Driving me crazy

The government has announced that Leeds is to be the focus of a pilot program for a new 'Pay-as-you-go' toll road scheme.

While the reasons for introducing toll charges on roads seems to make sense:

"The transport secretary said the charges, aimed at cutting congestion, would replace road tax and petrol duty.

Alistair Darling said change was needed if the UK was to avoid the possibility of 'LA-style gridlock' within 20 years."

In reality, both the execution of such a plan and the very idea is, and will no doubt be fundamentally flawed.

For a start, what on Earth has possessed the architects of this scheme to run the pilot in such a large metropolitan city like Leeds?

It's absurd in the extreme.

The amount of disruption is going to be utterly unfathomable.

Let's bare in mind that Leeds has just worked it's way through the painful and vastly disruptive construction of the M1-M62 link road, the M621.

I worked in Leeds during this time and the chaotic traffic congestion was just mind-blowing.

Also, there were plans to re-introduce a trams along the same lines as the Supertram in Sheffield.

In the end, the plan has been set back due to the incredibly high costs of development and construction, as well as the cost to business through general disruption.

So it's pretty clear that Leeds is not a suitable candidate.

Surely, a small town, or a series of small towns distributed over various geo-regional locations within Britain would make much more sense?

In addition, what happens to the people paying these toll fees?

What of those people living in Leeds paying toll fees?

Are we to assume that they don't get any rebate on their road tax to cover their new Guinea Pig status? Which would clearly be the honourable thing to do.

So in addition to the road tax, they're going to have to pay the various toll fees.

It's difficult to imagine a less sensible scheme. Certainly, a scheme so poorly thought through is unlikely to yield the data the government is looking for, which is the whole point of the trial in the first place.

There are other glaring failures in the thinking of the government.

For example, the idea of toll fees is to firstly introduce a more representative use-based fee structure for road usage that does away with the current flat fee.

Also, by introducing such a scheme, the costs of road usage becomes more transparent. The logic being that people will be more conservative with their use of the car.

While all of this sounds sensible enough, the government is going to get this quite wrong.

Why? Because they're going to get greedy and charge a fucking fortune, that's why.

Here's some simple numbers my dad and me knocked together. Not so much back-of-cigarette-packet, more back-of-a-compliment-slip laying around in the kitchen sideboard.

My dad does about 6,000 miles per year, well bellow the national average of at least double that.

He spends about £800 of petrol and his road tax is £160.

Now, the government have been clear that the upper toll fee for major motorways -- like the M1, M6, M25 and so on -- will be £1,34p while lesser A and B roads will be as little as £0.02p. In the middle of those fees is an average of about £0.50p.

So, my dad currently pays £960 per year for his car usage. With this new scheme, he will be paying around £3,000 per year .. and this is without factoring in petrol costs.

And this for a guy who is well below the national average for road usage.

I don’t think you require too much time or help in working out that the fees levied on other road users, such as myself will be substantially greater.

Even with a promised reduction in petrol duty, I certainly can’t see how this is going to help the situation at all.

Believe it or not, things could get worse.

In an attempt to avoid paying high motorway fees, people will use the lesser A and B roads. Which means that while we may see a marginal drop in road usage, much of what's left on the roads will be jammed into the narrower road infrastructure in and around major towns and cities that simply aren’t going to be able to cope with such high volumes of traffic.

So I suppose a sensible solution is needed. Just don't expect one from the government...