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GOOD DAY FOR BAD NEWS

14th March 2002, Page 22
14th March 2002
Page 22
Page 22, 14th March 2002 — GOOD DAY FOR BAD NEWS
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

The publication of the Commission for Integrated Transport's (CflT) ideas for congestion charging over the weekend appeared to have a curious synchronicity with the renewed troubles of the beleaguered Transport Secretary, Steven Byers.

Was this an example of yet more government spin? Or mere coincidence? Whatever it was, CfIT's concepts are not new. A national scheme for congestion charging was first suggested in the seventies when there were just 14 million cars on UK roads.

Now there are nearly twice that number and the scale of the problem has escalated dramatically.

Nobody knows better than our members of the problems out there. Business generally is suffering a huge additional cost penalty caused by our inadequate roads, poor traffic management and incompetent public transport.

But to suggest the retrospective fitting of 26 million or more black boxes to cars, trucks and vans and then the installation of a huge bureaucracy to manage payments for congestion

charging is to live in cloud cuckoo land.

If we are to reduce congestion we have to attack it on numerous fronts. We have to encourage the staggering of working hours. We have to encourage freight onto the railways. We have to improve the road network and remove the bottlenecks. We have to improve traffic management.

But most of all we have to make public transport a viable alternative, and that means clean, modern transport at affordable cost—not the dirty. decrepit and highly expensive system we have now.

Only then will we be able to restore sanity to our road system, reduce costs to industry and be competitive in the world at large.

John Lewis,

Director general British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association, Amersham, Bucks.


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