Date published: 2006/06/01
The Cambridge Evening News says:
A congestion charge of £4 would get cars off Cambridge's traffic-choked roads - and persuade more people to use buses, bikes and walk instead.
This is one of the key results of research into how to tackle the city's transport problems in the years ahead.
Cambridgeshire County Council chiefs, who ordered the research, stress they have not yet worked out whether the pay-for-driving scheme is a good idea for the city - or how much the charge would be.
But in a bid to find out what the impact would be, as part of a project called the Long Term Transport Strategy for Cambridgeshire, they fed the £4 figure into a computer.
Such geniuses who run Cambridge. You feed a random number into a random model on a computer and you come up with the obvious fact (already well demonstrated in London) that if you extort drivers by charging them an access fee to get into the city then they will avoid driving into the city. And you ask "experts" who would financially benefit from such a scheme (because it will require endless consultation and design by the very same "experts") whether it's a good idea and they say "yes".
Of course it would not be so bad if people were charged a proper congestion charge based on the congestion they caused. But then buses would have to pay the charge, and pedestrians too (pedestrians are one of the big sources of car congestion at many Cambridge junctions, e.g. Arbury Road and Milton Road). But we couldn't possibly have that. This whole exercise is motivated by the Cambridge ruling elite's hatred of the car (except for their own).
Of course Cambridge will discover what London has discovered. If you stick two fingers up to your customers they will go elsewhere with their business.
Sack anyone and everyone who has anything to do with transport planning in Cambridge and spend the money on something useful.
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