Congestion charging plans for the West Midlands are set to be dropped by council leaders later today.
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A meeting of leaders of the region’s seven local authorities in Birmingham is expected to reject any form of road tolls because enforcement would be too difficult.
The government had promised money from the Transport Innovation Fund for regional projects in exchange for a road pricing pilot scheme.
It was suggested that motorists should be charged around £5 for travelling into city centres, using either roadside camera technology or spy-in-the-sky satellites.
But council bosses have come to the conclusion that any scheme in the West Midlands would be too difficult to set up because of the sprawling nature of the region.
9 Comments
I don’t actually believe these actions are taken in the best interests of commuters. Indeed, the simply option would be to ensure that road tax is actually spent on roads. The reason we are in this mess in the first place is through an incompetent government, both local and national. Don’t turn your back on them because they will get it another way.
well said John.
If in doubt, try to screw more money out of the hardworking folk.
now all we need is everyone to dump their bins outside a council office on a weekly basis until something is done about refuse collection..
these people need to remember who voted for them in the first place.
Why should vehicle licence duty be spent on roads? Cars cause noise and air pollution, they remove valuable land that could be used for housing or parks to provide roads and car parks, they cause accidents and kill people, they discourage people from walking and encourage them to gain weight, they reduce opportunities fro interaction as people are stuck alone behind the wheel rather than walking in their neighbourhood, they reduce opportunities for children to learn how to manage risk because their parents are so concerned by road accidents that they force them to play indoors all day, they create blight by driving huge roads through communities…. maybe some of the vehicle licence duty should be to pay for hospitals, play areas, sports facilities, subsidised housing and schools instead?
grow up rebecca
Grow up and live on planet earth rebecca. All of our other taxes pay for the things you mention and if it wasn’t for cars there would be billions of pounds in tax lost each year through lack of fuel duty. Look at the big picture rather than the fluffy bunny, hug a tree approach
Rebecca wants to live on Planet earth. Too many cars make that difficult.
There is no road tax. There is a Road Fund Licence which was never intended to pay solely for roads. It licences a car to be on the road; nothing else.
Reduce the cars and reduce the fuel tax collected and also reduce the need for what that is spent on.
Look at the big picture CG Wolf not your little car cntric snapshot.
You know all this money that goes on shoddy road building, that get dug up again the moment they are built, if you are paying a road tax then you should not be paying road tolls. Period.
we all will love to live on a planet with no problems but look who creates them.
The government.
There have been plenty of “alternative” sources to provide free energy or greener energies, but they won’t patent those ideas.
Stop making excuses for simple corruption.
we don’t need oil but our governments insist we do so they can keep collecting our money at higher rates.
If we worked together we could all live with no health, environmental and social problems like poverty and crime and that’s world over.
Ask yourself why people, good folk like yourself pay billions on weapons instead of solving the issues which could drive us to extinction.
Instead of pointing fingers at each other and name calling see where the real inssues come from.
Taxes in general were created as war relief, to get the worlds economy back on track after the the world wars however apparantly its never enough and each year we pay more and more taxes to fund our governments who do nothing for us to see, except closing schools, poorer health, more ideas to create taxes like road tolls, but you rarely here of military taxes.
I remember a story you may all know called Robin Hood and the awful taxes the poor people payed.
Only difference today is the government makes it sound beneficial to us for why we are taxed, but truth is they are just cleverer ways of taking money from the ordinary folk.
Instead of complaining about cars, demand from our government to find cheaper and greener ways of helping us, instead of believing their crap about WE need to be greener, well I don’t make my car, I don’t make the rules, but I have to pay for THEIR inability to find a solution(and greed). I watched a program once about a guy who run his house on human waste. Not very pleasant sounding I know, however we all need to take care of business and so we have an endless fuel supply. He had plenty of energy to run his house and yet we have yet to see this cheap energy idea materialize in main society. Or how about one most have probably heard of vegetable oil, which the government has tried hard to put away and was even considering taxing vegetable oil higher to prevent people from using it. Why? It’s greener that oil? Oh yeah because they won’t be able to make money from it.
say what you want about what I have wrote but these are the cold hard facts.
People like facts so why don’t they start looking at them instead of pointing fingers at each other instead of the real culprits.
Our Councillors, as usual, are idiots. They’re not even going to try to see what tracking technologies might work? When the government is thrusting money for testing into their hands? If we get a ‘perfect storm’ catastrophic hours-long gridlock of a major Midlands city, what will the councillors say then? Will they pay up for the billions lost to the economy, and restore the long-term loss of credibility to that city’s business reputation?
The cheeky so and so’s trying to make us pay more! If this goverment stopped giving millions away to other countries, let alone to every tom, dick and harry that comes to live here - we’d have immaculate roads, A fantastic health care system, a brilliant education system and everything else that we continually complain about! The government says they will takle it - to get our votes and then proceed to do just as they like! Use your next vote very wisely people… And Rebecca chick - stay on what ever planet floats your boat - but watch out for the bump when you get back to planet earth! hee hee bless…