Should we pay more to park in town?

” Is renting a small space of tarmac for a few hours any different from the above?”

I think it is. The difference is when you go into a shop to buy things you’re paying a business for their products. We already pay for the public road out of all the taxes we all pay, Council Tax, Income tax etc And more tax revenue is raised by those shops being there, open for business and paying their business rates as a result of your custom. Their shop rent keeps property companies open which also pays hefty tax etc…Plenty of tax is raised to cover what they make from parking charges. Why should we pay for the same thing again? To use your comparison it’d be like going to pay for your coffee in Costa, and then being charged for it again due to the space you took up in the shop to sit and drink it. You wouldnt get charged for your petrol twice due to the space you took up on the forecourt. You wouldnt get billed twice for your haircut due to renting the chair during the haircut etc In the case of the congestion charge, most of the money goes to a private company to fund the running of the scheme and with Hybrids being exempt despite being the same size as any other car shows its nothing to do with road space or congestion, its all a greenwash. (I own a Hybrid by the way). Charges in council car parks are generally reasonable, the extortionate fees from private companies which doesnt benefit the area at all should be banned. But the idea of ‘rationing roadspace’ limits the traffic you can accomodate which affects the economy, surely we should invest in ways to get more people to park, more people to use the town at once and more people spending money.

“The ultimate aim must be to get cars out of our city centres – they poison the air we breath, congest our roads and clutter up our kerbsides, making cities much less pleasant places to be, particularly for pedestrians”

Incorrect. Buses pollute city centres far more than cars, the particulates chucked out by the stoneage style diesel engines are far more dangerous than todays modern, very clean cars (and some Hybrids dont use their engine at slow city speeds at all, causing zero pollution) and a bus puts out up to 60 times more nox gases than an average car. Cars are not to blame for this sort of thing at all. Policies which ban cars and increase bus use only increases pollution and is not founded on science but rather anti-car political correctness. ‘Clutter up our kerbsides’ thats where cars park, what else would you be doing with the kerbside? Football tournament? People who say ‘cars make cities bad for pedestrians’ are talking nonsense, all pedestrians have to do is look both ways before crossing the road and they’ll be fine. Thats what i was brought up to do. You only seem interested in making it ‘pleasant’ for one group of people (pedestrians) but unpleasant for anyone who dares to travel there by (cleaner than buses) cars. Surely you need to incorperate everybody. As for ‘congesting our roads’ thats what roads are for, for cars to travel on. Traffic is the lifeblood of every economy. The day when roads are empty you’ll have FAR bigger problems than a cluttered kerbside. Such as no economy, no shops, no jobs, no work, no money, no city, no point.

If you want cleaner city air, campaign for a blanket ban on all buses from entering the city and encourage people to use cars instead. My mother is disabled and has no alternative to a car, and people like you are curtailing her freedom to use her car to go where she wants, due to a hate of the motorcar which is not based on science or logic, but on a hatrid of ‘clutter’ which i find very odd.

James