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.

As for tax, when we become a manufacturing hub for the rest of the world and sell much ore to it than we buy;and when that outcome is further assisted by a completely reformed and simple tax system everybody pays according to their means!
As their one and only tax liability!

There will be plenty of revenue to pay for all the road and rail services we need!

Albeit, far fewer fathomless fools, who always think the answer lies in taxing enterprise and entrepreneurship out of existence or forced to relocate elsewhere, like almost all our better ideas and smartest people!
Alan B.

Think about it. then get on U tube, and listen to eminent scientist and nuclear expert, Dr Steven Boyd explaining just how safe thorium reactors are, and why we should get busy building a few and filing for patent, or wait until the Chinese who are beavering feverishly away with westinghouse, building stuff congress has decided on their sound scientific understanding of nuclear technology, to outlaw!

Listen and understand, bananas are more radioactive than thorium, and nuclear energy is the safest in the world!

The only problem to date is crap design, big nuclear and infantile oversight compounded by the vested interest of coal companies? [Coal now costs more than natural gas?] And the fossil fuel sector!?

Moreover, the law in the USA the home of modern innovation, has been changed recently, meaning first to file wins the patent and not necessarily the inventor!

The black ink notes physicists/researchers were obliged to keep are therefore rendered worthless along with decades of research!

The time for vacillating, endless political prevarication is over along with the puerile excuses for inaction!

Simply put, even the chinese commies have embraced the free market model, while sensibly retaining ownership and control of energy and capital, much to the chagrin of investors who just don't believe in free market competition, but rather want monopolies/"cartels" and a captive market which can be screwed for every last dollar! Even as the world goes to hell in a handbasket!

Lifting folks out of poverty is the way forward for us!
I mean how much trade did we do with China when Hasbeen was a boy? And how critical is that trade for us today!

And if china had remained mired in endemic poverty, where would we be now? Under the bedcovers, hiding from the Great Yellow Horde about to descend and take us over, and could still do so via their massive economic strength! Unless we pull finger, stop mumbling nonsense mantras about a government that has no business in business, and just get busy making something happen!

Just don't do something, stand there!
Alan B.

Alan I have no use for electric cars. Usually when I get a car out it will have travelled a minimum of 150 kilometres before being put away, & at least 40% of the time it will be around 400Km.

As for your thorium cherry, I do like that idea, but would put it in my car, as the dedicated power source. I expect cars will come with a lifetime supply of nuclear power before driverless or electric cars are if ever the norm. If the system comes to pass, I'll put another in my home.

Most of the people I know have no use for car sharing either. Very few do not have child transport or other chores as part of their commute.

The last little company I ran, had a factory near Nerang, [Gold Coast]. Only 22 employs but they came from eastern, central, & western Brisbane, Beaudesert, Murwillumbah & widely spread areas of the Gold Coast. There were a few efforts to carpool, but none lasted any time. There were just too many times they all needed to go in different directions after work.

Hasbeen, Tesla's new S model Wagon has a range somewhere north of 400 kilometres and is reasonably priced at I'm told, around 35 grand? Moreover, G.M. is said to be working on a new prototype battery that could double Tesla's range!?

Energy as cheap as thorium, might enable forward thinking councils to put magnetic interfaces under metered parking, which could say, recharge the vehicle to around 80% in around an hour, while you shop, visit the G.P., attend a board meeting, the bowls club or what have you?

Can't died in a cornfield over a century ago!

Yes we need to get serious about safe, clean thorium, if only to ensure our manufacturing sector is completely resuscitated, creating products, jobs, manufactured/value added exports and wealth here in Australia, for Australians!

Not tax avoiding foreigners who repatriate profits that ought to stay here! Where they can do the work of up to seven times their value, via the usual economic flow on factor!
Alan B.

Alan Tesla is only viable while the long suffering US taxpayers continue to fund what is closer to a confidence trick than a car manufacturer.

Those taxpayers have been fleeced of billions by Obama paying back his campaign funders with huge grants to alternate energy companies they started, now long gone.

I expect Tesla to go the same way. Their current recurring losses are huge, & getting bigger. It is only a matter of time.

Electric cars were a blind alley in the early days of the motor industry, & are still a blind alley.

Steam, & nuclear power are the future, but we may have to eliminate the greenies to get there.

Hasbeen: Nuclear technology may have already created a way to mix (liquid) Co2 collected directly from seawater and mix it with (liquid plasma) hydrogen collected from that seawater, combining the two to produce a variety of hydrocarbons? Fuel, and as the sea water gives up its Co2, it replaces it with Co2 drawn from the atmosphere?

If Tesla is running a scam, then so also is GM, who is putting the final touches on a battery said to double the range of Tesla? And there's huge money and people tied up in innovation like battery wall?

That said, I'm with you and would prefer thorium driving our motor vehicles, the farm tractor/harvester and any and all irrigation or desalination requirements!

The RV industry would go bananas if their power came from fueled for a lifetime recreational vehicles? And given an inboard dehumidifier that can make up to 40 litres of fresh water a day! Be able to go off grid for a couple of completely independant months or more? And exactly the solution our home defense forces need!

There are computer controlled four seat self flying VTL cars, currently configured as hybrids! Replacing the conventional combustion engine with a miniaturized thorium reactor? Could massively improve the range, speed and maneuverability of our rapid response forces!

That said, that'll be several decades or more, given some of our legislators/political puppets, I believe, will die in a ditch before they allow an inch of progress in this direction!? And I believe, for sound hip pocket (theirs) reasons!?

The counter attack by the Germans toward the end of WW11, referred to as the battle of the bulge, was only stopped because it ran out of fuel! And on the eastern front, they were beaten by the weather/fuel insecurity!

Thorium power in all our military hardware, would prevent both (similar) outcomes? Monty was slowed at a critical phase, waiting for his fuel supply to catch up?
Alan B.