be - that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution” He added that there should be a prosecution: “wherever it appears that the offence or the circumstances of its commission is or are of such a character that a prosecution in respect thereof is required in the public interest”
This approach has been endorsed by Attorney General ever since 1951. CPS Code