Great, but maybe the reason people don’t walk, cycle, or take public transport is because it is ludicrously shit. Many workplaces don’t offer places to get changed but they’ll be quite happy to pass on the charge to employees.
It’s usually expensive to live within 15 minutes walking or cycling distance to work. I live a 45 minute cycle away and I’d do it if it didn’t double my commute time every day. Again, workplaces aren’t doing anything to make it more attractive so you can’t really blame people for driving. Why should private businesses do something? Well apparently we’re all in this together but it only seems to be one side that gets asked to make concessions.
As for the money argument, £450m over 10 years is a drop in the ocean compared to the money this government has spaffed up the wall on their mates. I have zero time for the “well, the money has to come from somewhere” argument. Clearly the money can come first, but why pass up a chance to put the screws on normal people?
The UK has an obsession with levying unnecessary taxes. Cars are not the biggest contributor to climate change – corporations are and yet the UK Government isn’t in a hurry to tax them. Just more unnecessary taxes which hurt working-class people the hardest. This isn’t climate justice.
>Leicester is now set to become the second: it is consulting on proposals to charge companies with more than 10 parking spaces £550 a year per space from next year. It is up to employers to decide whether to absorb the cost or pass it on to their staff.
Excuse me? Having to pay to park at work? Fuck off.
This will further hollow out city centres. Making it harder for people to use the city centre shops will drive them towards out of town retail parks. Don’t be surprised to see even more charity shops and shuttered property on the high street.
Love the UK. Create a society built around the necessity of cars, privatise every public transport system, jack the prices up and let them be run into the ground, now you’ve got a captive fundraising source that people can’t realistically choose to opt out and you charge fuck out of them while also saying ***it’s green***
What if some cities are not very public transport friendly because routes are on main roads, bad timetables or reliability? Won’t this anti cars revolution is actually detrimental to people who actually use the city because they have or need to? It sounds like more would be made poorer or suffer.
Offices will just move/start up out if town, or to a nearby tory council that will offer concessions.
to cut pollution is the virtuous blanket, to make money is the reality.
The sheer cheek of it. The ‘environment tax’ is the biggest, phoneyest cash cow ever invented.
I call BS.
1. Parking cars don’t cause emissions.
2. Electric cars don’t cause emissions (at least not in the centre).
3. Cycling facilities, park and ride, public transport are rather terrible in Leicester, compared to for example Nottingham.
This is just a blatant money grab, and it will drive more businesses out of town.
And these idiots wonder why the high street is dying. Why the f would I do battle with an overcrowded contagious bus load of plebs only to have to lug bags full of shopping around back to the park and ride when I can just go to an out of town superstore or even better, Amazon?
Stop buying everything from China, they pollute 350,000% (approx) more than the entire UK. If the UK ceased to exist, there would be no measurable change in pollution.
Fuck off.
I think many people have already shared how this is a stupid arrangement.
This is normal. One person in the office at a desk comes up with a new idea to obtain revenue. Entire country objects when previous ideas like cycle paths, public transport, or safe pedestrian routes with decent lighting were rejected as “unnecessary” and “wasteful” spending of previously obtained revenue by the person at a desk, next door. Lord knows they won’t speak to each other, that would be wasteful, unnecessary and lead to complications.
It will make the private companies in charge of parking even more money!!
Maybe don’t make public transport so overpriced and people would drive less. I would happily take the train everywhere but it’s so expensive. Also used to cycle to my closet station before my wheels go stolen…
Bristol city council recently imposed hourly parking charges at the city’s parks and green spaces. They were surprisingly honest about it and just said the council needed the revenues raised.
It’s not about us, it’s always about them.
The answer in the UK is always to tax. Doesn’t change behaviour because car usage in many cases has no alternative. Just hammers normal people more in the name of the environment. Green taxes have been a thing for a few decades now and have made absolutely no difference. How about free parking for electric cars?
