Somone may care to confirm/refute this, but I think I read not so long ago that the full cost of running a car has decreased markedly in the last 15 years or so in real terms, counter to the cost of public transport which has risen dramatically. Is the current "crisis" not simply the bubble bursting and prices catching up to what they would have been if they'd evolved untampered? It seems that petrol is not so much expensive now, but that it was overly cheap for a long period.
Road Hauliers gear up for fuel protests - do you support them?
- Thread starter roryer
- Start date
You could equally point out that rises in electricity and gas bills don't really affect the VERY POOREST (because they are either sleeping on park benches, or can't afford to top up their prepayment meters) so therefore we needn't worry about poor people in general being in fuel poverty.....
Giles..
Fullyplumped
in a personal capacity
I think you may have read a press report about Social Trends 38 which was published recently. .
Among the highlights were -
- The number of people licensed to drive a car in Great Britain increased by more than 14 million between 1975/76 and 2006 to just under 34 million.
- The proportion of households with regular use of two cars in Great Britain increased fourfold between 1971 and 2006, to 26 per cent.
- Between 1987 and 2007, motoring costs in the UK measured by the Retail Prices Index (RPI) rose by 85 per cent, while the cost of fares and other travel costs rose by 130 per cent.
- In November 2007 the UK was the fourth most expensive country in the EU-25 in which to buy premium unleaded petrol, at 100.5 pence per litre.
Cars have probably never been more affordable to more people in the UK than now.
Sunray
Its sunny somewhere.
That final line is one of the reason there is duty in the 1st place. In the US fuel duty is pretty low, but they have the space for all the cars, what ever you think about that, they do have lots of space.
In this country, if we had cheap fuel, imagine how congested the roads would be. It takes me 20 minutes to go from Hackney to the M4 at 4am in the morning. At 10am its more like an hour or even more on a bad day.
-
The cost of fuel is directly related to global growth. OPEC have repeatedly said that their is plenty of oil, just a combination of a weak dollar and some 'geopolitical' events and speculation. If it gets too high, people will stop using it, can't afford it.
Becomes cheaper. Remember the price isn't set by the suppliers.
In this country, if we had cheap fuel, imagine how congested the roads would be. It takes me 20 minutes to go from Hackney to the M4 at 4am in the morning. At 10am its more like an hour or even more on a bad day.
-
The cost of fuel is directly related to global growth. OPEC have repeatedly said that their is plenty of oil, just a combination of a weak dollar and some 'geopolitical' events and speculation. If it gets too high, people will stop using it, can't afford it.
Becomes cheaper. Remember the price isn't set by the suppliers.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
You could point that out, but it would indicate that you hadn't really understand the point that i was making.
Yes I support the hauliers.
However most of them use diesel so I cant vote yes
Haulage should be susbsidised as it has been forced onto the roads. We would not get our food and other goods otherwise.
I'd love to see the kind of scenes we were seeing back in 1998(?) it was all good fun
However most of them use diesel so I cant vote yes
Haulage should be susbsidised as it has been forced onto the roads. We would not get our food and other goods otherwise.
I'd love to see the kind of scenes we were seeing back in 1998(?) it was all good fun
max_freakout
Nothing matters
i predict that the price of oil will be MUCH higher than $200, MUCH sooner than the end of the year
max_freakout
Nothing matters
what and stop driving and stay at home all the time?
Boycey
juvenile rave slut
there are VAST (like the use of capitals
) numbers of people too poor to own a car but living in buildings. in fact the very poorest are getting ripped off on meters. nil point.I'm not sure I quite understand what you're getting at, here?
There are alternative means of transportation, and there are better ways of doing distribution that result in a lot less food miles and pollution. One of the reasons the existing system is as shoddy as it is is because road haulage enjoys quite unfair advantages over alternatives.
Road hauliers don't have to justify (or fund in advance) the building of roads the way rail has to justify and fund its infrastructure, for example. Nor are roads subject to anywhere near the same restrictions in terms of planning and approval that rail links are.
