There needs to be a serious policy shift to get freight off the roads and on to rails. If you drive up and down the M6, M1, M4 any day of the week, the 2 outside lanes are chock full of HGV prime movers. If there were some way of increasing the tax for these journeys and then use that revenue to subsidise freight that is transported by rail, I'm sure eventually the load would shift off the roads eventually. The rails would get the investment they need, the roads wouldn't get hammered as they are now, it'd be a win, win.
How about this for a radical thought, levy a charge for every foreign vehicle that enters the UK and use that to pay for the railways.
Those HGVs represent much of the UK's economic activity. They are Britain's lifeblood, creating jobs and wealth, adding to GDP growth. I would like to see more of them, on roads fit to carry them, conveying more goods and adding more jobs and growth. It seems that you, in contrast, would like to see them more heavily taxed so that there are less of them (sic). I beg to disagree.
Interesting point Pete and I agree wholeheartedly with you. I have an import/export business and the goods I deal in are moved around by boat, train and road. If there is ever a problem it is almost always on the road transport front so from my viewpoint it is the road network that needs improving. An amount of freight already goes by rail but the final delivery element is always by road as logically not all drop off points can be next to the railways.
A very naive remark, HGV's are not Britain's lifeblood. They are a vehicle to transport goods, already massively taxed and damaging to the environment, our quality of life and not entirely without risk. if you read my comments you would see that the emphasis isn't on reducing freight but simply incentivising it onto the rail network. This has the capacity to accommodate much more than the roads and therefore would aid our economy instead of what you suggest which would inevitably grind the transport network (roads) to a halt. There is very little capacity for increasing road use but quite the opposite is true of rail. You seem to be advocating the crippling of our transport system and economy. I could not agree with such a shortsighted opinion.
The point I had made was that if £2billion per year were to be invested in transport infrastructure, it would be more sensible and more cost-effective to spend it on roads than a rail line. I said I would like to see a lot more HGVs on roads fit to carry them. Why on earth would you imagine that increasing the capacity of UK roads would make them grind to a halt? For a nation with the land area and population of the UK, because of past long-term underinvestment the existing mileage of roads is far below the equivalent level of other countries, strangling growth. Why on earth would you imagine there is "very little capacity" for increasing it? In the UK the roads carry roughly 20 times more passenger-miles and freight ton-miles than railways; so a 10% increase in road transport would have a far greater economic effect than even doubling rail transport. Feel free to call me "naïve" and "shortsighted" if it cheers you up, but sadly it does nothing to strengthen your arguments.
Pulled by horses. Just think of the CO2 savings, we could subsidise them with a doubling of VAT on sale of goods. How green would that be ?
We laugh. But...imagine if we went local again? Produce produced and distributed within 30 miles of where you live. Food is the easiest, but what about other household items? How many washing machine factories would be needed to cover a small-ish area? Export could be county t county, not country to country? Invest in factories. Invest in homes. Make People work not benefits. Big import taxes on anything you can buy locally. Back to our roots
I'd just build more toll roads and give the road users the option of paying extra to use a faster network or suffer with what we have at present. Once they're built and fully operational then make anything on foreign plates use them to keep the costs down for the rest of us :wink:
Which seems to be what you have in Spain: brilliant empty toll-paying motorways and A roads chock full of lorries crawling about. Madness.
Bonkers. Taking your viewpoint, no one would ever have built any railways, or canals, because roads were where it was at. HGVs are noisy and make all sorts of people's lives in proximity to arterial roads (and Britain is just so good at ribbon development) a misery. It's completely insane. If you wanted to free up roads for private transport and yes! motorbikes, you'd send as much freight by rail as possible. It's a quality of life issue. And if the government was trying to kick-start the economy via capital infrastructure, getting serious about rail would be a good place to start. As for the fabled German autobahns, they are massively disappointing. Not a patch on the French autoroutes, or the Spanish equivalent in my experience. Frequently banded over, reasonably narrow, the exit junctions are stupidly sharp for such high-speed traffic, the signposting is illegible. The Americans failed to get rail transport, more fool them. As the UK sees itself as a little USA, it's not so surprising that it has also allowed the rail network to become peripheral. I find it interesting that the high speed trains of today actually take longer to do Didcot to Paddington than they did in 1978, when you could do it in 35 minutes. Also in 1978, you'd always get a seat. And that seat would have a nice view, instead of the back of the seat in front of you and its plastic tray, like you get in a coach. The rail travel experience, unless you're in First, is naff compared to 35 years ago. Would you have it naffer still? Also in 1978, you could do the above journey for £2 with vouchers from Persil...
Is there a link between the relative states of the economies of Germany, France and Spain and the quality of their transport infrastructure ? France and Spain have spent large amounts of borrowed money on infrastructure and their economies are in the shit. Germany has spent less, has adequate roads and is not quite in the same level of shit as France and Spain.
In 1750, investing in canals was a very good idea and in 1850 investing in railways was just about the most profitable option available. In the 21st century economic circumstances are entirely different. Rail freight remains viable for bulk conveyance of coal, steel, quarry stone, etc but is hopeless for modern manufactured products of any kind. Rail passenger services are highly practical for carrying millions of commuters short distances into cities, but little else. Road transport yields a huge contribution to tax revenues; rail produces no tax revenues and eats huge subsidies. Road transport takes people and goods from front door to front door, while using a rail service requires inconvenient, expensive transitions. Need I go on?
Well, you could go on about noise, pollution, the decaying state of the roads and what it's like to live next to a trunk road, as so many do. You could also study the following table and explain why so many countries seem to carry far less % freight by road, unless for some reason the UK and Ireland are magical places which make this impossible. File:Modal split of inland freight transport, 2000 and 2010 (1) (% of total inland tkm).png - Statistics Explained Germany UK Road 65 85 Rail 22 11 Waterways 13 0.1
You can't help wondering, looking at the table, that if Spain had spent less money on deserted golf courses and irrelevant housing projects in the middle of nowhere, and more money on rail, they might have an infrastructure better suited to a modern economy.
We need not disagree about the decaying state of the roads - one of the topics under discussion is the desirability of improving them. And we do not need to resort to magic, just to political decisions made by successive governments in various countries. Each government in turn has decided how much money to spend on building roads or railways, how much to tax roads, and how much to subsidise railways. Those decisions have had long term consequences. "Impossible"? Of course it's possible to divert freight from one mode to another - we are debating to what extent it is desirable. In the old Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, governments feared private individuals being able to travel where when and how they chose by road, so they strongly favoured policies of centrally controlled, collective travel by rail. Some of the consequences of this are still with those nations. I need hardly say that I am totally opposed to that collectivist approach - how about you?
