Stingray's Badger FriendNext time anyone tells me they are worried about lower speed limits on UK roads, I'll remind them that the #GreenParty #GPEW would love them to travel at 125mph... by #train
Swift@StingrayBadger wait, someone's been able to exceed 55mph on a motorway? guess it wasn't the m6.
ROTFL! You're right, it's such a rare event.
@StingrayBadger just snarkin.
I rarely drive except to visit parents and I'm amazed how long it takes - 3 hours last time, mostly motorways, so averaging 40mph.
I'm careful to remind myself that I am not _in_ traffic, I _am_ traffic. But I wonder how people apparently do this all the time. I had to drive my dad to a heart op. Maybe everyone has a similar reason. But I bet there's loads who are just addicted to the cult of individuality, which sees public transport as failure, a view backed up by awful public transport links.
As a motorcyclist, 55 limit sounds very boring. But safer, greener. And if it was 55 reliably, it would likely be faster than a theoretical 70 limit.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)I don’t own a car, but the state of public transport in the UK is awful. Going from Cambridge to Manchester on a train takes longer than driving and the fastest route is via London and involves walking from Kings Cross to Euston (taking the tube is slower than walking, and involves walking almost as far), which is dry awkward when you have luggage or any kind of mobility problems.
We have to send some folks to an event in Glasgow soon. In descending order of cost, speed and convenience, the options are: plane, car, train. There is absolutely no excuse for both car and plane being better than a train.
Busses in Cambridge exist, but they’re a hub and spokes model and so getting from anywhere one side to the other requires a change (unless you’re on one of the routes that has zero non-university-owned housing along it). Getting from the station to anywhere basically requires a taxi. They rebuilt the area around the station with more taxi space, but now there’s congestion around that area because you either cycle (great if you don’t have luggage, there’s a big bike park right there) or you take a taxi. No thought was given to having regular busses that would get people to within a short walk of their destination easily.
I used to live in Swansea and the busses there were pretty good, but they got progressively more and more expensive. Last time I visited, it was cheaper for two of us to take a taxi than a bus.
I’m 100% in favour of discouraging cars, but you don’t do that by making driving less convenient without first improving the alternatives. I would suggest:
- No new motorway building, funding for repairs only.
- Improve the rail freight network such that lorries are not economical for moving shipping containers except at the last mile (which will massively reduce motorway maintenance costs).
- Invest in more railway routes that don’t go via London, starting by going an hour in the wrong direction should never be the fastest way of going somewhere on the train.
- Remove / reduce direct and indirect subsidies on London airports, so flying to the USA from Bristol or Manchester isn’t more expensive than first taking a train a couple of hundred miles in the wrong direction.
- End privatisation for busses and make them free at point of use, nationwide (the Scottish Greens, I believe, have such a policy now).
- Make funds available for medium-sized cities to build underground systems, especially ones that link up outlying villages. This is a big investment but metro systems scale a lot better than busses and can be supplemented with busses easily.
- Provide tax incentives for companies that support remote work, especially for employees in economically deprived areas. Stop people having to move to the most populated areas for jobs.
- Allow more of the civil service to work remotely.
And then put in lower motorway speed limits and allow councils to charge higher council tax for places within the public transport network that have cars registered at the house and encourage them to bring in congestion charges.
The very first thing I’d do is end the stupidity when you hit £100k income in the UK. You immediately lost 100% of childcare benefits and then you start losing the personal allowance. And that’s something that happens to pretend that it’s an increase in marginal tax rate, but when you are making around £125k, you have no personal allowance left. This means that someone making £200k pays a lower tax rate than someone making £110k. Eliminating all of the weirdness that happens around £100k and just bumping the tax rate at £100k would both simplify the system and raise more tax.
I’d also be 100% in favour of a wealth tax. Around £5M is enough that you can live a luxurious life on the income from investments. A wealth tax that started at 3% £30M and went up after that would have zero meaningful negative impact on anyone’s standard of living. The problem is that this really needs to be done at an EU level to avoid people just leaving the country for tax purposes. The USA largely avoids this with a massive exit tax, which could also work: if you give up your UK tax-resident status and have a net worth of over £50M, you pay a one-time 50% tax.
But, to be able to do any of this, you need to address the Murdoch problem. Banning foreign entities from collectively owning more than 20% of any UK media organisation would be a start. I’d also require regulatory disclosure and approval for any individual owning more than a 1-5% share in any media organisation over a certain size. If you need 51 individuals to own shares to have a controlling interest in a media company, it’s harder for one family to do it. You could drop this to 0.5% if that became a problem.