And there's some interesting arguments around the idea that what road hauliers pay in road fund licence doesn't come anywhere near covering "their share" of roads maintenance, building, and so on.
Hauliers really don't get the raw deal they'd have us believe.
I am getting at the fact that there are no other alternatives. Are you suggesting rail? and how exactly are they going to distribute to supermarkets village shops and various other retail outlets?
I accept the stick principle but where are the carrots, where is all this money going, where are the alternatives?
Part of the reason there are no other alternatives is because, from the inception of road transport (essentially, after WWII), railways have been hobbled and handicapped by all kinds of regulations. Not to mention a smattering of corruption - the Transport Minister who presided over the Beeching cuts was one Ernest Marples. Admittedly, he did resign his holdings in the Marples Ridgeway construction company (which built the M1
), but as far as I know he handed them over to his wife...The Beeching cuts destroyed the capillaries of the railway network - lines that went, if not to villages, at least to small towns. Which meant that, for most of the country, the distance to the nearest railhead was now too great to make it worthwhile putting the stuff on rail again. That equation will change as oil continues to get more expensive, but if we aren't reinstating some kind of alternative NOW, then we won't have any meaningful options when we really need them (which is, in a way, NOW).
I'm not advocating some absolutist "trains good, roads bad" policy; I'm not that naive. But we don't need convoys of 44 tonne lorries all going the same way when the same goods could have been put onto rail, delivered to railheads much nearer their destination, and then transported the short remaining distance on smaller vehicles.
Let's suppose a nightmare scenario. Oil's $500 a barrel. Too expensive, in reality, to spend on carting spuds to Shrewsbury, or cauliflowers to Chester. We have to get stuff around the country some other way. At the moment, there isn't really another way: we're utterly dependent on oil.
But suppose we started - today - sorting out a transport network that wasn't dependent on oil. Realistically, that probably means nuclear: there will never be enough biofuels to meet even current demand. Obviously nuclear-powered 44-tonne trucks aren't an option (remembering that even uranium is a comparatively scarce resource), so we need an alternative energy source.
Most of them pretty comprehensively rule out road transport - battery technology still isn't there yet, and even hydrogen power's a way off...perhaps it'll work by then. But we have proven, working technologies now with railways. Almost all of France's railway network is powered by electricity (mostly nuclear-generated), for example. But that stuff doesn't build itself, so we need to be dealing with it now. And working out what kind of railway infrastructure we need to make it practical and cost-effective to deliver goods to where they're needed when road transport is costing a fiver a mile. Maybe having railheads in every market town in the UK doesn't make any economic sense right now, but when in the cost equation will it make sense...and will it be all that far in the future? Will we even have time to build it if we start now?
Railway economics suck: upfront infrastructure costs are huge, there's no denying it. A railway locomotive costs a lot more to build than several dozen HGVs But once it's built (if it's built properly), you've got it for the next 40 years. We're still using railway infrastructure that was built over 150 years ago - so we're looking at paybacks on that kind of timescale. If the Victorians were doing it, albeit sometimes for all the wrong reasons (what's the name of that viaduct-to-nowhere in the middle of Birmingham?
), then we can manage rather better, surely, than the scratching in the dirt we seem to be managing right now...Oh, and, incidentally, if we're building a railway for freight, there's always the possibility of letting passengers use it, too. And, for that matter, perhaps combining the small-unit-load distribution network with local public transport, too. After all, we want to get as much back for that fiver-a-mile fuel bill as we possibly can, no?
It makes such sense to me, I find myself dismayed by the way governments simply refuse to take a strategic view. This government's policy on rail power? Don't electrify: use biofuels. It's a short-term sticking-plaster way of, effectively, doing nothing. Or, more importantly, spending nothing. Which isn't a lot different from how Thatcher's government operated British Rail, and look where that got us.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
One of the best posts on transport no U75, ever. I've saved it to notepad for future pub rows
roryer
道可道非常道，名可名非常名
Of course the poor will be the worst hit by rising costs of fuel and food in the coming decades, and therefore I wholeheartidly support a fair and equitable distribution of resouces, and believe that global carbon rations granting equal access to energy for each and every person on the planet, would be the ideal solution, as the poorest people in the least developed countries will probably not be given any access to basic fuel for heat.
