pinner Posted March 5, 2011 Share Posted March 5, 2011 Post #19 misses the point. Why should the UK need EU permission for anything at all? Pah! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamesey Posted March 5, 2011 Share Posted March 5, 2011 Yes, because there is no alternative to oil-based forms of transport. i run on b100 from waste oil collected from local resturants local to me , i make it myself and run my 3.1 trooper for nearly free , i laugh driving past the petrol station lol lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spindrift Posted March 5, 2011 Share Posted March 5, 2011 get real you must not drive anywhere:loopy: TRL reports, fewer car miles travelled means fewer accidents. Makes sense when you think about it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WeX Posted March 5, 2011 Share Posted March 5, 2011 It isn't. European countries have higher direct taxation and road tolls. The UK is about average for direct taxation but yes we do only have a tiny number of toll roads, but then again we do have the road fund license or road tax which is not present in the majority of EU nations if any. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spindrift Posted March 5, 2011 Share Posted March 5, 2011 The UK is about average for direct taxation but yes we do only have a tiny number of toll roads, but then again we do have the road fund license or road tax which is not present in the majority of EU nations if any. Road tax hasn't existed in the UK for 70 years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hots on Posted March 5, 2011 Share Posted March 5, 2011 TRL reports, fewer car miles travelled means fewer accidents. Makes sense when you think about it. I once set off in my car and accidentally ran someone over before I'd even got out of second gear. I didn't really, but I suppose that could happen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cuttsie Posted March 5, 2011 Share Posted March 5, 2011 Fuel costs are not higher: There are six EU countries with more expensive petrol right now; two others that match us. The rest clustering around. In Norway petrol is 20p per litre more expensive than here. In Spain it’s 20p per litre cheaper. Obviously relative fuel prices between countries fluctuate according to international and national events, our various national tax schedules, and, where applicable, currency fluctuations. The order of countries on the list changes all the time. I’d quite like to assemble a timelapse of the graph for the past 20 years, to see whether there were any interesting trends — perhaps it was true for a while that the UK was paying a noticeable amount more? But there are a lot of other things I’d quite like to do more, so I’m not going to. The best source I can find for the claim is a uSwitch “survey” from 2008: PDF. As you can see, uSwitch take researching their “surveys” even more seriously than I take researching blog posts. They put some keywords into Google, found various sources of data, and put them together in Excel. I recommend going to page 5 to follow their quite fabulous method for calculating the annual national spend on petrol. Apparently we don’t have the real data, so they had to make it up. Only they forgot the Peter Snow “just a bit of fun” disclaimers when they prepared the press release and accidentally got their made up facts printed in every newspaper. The “survey” did show that Britain was paying more per litre than other European countries in 2008 (when the pound was noticeably stronger against the Euro). In many cases it was only by a hair’s breadth, and thus it was not a particularly interesting fact, but it was true nonetheless, according to the data given. So a press release was prepared and the newspapers mangled some impressive sounding numbers out of the data, which have become part of the collective wisdom of the British people. Interestingly, even though the “survey” itself pointed out that we do not pay the highest rate of tax, this didn’t prevent the Daily Mail declaring that it is so in their headline. But enough of that. The basic conclusion is that, currently, the claim is not true. And when it was true, it probably wasn’t interestingly true. And the other conclusion is that, for such a common claim, there doesn’t seem to be any good quality well presented and well publicised data on this. I’d love to see such things as: * Price-per-litre trends over time for these countries, with and without taking into account inflation and currency fluctuations. * Amount and proportion of the price-per-litre that is tax, with trends over time. * Total national spend (not made up numbers), with population, number of cars, etc, for comparison. (Because paying more for petrol is not the same as spending more on petrol, and the latter probably says far more interesting things.) What is probably true is that motoring is a painful cost for many people. But paradoxically, it’s the fall in the cost of motoring that has caused this problem. During the good times of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, more and more people have built themselves into a car dependency. Car ownership is higher than ever because the cost has been falling for so long. And so, with everybody owning a car, our houses have moved further from our work places, our village shops and services have closed, and the bus service has been withdrawn. This in turn pushes more people to buy and run a car, even if they can not really afford to do so and were quite happy living without one until the shops closed. And when the good times turn bad — when wages are frozen, when office locations are merged, and when redundancies are handed out — you can not simply give up the car. The world changed. http://waronthemotorist.wordpress.com/ codswollop Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WeX Posted March 6, 2011 Share Posted March 6, 2011 Road tax hasn't existed in the UK for 70 years. don't be so pedantic, even the DVLA call it vehicle tax / car tax / road tax and I did say road fund license or road tax you seem to have difficulty answering the questions raised. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WeX Posted March 6, 2011 Share Posted March 6, 2011 TRL reports, fewer car miles travelled means fewer accidents. Makes sense when you think about it. ok, with your thinking here and with the following facts, that over time the number of accidents have dropped compared to the number of cars due to better roads and cars etc, we could be like you and impede people, like some communist state or we could continue to develop out roads and cars to a point here accidents are none existent. same thinking, just less dictation and more progress Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tradescanthia Posted March 6, 2011 Share Posted March 6, 2011 Higher fuel costs means fewer miles travelled and more lives saved. Then stay at home, dont drive, dont allow anyone else to drive and eventually STARVE to death. Balmpot !!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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