Give Me Road Pricing And Give Me Death...

Of out-of-town shopping centres, anyway. I got ranty with some mates on a mailing list so I thought I'd lazily post it here. It's got... feeling. ;)

It relates to recent stories regarding road pricing proposals here in teh UK and a press release from Friends of the Earth...

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Well well well. One sentence mentioning alternatives to the car. What a surprise. We've spent the last 20 years becoming more mobile so we can contribute to this wonderful open economy. No more jobs for life, etc, live farther from where you work.... And now...

Big stick, no carrots.

Don't get me wrong, we've got to change the way society thinks and works, but we've come too far. Out of town shopping centres, lack of bus and train (and moving them into private, profit making hands) links and services (thanks Dr Beeching) - all these things came as a consequence of the wonderful physical mobility which (pardon my simplifying) essentially tory doctrine about upward social mobility (have a car and house, be successful) created.

It's interesting that alternatives really aren't getting mentioned, apart form the usual glib crap about the railways never having carried so many people (ask a commuter while he's breathing someone else's armpit) and more investment than ever (stat crap)... Labour would hate to give the impression they want to nationalise a resource like trains which might, if actually taken seriously as in other european nations, get people from A to B and creating wealth like good little ants...

Oh - and 2p a mile sounds great. Now, how the hell do I work out how to get to work on B roads which are carrying all the other traffic which doesn't want to pay £1.35 to get past J11 of the M4?...

And I haven't even talked about the technology involved (part of which is in my technical sphere) - any estimates coming out of government about how much this will cost, when it will work etc should be laughed at with an Uzi.

I've had enough typing reasoned responses to stuff like this. Unless we stand up as a nation and tell these overstuffed lawyer career politician crapheads to go get a real job for a while and come back to earth where the rest of us live, we're doomed to be force-fed half-baked politically-warped ideas like this one. Voting is pointless.

There, I said it again ;)