Unfortunately there is far to much invested interest in maintaining the status quo, and the likely result will be to harness dirty power, from liquified coal and oil extracted from tar sands.
Even this would only be a stopgap solution, as coal itself is set to peak in the next 30 years, and much more quickly if demand were to shoot up in order to replace oil, and also would so exacerbate the seriousness of climate change that it would likely tip us into a climate crisis.
The only guenuine solution is to manage a transition away from an energy intensive transport system now, rather than just watching as the areas where there are limited local services and shops turn into slums.
The same argument applies to how we move freight, as the current system is based on the assumption energy is very cheap, which will not be the case for much longer.
I'm not an expert on freight, but I do know that rail and water are under-utilised. My understanding is that a if freight arrived at one port and was tranferred into smaller boats to be shipped around the coast, as we are an island and no town is more than 70 miles from the sea, it would be much more efficient.
The alternatives need time to be developed, but shouting and complaining about the end of cheap energy isn't going to help develop them, we should be actually be shouting for higher levels of tax on fuel, money which could be earmarked for a transition development fund.
I support the truckers, if only in that they are helping to draw our attention to very serious issues. Most people are just sleepwalking (or maybe sleepdriving), into a cul-de-sac.
Unfortunately there is far to much invested interest in maintaining the status quo, and the likely result will be to harness dirty power, from liquified coal and oil extracted from tar sands.
Even this would only be a stopgap solution, as coal itself is set to peak in the next 30 years, and much more quickly if demand were to shoot up in order to replace oil, and also would so exacerbate the seriousness of climate change that it would likely tip us into a climate crisis.
The only guenuine solution is to manage a transition away from an energy intensive transport system now, rather than just watching as the areas where there are limited local services and shops turn into slums.
The same argument applies to how we move freight, as the current system is based on the assumption energy is very cheap, which will not be the case for much longer.
I'm not an expert on freight, but I do know that rail and water are under-utilised. My understanding is that a if freight arrived at one port and was tranferred into smaller boats to be shipped around the coast, as we are an island and no town is more than 70 miles from the sea, it would be much more efficient.
The alternatives need time to be developed, but shouting and complaining about the end of cheap energy isn't going to help develop them, we should be actually be shouting for higher levels of tax on fuel, money which could be earmarked for a transition development fund.
I support the truckers, if only in that they are helping to draw our attention to very serious issues. Most people are just sleepwalking (or maybe sleepdriving), into a cul-de-sac.
subversplat
writer of wrongs
What's that? Hundreds of trucks all parked up in protest?!
"But they are also the people who will benefit from a reduced reliance on cars in general."
Can you expand on this idea.
What benefits do people gain by being forced to give up their cars?
Just wondering what benefits there are to standing on the street waiting for a bus? Or cramming into a Tube Carriage? What benefits are there to paying for a cab to get home on a Sunday evening because the trains aren't running and you been waiting an hour for the replacement bus service already?
What are these mysterious benefits to not having your own transport?
Can you expand on this idea.
What benefits do people gain by being forced to give up their cars?
Just wondering what benefits there are to standing on the street waiting for a bus? Or cramming into a Tube Carriage? What benefits are there to paying for a cab to get home on a Sunday evening because the trains aren't running and you been waiting an hour for the replacement bus service already?
What are these mysterious benefits to not having your own transport?
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Rail is one of the alternatives. It is true that there are some issues to do with the capacity of our existing network being stretched in some areas, however, more freight certainly could go by rail than does at present.
Some information about rail freight in the UK here:
http://www.rfg.org.uk/aboutfreight/facts/
Rail freight in this country is now a commercial operation - in other words, it is largely non-subsidised (although there are some grants available, in some situations, to help companies transfer from road to rail). This means that the decision about whether freight goes by road or rail is mainly an economical one - it will go by the cheaper option. By making it more expensive to go by road, the balance will obviously be swung towards rail in many cases.
