Why I Love Road Pricing

Recently I received an email encouraging me to sign a petition against the governments plans to implement Road Pricing, a scheme that involves forcing people to pay for a device to be installed in their cars, and then making us pay for each mile we drive, giving us speeding tickets every time we creep over the speed limit, and worst of all, monitoring our every move.

I did sign this petition, because I do disagree with the scheme, but not for the same reasons the majority of the 1.5 million other people who signed it did.

For those of you that haven’t worked this out on your own, the fears people have about the scheme are stupid. Let’s deal with the “They’ll monitor you everywhere you go!” fear. Now, come closer, because you need to listen to me very carefully when I say this.

Nobody gives a shit where you go, you’re insignificant, and Tony Blair doesn’t care if you’re having an affair or visiting a Sex Shop. You don’t matter, you never will, nobody gives a fuck what you’re doing.

Next fear: “They’ll give us speeding tickets every time we go 1 mile over the speed limit!”. Wrong, that’s not going to happen, and I’ll tell you why. The Government want getting away with speeding to be just easy enough that we all do it, that way they can still catch us doing it every now and then. If we have these devices on our cars, and we know we’ll get caught speeding every time, we’ll all just stop speeding, and they’ll stop making money. It really is that simple. They need the balance they have at the moment where we get away with it 99.9% of the time, because that way we all keep doing it, and they can catch us doing it every now and then. Surely we all know that.

So, if I don’t think these fears are justified, why did I sign the petition? Two reasons. Reason the First : it’s fucking stupid. Have they not noticed that this is an extremely complicated way of achieving something they’ve already achieved. If it’s supposed to be “pay as you go” for road travel, surely tax on fuel, which we already have, achieves just that? The more miles you drive, the more fuel you use, the more tax you pay. Simple.

But more importantly, I signed it because of the reasons they say they’re doing it. “It’s to help the environment” “It’s to reduce congestion” “It’s to make people use public transport”. Blah Blah Blah Blah Bollocks.

These reasons are dishonest, illogical, and naive respectively. Bunch of dicks.

I’m curious, are CO2 emissions reduced by money? And if so, is that what the government plans to spend the money on? Apart from the fact there is no scientific evidence AT ALL to say that CO2 emissions cause global warming, even if there was, taking people’s money isn’t going to help.

So what about reducing congestion? Well, London implemented the congestion charge years ago and the amount of traffic didn’t drop at all. It didn’t drop because people don’t drive to work for fun, they drive to work because there’s no choice, so all the scheme did was take a load of their money. Further more, think who congestion charging affects the most: People without much money. So effectively the message we send is that rich people are allowed to pollute, but poor people are not, is that right? The London congestion charge didn’t make a difference to the guy who drives his 1mpg Ferrari around London, he can afford £8 a day and not even know it’s gone. The guy driving to work in his fuel efficient diesel however, he really misses the £200 a month that just got taken from him just for him to continue driving to work, but he still had to drive to fucking work didn’t he?

So far congestion charging hasn’t reduced congestion, the environment hasn’t benefited at all, and the poorest people are the ones who suffer the most. So we have nothing but failure as a form guide for congestion charging, and unsurprisingly, this is taken as a prompt to do more of it.

However, the winner for shittest justification of all has to be “It’s to make people use public transport”. Fuck Off. I mean really, Fuck Off. There isn’t room on public transport for more people, it’s always rammed, you can’t get anywhere, the buses stink of piss and you routinely get stabbed at train stations. Trains are always late, frequently crash, and a season ticket to London from just outside London costs nearly as much as a human kidney (which you will probably need to purchase after you get stabbed on the platform). It only gets worse, and more expensive, every year, and it is not a viable way to get around.

British transport can suck my cock, as can any of the fucking simpletons who think that they can use the “it’s to make people use public transport” argument to justify stealing more of our money. You know what would make me use public transport? It having the capacity to get me where the fuck I want to go in a reasonable amount of time without me having to re-mortgage my house to pay for it.

Until that happens, we’re all going to drive our cars, no matter how much it costs us, and everyone knows that, which means the reasons for implementing Road Pricing are simple: They want more of our fucking money.

Now that I’ve said all that, I’m curious as to how many of you are wondering why this article is entitled “Why I love Road Pricing”, in fact, I wonder how many of you even remembered that until now.

I’ll tell you why I love Road Pricing, I love Road Pricing because it resulted in my receiving an email directing me to the government petition site, and when I was there, I saw this…

Now you tell me, is that not the single fucking greatest thing you’ve ever seen? I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but I’m choosing to ignore it, face value is much funnier. I love the idea of these guys just being taken up in a plane and chucked out of the door, with no training at all.

“Which one of these do I puuuuuuuuuuuuuuuullllllllll?!!!?!!”

It’s not as stupid as Road Pricing, but it’s certainly funnier.