Sounds nice on paper but I think this will just encourage work from home and online shopping more. I think restricting cars from the very centre of cities to cut down on traffic makes sense but these broad approaches which cover large areas will just lead to people not going into the city at all.
Fuel tax. Vehicle tax. Parking tax. Congestion tax. Smoking tax. Plastic bag tax. Speed cameras. All this shit does is monetise the problem instead of tackling it.
You want people to stop driving? Make public transport at least as good as it is on the continent. It’s too inconvenient, too expensive, too out of date. Make UK roads and cities safer for cyclists. Bring back trams. Build more subways. Renationalise the railways and stop trying to run everything as a business.
How about making work from home compulsory. Unless your a Dr ect…
Tax isn’t going to fix the issue of low takeup of public transport in the UK.
The reason we have such shit public transport is because UK cities are significantly less densely populated than most cities in Europe.
We are one of the few Countries that insisted on building outwards rather than upwards.
With people spread out all over suburbs, trains and buses just aren’t that profitable to run because they arent geographically close enough to customers.
This is why UK trains and buses cost so much to use as well – they might appear overcrowded, but the reality is companies don’t run enough vehicles to cover a range of time slots because those wouldn’t be full enough to justify the cost.
WFH is pretty much the only solution that will reduce pollution in the UK. Otherwise this just becomes a regressive tax on working age people (many in appalling retail jobs) to subsidise Council budgets.
I challenge any MP to ride a bike on my commute. Its like running a gauntlet.
It’s FOUR miles from my house but takes an hour and a half for public transport. Aproximately Nine pounds a day because i would have to use two different bus companies.
I can get a tram/bus combination for 10 pounds that will also take an hour and a half.
I can walk it in an hour and forty five minutes.
This probably doesn’t sound too bad but this isn’t rural Britain, this is Manchester.
That’s a shame because my favourite thing about high streets is dodging the morons who can’t be bothered to keep up to date with the Highway Code.
24 comments
Great, but maybe the reason people don’t walk, cycle, or take public transport is because it is ludicrously shit. Many workplaces don’t offer places to get changed but they’ll be quite happy to pass on the charge to employees.
It’s usually expensive to live within 15 minutes walking or cycling distance to work. I live a 45 minute cycle away and I’d do it if it didn’t double my commute time every day. Again, workplaces aren’t doing anything to make it more attractive so you can’t really blame people for driving. Why should private businesses do something? Well apparently we’re all in this together but it only seems to be one side that gets asked to make concessions.
As for the money argument, £450m over 10 years is a drop in the ocean compared to the money this government has spaffed up the wall on their mates. I have zero time for the “well, the money has to come from somewhere” argument. Clearly the money can come first, but why pass up a chance to put the screws on normal people?
The UK has an obsession with levying unnecessary taxes. Cars are not the biggest contributor to climate change – corporations are and yet the UK Government isn’t in a hurry to tax them. Just more unnecessary taxes which hurt working-class people the hardest. This isn’t climate justice.
>Leicester is now set to become the second: it is consulting on proposals to charge companies with more than 10 parking spaces £550 a year per space from next year. It is up to employers to decide whether to absorb the cost or pass it on to their staff.
Excuse me? Having to pay to park at work? Fuck off.
This will further hollow out city centres. Making it harder for people to use the city centre shops will drive them towards out of town retail parks. Don’t be surprised to see even more charity shops and shuttered property on the high street.
Love the UK. Create a society built around the necessity of cars, privatise every public transport system, jack the prices up and let them be run into the ground, now you’ve got a captive fundraising source that people can’t realistically choose to opt out and you charge fuck out of them while also saying ***it’s green***
What if some cities are not very public transport friendly because routes are on main roads, bad timetables or reliability? Won’t this anti cars revolution is actually detrimental to people who actually use the city because they have or need to? It sounds like more would be made poorer or suffer.