As has been noted earlier in the thread, there are many arguments to say that road-borne freight does NOT pay its way - for example, the amount of damage caused to roads by a heavy lorry is much more than that by a car, and the lorry does not pay proportionally more in road tax etc. to reflect this. So, it can be argued that by taking lorries off the roads you are actually reducing the amount of public subsidy needed to maintain our oad network.
The point is, that by making road freight more expensive (by removing some of the public subsidy that it currently enjoys), you make rail freight more viable. And once it becomes more viable, commercial companies have more incentive to invest in infrastructure such as distribution depots and facilities to transfer from road to rail. And it becomes more attractive to businesses to locate their factories or warehouses near to railheads rather than, and so on and so on. Obvioulsy the more it is used, the more efficient it becomes (several different companies are using a transfer facility, rather than just one, for example) and costs can come down.
What I am saying is that the carrot is in the form of offering the rail freight carriers a little bit of extra competitiveness by removing some of the unfair subsidy that road haulage currently enjoys.
As for the question "how exactly are they going to distribute to supermarkets village shops and various other retail outlets", well, obviously the freight train doesn't arrive at your local shop. The function of rail freight is mainly to cover the large distances - from port to distribution hub, for example. Then the final part of the journey has to be carried out by road. This is exactly how the royal mail used to operate for example. Sadly in recent years the number of mail trains was drastically cut - there is much argument about whether this was due purely to a genuine cost difference, or the incompetence of the particular rail freight carrier responsible for the contract at the time, or simple short-sightedness on the part of Royal Mail. It seems it must have been at least partly due to the latter because I believe they have since reverted some of their flows to rail, having realised that the road option was not actually any more reliable.
Also, there are currently several regular trains operating carrying supermarket goods, for example the one for Tesco which is operated by Stobart Rail. Stobart Rail is in fact run by Eddie Stobart - one of the main UK road hauliers. Perhaps instead of whinging about fuel prices, road hauliers should follow their example and get involved in the rail freight market instead. It seems to make a lot of sense to me.
roryer
道可道非常道，名可名非常名
Benefits of being car free:
If you cycle: fitness, wellbeing, health, freedom, reduced costs, extra speed in urban areas.
Travelling by train: meeting people, sitting and reading, having a beer, tea, coffee.
By bus: as above apart from the beer and drinks.
Walking: I mean surely everyone must agree its just the most enjoyable way to travel, a little slow for long distances perhaps.
Tube: Its a fast way to travel around a large metro area.
If you cycle: fitness, wellbeing, health, freedom, reduced costs, extra speed in urban areas.
Travelling by train: meeting people, sitting and reading, having a beer, tea, coffee.
By bus: as above apart from the beer and drinks.
Walking: I mean surely everyone must agree its just the most enjoyable way to travel, a little slow for long distances perhaps.
Tube: Its a fast way to travel around a large metro area.
Part of the reason there are no other alternatives is because, from the inception of road transport (essentially, after WWII), railways have been hobbled and handicapped by all kinds of regulations. Not to mention a smattering of corruption - the Transport Minister who presided over the Beeching cuts was one Ernest Marples. Admittedly, he did resign his holdings in the Marples Ridgeway construction company (which built the M1
The Beeching cuts destroyed the capillaries of the railway network - lines that went, if not to villages, at least to small towns. Which meant that, for most of the country, the distance to the nearest railhead was now too great to make it worthwhile putting the stuff on rail again. That equation will change as oil continues to get more expensive, but if we aren't reinstating some kind of alternative NOW, then we won't have any meaningful options when we really need them (which is, in a way, NOW).
I'm not advocating some absolutist "trains good, roads bad" policy; I'm not that naive. But we don't need convoys of 44 tonne lorries all going the same way when the same goods could have been put onto rail, delivered to railheads much nearer their destination, and then transported the short remaining distance on smaller vehicles.
