Pricing as a tool to manage traffic!?

As a motorist dependant on car for the overwhelming bulk of my essential transport options and independance! I pay through the nose, as do most other road users for the paid right to use what my registration and fuel excise pays for!

If there are too any people using gridlocked roads? Then it's he result of decades of poor planning and former funding returned to those on higher incomes as welfare for the rich!?

Funds that in earlier times pushed infrastructure out ahead of regional development, thus ensuring the human right of shelter manifesting as housing remained affordable, with enough essential service and public transport option to enable the family jalopy to remain parked or used to ferry the kids and the groceries!?

We do need to get serious about roads, rail and reticulated services! And how to affordably fund the same?

We cannot pay for the luxury of the roadblocks manifesting as corrupt or crisis riddled state government/empire building bureaucracies, or the 70 billions plus per we pay for their existence!

And that's what it costs to keep them in the manner they've grown accustomed to, before a single cent is directed at public amenity/service delivery!

If the "work" state parliaments did was redirected and delivered by a combination of councils the federal government; and where possible direct funding connected to regional autonomy!?

We'd be able to liberate 70 billions plus per to rollout rapid rail one year and better urban train, tram and or trolley bus services the next? And say an underground delivery service relying on pneumatics/ air locks/vacuums and cylinders the one after that, to move materials etc, thereby keeping them off the roads?

It is time to get serious about endemic waste and welfare for the rich!

As opposed to more of this errant, self serving, city centric, birds fur, horse feathers and bombastic balderdash!

Bah humbug Sir! We are people not captive market cash cows to be milked for every last drop by folks who haven't a new or better idea to bless themselves with!
Alan B.

Which uncaring about anybody but themselves, homosexual from the Greens city based political party, dreamt this one up.
This article first appeared in crikey...says it all doesn't it.

I love the way the western suburbs of Sydney, are ho-hummed out of the equation.

How about we all shave our legs, climb into a Lycra suit, mount our $15k push bikes, and ride into the rainbow?

FMD !

What is it with these damn fool planners, & their fixation on public transport & bloody bicycles. How can we convince them that this is not Copenhagen, we do not live in Copenhagen, we do not want to live in Copenhagen, & we suggest they take their taxpayer funded holidays somewhere other than Copenhagen.

Having got that off my chest, could we perhaps find a way of getting it through their thick heads that Public transport, or bicycles just don't work for most of us. As it is heavily subsidised by all of us it is therefore much cheaper than driving, & surprise surpeise, we are smart enough to use it, in the very few instances it can fulfil our requirements. As we are not all public servants or planners working in city high rise offices or universities, it is never going to be able to suit our requirements.

Now Dr Davies, would you please explain just why you think motorists, who never use, & can not use public transport, should then have to pay for those who do, can, or want to use it. Could you also explain why motorists who have paid through the nose a dozen times over for our roads, should have to share them with, or even worse, lose some of them to public transport.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if our highly educated doctors of what ever had to do a one year course in common sense, before they were allowed out of the kindergarten our universities have become. Perhaps then our planners could produce something useful & workable, rather than this dross.

At last someone is thinking. We should bring our tax system into line with reality.

People realising the true cost of the facilities they use and people being taxed in accordance with the reality they face would answer most of our problems.

We should get and pay for an E- tag as part of registering our vehicles. We should pay a toll on all important roads that have been brought up to high standard.

Government should borrow at present low interest rates, build or upgrade the roads and flog them off as toll roads.

We should not be able to register a vehicle if our E- tag bill is not reasonably up to date.

As against this every taxpayer should get a deduction from assessable income for the reasonable cost of getting to and from work.

TO give the nuclear family a fair deal, procreation capable couples and couples who have in fact taken on the long term support of a child or children should have the option of being taxed at twice the tax payable on half the assessable income of both of them less a fixed amount for each child.

We would then be able to avoid the "churn" of taxing on an unrealistic basis then, paying it back as hand outs to the same people as "benefits" after the grabbing of the taxes in and paying it out as benefits has involved the expense of numerous public servants.

At last a thinker

Old Man, if you are in fact an old man, you should by now have some idea on our tax system.

Motorists have paid many times over for the roads we have, & many times more for the roads we did not get. With well over half the fuel cost being tax of one form or another, we already pay enough for our use of roads.

The government pandering to interest groups like the greenies, & trying to charge motorists even more is disgusting. True equity would see fuel taxes halved, annual registration costs dropped to the cost of service, & public transport users paying full cost of operating the thing they are riding.

My nearest public transport is 25 kilometres away, & offers no parking facility. It requires over 100 Km of driving by someone for any one of us to be dropped to & picked up from the railway or bus stop.

Again please explain why I, or someone living in a country town with no public transport at all, should have subsidise city commuters? User pay is a great idea, especially on public transport.

I like Copenhagen Hasbeen, not because of Bicycles but because of the thorium energy lectures emanating from there (on U tube) and available to anyone who retains some useful cognitive ability!

Molten salt thorium reactors are walk away safe, very capable of burning nuclear waste in part of the cycle, which when fully played out, leaves smaller remment waste, with a reduced half life of just 300 years!

And because they provide incomprehensibly cheap electrical power, day and night, whether the wind blows or not and whether the sun shines or not! Just 8 grams of thorium, in a very safe miniature laser actuated reactor, placed in the back of you car can power it and F1 performance, for the next 100 years without refueling!

Driverless technology and cars able to talk to each other will help to ease congestion as will overpasses and underpasses that replace traffic lights! As will limiting trucks to after 6 pm and before 6 am!

Driverless company cars could pick up around four co-workers to complete the daily commute, thereby reducing the usual commuter gridlock by as much as 75%?

Overdue decentralization and work from home strategies made possible by the rollout of the NBN, will reduce the number of cars using our roads! And nuclear technology will eliminate the smog our vehicular traffic creates!

Just think, a small marble of (seriously abundant) thorium roughly the size of a plump cherry can be mined from the soil and refined for a total cost of $100.00; and that same small ball of thorium enough to power your home and recharge your electric car for the next 100 years!

That's just a dollar a year!

I've had my absolute fill of fathomless fools who think all we need is to tax motor vehicles out of existence!? To save the planet!?

When instead, we need to think and work smarter to cure all the self evident problems affecting the planet!

And start here with a very low cost energy roll out guaranteed to reinvigorate and transform manufacture and export capability here!
Alan B.