Offices will just move/start up out if town, or to a nearby tory council that will offer concessions.
to cut pollution is the virtuous blanket, to make money is the reality.
The sheer cheek of it. The ‘environment tax’ is the biggest, phoneyest cash cow ever invented.
I call BS.
1. Parking cars don’t cause emissions.
2. Electric cars don’t cause emissions (at least not in the centre).
3. Cycling facilities, park and ride, public transport are rather terrible in Leicester, compared to for example Nottingham.
This is just a blatant money grab, and it will drive more businesses out of town.
And these idiots wonder why the high street is dying. Why the f would I do battle with an overcrowded contagious bus load of plebs only to have to lug bags full of shopping around back to the park and ride when I can just go to an out of town superstore or even better, Amazon?
Stop buying everything from China, they pollute 350,000% (approx) more than the entire UK. If the UK ceased to exist, there would be no measurable change in pollution.
Fuck off.
I think many people have already shared how this is a stupid arrangement.
This is normal. One person in the office at a desk comes up with a new idea to obtain revenue. Entire country objects when previous ideas like cycle paths, public transport, or safe pedestrian routes with decent lighting were rejected as “unnecessary” and “wasteful” spending of previously obtained revenue by the person at a desk, next door. Lord knows they won’t speak to each other, that would be wasteful, unnecessary and lead to complications.
It will make the private companies in charge of parking even more money!!
Maybe don’t make public transport so overpriced and people would drive less. I would happily take the train everywhere but it’s so expensive. Also used to cycle to my closet station before my wheels go stolen…
Bristol city council recently imposed hourly parking charges at the city’s parks and green spaces. They were surprisingly honest about it and just said the council needed the revenues raised.
It’s not about us, it’s always about them.
The answer in the UK is always to tax. Doesn’t change behaviour because car usage in many cases has no alternative. Just hammers normal people more in the name of the environment. Green taxes have been a thing for a few decades now and have made absolutely no difference. How about free parking for electric cars?
Sounds nice on paper but I think this will just encourage work from home and online shopping more. I think restricting cars from the very centre of cities to cut down on traffic makes sense but these broad approaches which cover large areas will just lead to people not going into the city at all.
Fuel tax. Vehicle tax. Parking tax. Congestion tax. Smoking tax. Plastic bag tax. Speed cameras. All this shit does is monetise the problem instead of tackling it.
You want people to stop driving? Make public transport at least as good as it is on the continent. It’s too inconvenient, too expensive, too out of date. Make UK roads and cities safer for cyclists. Bring back trams. Build more subways. Renationalise the railways and stop trying to run everything as a business.
How about making work from home compulsory. Unless your a Dr ect…
Tax isn’t going to fix the issue of low takeup of public transport in the UK.
The reason we have such shit public transport is because UK cities are significantly less densely populated than most cities in Europe.
We are one of the few Countries that insisted on building outwards rather than upwards.
With people spread out all over suburbs, trains and buses just aren’t that profitable to run because they arent geographically close enough to customers.
This is why UK trains and buses cost so much to use as well – they might appear overcrowded, but the reality is companies don’t run enough vehicles to cover a range of time slots because those wouldn’t be full enough to justify the cost.
WFH is pretty much the only solution that will reduce pollution in the UK. Otherwise this just becomes a regressive tax on working age people (many in appalling retail jobs) to subsidise Council budgets.
I challenge any MP to ride a bike on my commute. Its like running a gauntlet.
It’s FOUR miles from my house but takes an hour and a half for public transport. Aproximately Nine pounds a day because i would have to use two different bus companies.
I can get a tram/bus combination for 10 pounds that will also take an hour and a half.
I can walk it in an hour and forty five minutes.
This probably doesn’t sound too bad but this isn’t rural Britain, this is Manchester.
That’s a shame because my favourite thing about high streets is dodging the morons who can’t be bothered to keep up to date with the Highway Code.