Let's suppose a nightmare scenario. Oil's $500 a barrel. Too expensive, in reality, to spend on carting spuds to Shrewsbury, or cauliflowers to Chester. We have to get stuff around the country some other way. At the moment, there isn't really another way: we're utterly dependent on oil.
But suppose we started - today - sorting out a transport network that wasn't dependent on oil. Realistically, that probably means nuclear: there will never be enough biofuels to meet even current demand. Obviously nuclear-powered 44-tonne trucks aren't an option (remembering that even uranium is a comparatively scarce resource), so we need an alternative energy source.
Most of them pretty comprehensively rule out road transport - battery technology still isn't there yet, and even hydrogen power's a way off...perhaps it'll work by then. But we have proven, working technologies now with railways. Almost all of France's railway network is powered by electricity (mostly nuclear-generated), for example. But that stuff doesn't build itself, so we need to be dealing with it now. And working out what kind of railway infrastructure we need to make it practical and cost-effective to deliver goods to where they're needed when road transport is costing a fiver a mile. Maybe having railheads in every market town in the UK doesn't make any economic sense right now, but when in the cost equation will it make sense...and will it be all that far in the future? Will we even have time to build it if we start now?
Railway economics suck: upfront infrastructure costs are huge, there's no denying it. A railway locomotive costs a lot more to build than several dozen HGVs But once it's built (if it's built properly), you've got it for the next 40 years. We're still using railway infrastructure that was built over 150 years ago - so we're looking at paybacks on that kind of timescale. If the Victorians were doing it, albeit sometimes for all the wrong reasons (what's the name of that viaduct-to-nowhere in the middle of Birmingham?
Oh, and, incidentally, if we're building a railway for freight, there's always the possibility of letting passengers use it, too. And, for that matter, perhaps combining the small-unit-load distribution network with local public transport, too. After all, we want to get as much back for that fiver-a-mile fuel bill as we possibly can, no?
It makes such sense to me, I find myself dismayed by the way governments simply refuse to take a strategic view. This government's policy on rail power? Don't electrify: use biofuels. It's a short-term sticking-plaster way of, effectively, doing nothing. Or, more importantly, spending nothing. Which isn't a lot different from how Thatcher's government operated British Rail, and look where that got us.
Yeah nice history lesson there, newsflash, I know!
The fact of the matter is we've been taxed at a reasonably high level in the name of environment for years now without these resources being used to implement such an infrastructure or in fact any sign of these finances at all.
Thus I feel the strike would be justified just because it really hammers home that precisely nothing has been done to implement an alternative even though we have been paying through VED, tax on fuel and VAT on fuel for decades supposedly to be invested in a transport infrastructure in anticipation of this crisis.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Anyone see the Top Gear ep where Clarkson et al pitted bicycle vs car vs PT vs ludicrous but quite brilliant speed boat?
The bicycle won, even tho Hammond couldn't jump reds
Altho commuting by boat looked
The bicycle won, even tho Hammond couldn't jump reds
Altho commuting by boat looked
The problem with freight on the railways is that a lot of the main trunk routes, especially the east and west coast main lines, are already running at somewhere near capacity. Demand for freight on rail hasn't been healthier for half a century and freight operators like EWS are doing very well for themselves, but it's reaching the point where there just isn't the line capacity to increase things very much further. In other words, we badly need some new lines - such as the north-south high-speed line - to take the load off the existing network, and to reopen some of the lines closed in the 60s and 70s. But that's very expensive indeed. As agnesdavies says, the first cost is very high and the payback is measured in decades rather than years, which makes government very wary of putting up the money.
As for water transport, I'm sceptical about how far it can ever fit in with modern distribution systems: it's just too slow, and not all that reliable either. Besides, a high proportion of modern imports come in containers, which the existing canal network probably can't accommodate. It would need massive investment to make it feasible, which would probably be better spent on the railways.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
The benefit is in not having to own your own transport.
The point is, in a system which is based on the assumption that most people don't have cars, those that don't are much better off. London is the closest we have to this in the UK. It's possible to get home by public transport from just about anywhere in London at any time of the night. I know from bitter experience this isn't the case in other cities in the UK, even big ones like Glasgow.
