Open up the toll gates

I think toll gates are wrong considering the amount of taxes we already pay – and the £5 toll fee was always too much. I hazard a guess that if £1 toll had been used – the traffic would be 5 times more on the toll road,

I think that a good approach would be to have for smaller cars, narrow lanes with low headroom so that all smaller vehicles could use all toll roads and bridges in the UK free. That way all the drivers of big american style pickup trucks along with people carriers and chelsea tractors would be stuck queing for ages while watching smaller cars going straight through. It would then probably not be too long before most of these large vehicles got replaced with much smaller ones taking up less space. This would work much better than expensive tax discs, because as well as costing in road tolls which could be increased a lot, it would also add lots of journey time onto trips made by the drivers of these vehicles! Losing time would be something that would deter very rich people with deep pockets from using them. The extra height that is currently used to their advantage for seeing ahead and lane swapping in queing traffic would not work when the queue is made up entirely of larger higher vehicles. This in my opinion would be a very satisfying and enviromently friendly way to deal with traffic congestion.

Dartford Crossing – well, there’s not really any alternative is there? No matter what the price nor how long the queues.

M6 Toll. Where you merge with the toll road having driven up the standard M6, you look over your shoulder to see three, almost completely empty, lanes. Lanes that could have taken the traffic, and therefore the pollution, away from the standard M6 and the residents of Birmingham – to the obvious benefit of everyone.

And a good thing too in the short term. The M6 Toll was a completely bonkers idea and its failure more-or-less guarantees it won’t be repeated.

Having lived within 10 minutes of the M6 all my adult life, in my opinion it isn’t the cars that cause the congestion, it is two solid lanes of lorries, all driving at 56mph, trying to overtake each other and forcing everyone into the outside lane. They pull out without warning, knowing you have no option but to brake, and hog the middle lane for miles while they gradually overtake the wagon on the inside lane who is travelling at a mile an hour less. How about sending all the lorries down the M6 Toll? Bliss!!

The proposal seems reasonable and customer friendly.
Hopefully users would not find a way of abusing the priviledge.

Do the owners of these roads care how long you sit there?, of course they don’t. Their only reason for being there is to make a profit. We either should stick to our system of paying for a decent road system by general taxation or do it the French way and charge all motorway users a contribution for using them and paying a bit less tax. Either way they all have to be paid for.

Another suggestion is to make all main routes toll roads and to install cameras to track vehicle movements like the London cogestion zone system. Thus we could do away with toll boths but would pay for the use of the roads. The charges could vary for the types of routes used but I stress not the time of travel as some people would drive during the night if that was the cheapest option. Tired drivers crash!

It could also be tied into a speed control system in that the tracking information would detect speeding drivers and thus extra fines could be extracted from those peple who do not have the skill to obey speed limits!!!

I use a TomTom Go 730 connected with an RDS-TMC Traffic Receiver (£7 on Ebay!) and IQ routes to detect busy roads and real-time congestion and help me find alternative routes. Very rarely has it let me down and often when I’ve ignored it I’ve ended up in a big jam further down the road after a junction where it had advised me to turn off. Lesson learnt there, me thinks.

I absolutely love maps but this is where I think the right sat nav has a huge advantage.

However, if I was Transport Minister for a day I would:
1. Introduce a tax on all foreign-registered vehicles entering the UK (valid for a year, more for HGVs)
2. Ensure there’s a disaster continuity/contingency plan for every section of motorway in the event of closure, in some cases introduce emergency exits, temporary contra-flow systems or temporary breaches of the central res to allow police-controlled U-turns
3. Introduce more ‘Keep to the left lane’ reminders on electronic sign displays
4. Consider dividing motorways in some urban areas by lanes to segregate through (national) and local traffic
5. Invest more in technology to provide more information to drivers and/or passengers about traffic conditions ahead, including introducing more signs on the roads before motorists get onto gridlocked motorways
6. Ban HGVs on motorways on Sundays
7. Ban HGVs from lane 2 during peak periods to stop ‘elephant racing’
8. Have more flexible use of traffic lights on roundabouts – i.e only switch them on when necessary
9. Introduce compulsory driving tests every 5 years to educate drivers about changing driving conditions and trends. Driving is a privilege, not a right
10. Be realistic about the Utopian dream of an integrated public transport system where everyone will be happy to get on a dirty/slow bus or expensive train, and accept that congestion depends largely on how much people are prepared to put up with it and also accept that the quandary of congestion will never be solved (in other words, the more effort you put into reducing congestion roads, the more attractive you ultimately make them).