Safe Speed Forums

Just have to wait for the BARB info on the viewing figures then! I'd guess at a million and a half or so, making a 'difference' to just @30,000 people?

In reality I'd suspect that pretty much every viewer had an opinion already and I very much doubt that the programme would have made that much difference to them at all.

I was making a cuppa ready for the programme to start when this came on. I asked the wife to just keep shouting liar at the screen while it was on. She did too bless her.

Nothing on it changed my mind. I would have liked to see the calculations used for the "road pricing" including the source of the figures used. It was good to see the critics as per the MART guy and the parking ticket guys but feel that more time could have been given to them.

As everyone has already stated, it was a massive PR exercise for the government. I wonder if C4 have been severly slapped after the Great Global Warming Swindle?

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Prepare to be Judged

The most prophetic point made was that the real issue is that no one has any trust left in this government.

The belief is that the goverment will bring in the road charges, but will still keep all the other charges of road tax and petrol duty just the same, that they will not provide the promised public transport or any more roads and will just squander the extra money with more of their ill-considered and failed policies.
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Two things from both Paul @ Icandoit.

"Thinking People" aren't as numerous as one would hope, so a fair few "non-thinkers" probably had their minds changed.

I imagine, however, that the people who sat through the whole thing were of the "thinking people" camp and did, as you say, already have an opinion that wasn't likely to be changed by a clearly unbalanced tv documentary.

Fingers crossed i'm right that not too many non-thinkers were watching

hmmm.

Things I liked
- "Transport is the biggest failing of the current government"
- The comparison between parking enforcement in London & Manchester - "maybe the way to cut congestion is to work with motorists, rather than against them"
- The 4 people that participated in the test were very representative.
- Although 3 out of the 4 people said they'd accept road pricing, they made it very clear that there were conditions attached - i.e. that public transport alternatives would have to be made available FIRST and that fuel duty would have to be reduced to compensate. Whether you agree with it or not, this pretty much sums up the stance of the majority. The program made quite clear, though, that people do not trust the Government to keep their end of the bargain.

Things I didn't like
- The constant repetition of "something has got to be done" and the implication that congestion will get worse and worse if something is not done. Not true. Congestion is self regulating - if a road becomes very congested, people who have a choice to avoid that road will do so of their own free will, hence reducing the congestion. The behaviour of people who do not have a choice will not be impacted by road pricing, because they do not have a choice. This is a core argument in the road pricing debate and it was missed altogether.
- The subject of local councils purposely generating congestion (and hence a justification for road pricing) with unnecessary restrictions, bus lanes & traffic light phasing was only skimmed over.
- No Paul Smith interview in the section about speed cameras. Instead we get Captain Gatso. WTF?

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“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken

The conclusion I got, was that they intend to bribe local authorities to roll it out so that they can raise money via road tax, fuel duty and road pricing.

I thought it was supposed to be an alternative.

Also I don't buy the congestion is inevitable story. People will simply find other ways to get around.

I wonder how many additional cars are due to the recent explosion of inward migrants.

Nobody pointed out that the government has done nothing to encourage:
- People to commute at different times of the day
- People to car share
- Lorries back on to trains
- alternative congestion friendly forms of transport (e.g. scooter or motorbike)

One of the things I would have liked them to focus on would be the revenue shrinkage that would occur if they switched from fuel duty to road pricing.

If Ken's Congestion charge is anything to go by the capital and operational expenditure of a road pricing scheme may take anything up to 60% of the revenue raised. The result would be LESS money to spend on transport

Yes, but they let the courier off the public transport test.

The prog was a bit of a mixture really.

The authorities, local and national, who deal with congestion want us to believe their sincerity...yet one local council is still pressing ahead with all those fines for crossing a bus lane to get into a car park....and they wonder why we don't trust them It's examples like this and seemingly deliberate remodeling to create congestion that makes us distrustful.

Regional road pricing very nicely avoids any need for Westminster to reduce the already astronomical levels of tax on cars. I am one of those that in principle sees advantages to road pricing....but only in principal and certainly not in practice. The socialist (small 's') in me hates that idea that those on low incomes will be discriminated against when it comes to using the roads, which road pricing very deliberately does. And then there will be the high cost of fitting the kit, I just love the idea of paying to be able to pay them...not.

But I simple don't buy the notion that once one road gets full we'll find another. In my neck of the woods we're out of choices right now and given projected car number increases we are looking grid lock any time soon. I fear we'll get inequitable road pricing because any other alternative would need to be too draconian for even our politicians to touch.

It was a missed opportunity that SS was cut and Capt Gatso got his 5 mins. I won't weep over a destroyed camera but all the Capt efforts just give camera exponents a stick to beat us with.

As for the guinea pigs in the programme - well the prices weren't dreadful but they will only ever go up. And as I live in South Manchester I simple struggled to believe that the University lecturers 20 min car journey into the city from the 'burbs turned into 1hr 40 min trip on public transport.

Barkstar

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The difference between intelligence and stupidity is that intelligence has limits.

Not true. Car use has gone down in the last year, by a tiny margin but still down. So all these predictions of 30% increases in 15 years may well be well off. Small goods vans usage has increased by something like 15% in the last year or two however. And HGV's make up a good portion of motorway traffic... make freight go by train and canals and suddenly a whole lot of space is available for cars again.

This comment is often made, but realistically you would need a huge amount of investment and expansion of capacity of alternative modes if you wanted to make a meaningful difference to the amount of freight on the roads.

Main line railways are currently bursting at the seams with passenger traffic, which, despite a smaller network, is at its highest level since 1946.

And rail is only really economic for longer journeys when it can take the load directly from source to destination - having to transship loads to and from road vehicles adds a major cost and time penalty.

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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 have always maintained (though not very often on here, just in rants to family n such) that this is the only solution - HUGE investment in Rail & even River/Canal transport in order to make up for the decades of devolution of the railways. It won't happen, not on the scale needed, so congestion will definitely continue to be a problem, regardless of pricing etc etc

And the greenies would oppose large-scale new railway construction just as surely as they oppose new roads - especially since railways have to have much gentler gradients than roads and therefore can't be as sympathetic to the landscape.

Basically we have far too little transport capacity (of whatever type) for our needs and therefore the network suffers from chronic sclerosis.

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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

It's a lie. There is no long term 'gridlock' anywhere in the world.

Why? Because people aren't stupid enough to sit in gridlock. As it takes longer and longer to travel, more and more people find alternatives so lessening congestion, and reducing travel time.

The whole system self regulates with travel delays that people find acceptable. It will always self regulate.

Traffic hasn't grown in London for 30 years. QED.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I watched the programme and can only surmise that Captain Dickhead in his Comic Book Guy mask made better television than Paul Smith with his straight talking words.
I don't subscrib to everything you say Paul, but I'm closer to you than I ever will be to Captain Twatso.

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Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

I couldn't agree more, not enough room, not enough freedome to build - too many greenies. I firmly believe the greenies have gotten up far too much support and the nonsense they talk about and the amount of development they halt will come back to bite in the future