That's before we even start to go into all the other benefits like reduced pollution, increased safety, less noise etc etc etc. If you aren't familiar with those arguments perhaps you need to go away and do some reading.
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
Christ, I'd hate to drive everywhere. The time you spend driving isn't your own, it's the car's. I can read a book or watch a movie on the train/bus. Cycling's fun and good for me. The only thing cars are good for in my world (note: not everybody, just me) is moving heavy things around.
PS: Ooh, are you going that way? Gizus a lift?
PS: Ooh, are you going that way? Gizus a lift?
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
I've started cycling as a commuter in the last 3 months, and not only do I feel better, I've lost weight (and my gut no longer looks like Fatty Lee Adama Fatsuit Boy), saved myself enough topay for my long weekend in Ibiza in September AND I know exactly how long I will take to get into work/school on any given day, rather than having to factor in the 'fucked rail or road' 20 mins.
Plus it's WAY more fun.
Plus it's WAY more fun.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Railway economics suck: upfront infrastructure costs are huge, there's no denying it. A railway locomotive costs a lot more to build than several dozen HGVs But once it's built (if it's built properly), you've got it for the next 40 years. We're still using railway infrastructure that was built over 150 years ago - so we're looking at paybacks on that kind of timescale. If the Victorians were doing it, albeit sometimes for all the wrong reasons (what's the name of that viaduct-to-nowhere in the middle of Birmingham?
Oh, and, incidentally, if we're building a railway for freight, there's always the possibility of letting passengers use it, too. And, for that matter, perhaps combining the small-unit-load distribution network with local public transport, too. After all, we want to get as much back for that fiver-a-mile fuel bill as we possibly can, no?
It makes such sense to me, I find myself dismayed by the way governments simply refuse to take a strategic view. This government's policy on rail power? Don't electrify: use biofuels. It's a short-term sticking-plaster way of, effectively, doing nothing. Or, more importantly, spending nothing. Which isn't a lot different from how Thatcher's government operated British Rail, and look where that got us.
All of what you say is true, and I would of course like to see the government being more proactive in instigating improvements to the rail network. Being more supportive of the proposed N-S high speed line woul be a start.
But perhaps a more realistic or optimistic way to look at it is to have some hope in the power of commercial opportunities to inspire investment. In theory at least, if Railtrack sees freight operators queuing up desperate for track access (this is happening to some extent already, of course), this should persuade them that it is worth their while making significant investments into increasing capacity.
That's why I support the principle of making road transport more expensive (or rather, less cheap) to give rail a more significant competitive advantage - I have more faith in the power of commercial incentive to deliver investment, than endlessly dithering government which is constantly harassed by the selfish road lobby and a largely short-sighted electorate.
I often like to point out that in the states, a much higher percentage of freight is carried by rail than is here - despite their low fuel prices and dependance on road transport otherwise. And all rail freight there is carried on privately owned, unsubsidised railways. I know there are all sorts of things that mean you can't make a direct comparison, but it does demonstrate that rail freight can be highly competitive - I just think it needs to be given a bit of a kick start here, having been run down, as you say, for so many years.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I might agree with you there, but that strike would be to a different end from the one being held by the truckers.
I don't think the truckers would be holding up placards saying "MORE INVESTMENT IN ALTERNATIVES TO ROAD TRANSPORT NOW!", are they?
I know, but when they see that all transportation is bought to it's knees yet again because of a few road hauliers. They might possibly think to themselves "can't we get an infrastructure that isn't quite so................."
Fuck it too subtle, they're in government for fuck sake
roryer
道可道非常道，名可名非常名
Exactly my point, environmental and anti-road protestors should be there too, we / they need to jump on the bandwagon they are starting and highjack the protest.
Environmentalists should blockade the blockaders. Then the government can no longer solve the short term crisis by reducing tax on fuel, and would have visible support for increasing the tax, and introducing road pricing and other schemes that seek to hasten the much needed transition.
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