This is no ordinary traffic queue: nobody is on their mobile phone trying to rearrange childcare, and nobody is accusing anyone of poor navigation. This is a metaphorical sort of traffic queue.
Amid modest fanfare towards the end of last year, 10 Downing Street launched an online petitions service (http://petitions.pm.gov.uk), which for weeks was dominated by the hunting lobby and opponents of ID cards. But now it’s dominated by a demand to scrap plans for road pricing, submitted by Roberts last month. As I write, his call has attracted 92,175 signatures — enough to form that metaphorical traffic queue, and it’s growing by about 5,000 names a day.
The government wants to introduce a system of road pricing — under which drivers will pay per mile — in order to avoid the UK’s 33m vehicles forming traffic queues. According to the most recent inquiry, by Sir Rod Eddington, former head of British Airways, road pricing could cut congestion by half.
But Roberts and the drivers behind him say the tax is unfair on poorer drivers and too complicated to set up; let’s face it, this government has never been very good at complicated. And Roberts has a killer argument against the introduction of road pricing as a disincentive to drive. “Nobody,” he says, “actually chooses to sit on a congested road.”
I sometimes wonder what ministers see when they try to picture a typical British driver. I suspect it’s a vision of Jeremy Clarkson at the wheel of a Maserati, racing around the Top Gear track, howling with delight. And you’ll know just how much this mirrors the experience of modern driving, right?
Hardly anybody drives for fun any more; we do it because, probably like Roberts, we have to visit clients on industrial units within a 100-mile radius. Or we need to get to Manchester for a meeting and our flipchart is too heavy to carry on a train. Or we’re taking the family to Cornwall for the holidays because not only is it cheaper by car, but trains don’t cater for the travel cots, dog baskets and cuddly toys so essential to family travel.
Despite what ministers and anti-car campaigners appear to think, we do not use our cars merely to annoy them, tempting though it might be. We use our cars to get about in our daily lives because the trains are too costly and overcrowded, the buses are unreliable and somebody has stolen our bicycle.
Congestion is its own tax; we already pay enough in terms of time and stress when we sit in a jam to dissuade us from unnecessary travel. I don’t trust the government any more, and I certainly don’t trust it not to use road pricing as yet another tax.
Last time I looked, that metaphorical queue of petitions was tailing back almost to Lancaster. You may or may not choose to join it but I suspect it’ll be in Scotland by the time you read this. So if you’re planning to drive in the Aberdeen area today, leave a little more time for your journey.
