Xplora wrote:You can get people out of their cars... you just make it too expensive and they stop getting in. You charge them 10K a year rego and you'll decimate the driver numbers. People need to commute. They don't need to drive. Don't get me wrong... I don't want them to stop driving. I'm a 3rd generation car mechanic LMAO but you have to manage the traffic somehow. If you can't afford to walk, or ride, or PT, you can afford to pay. If you can't afford to pay, you have to charge more to cover it. A lot of people don't really need to drive, they just make decisions to do so.
It does not require great political will to make this happen. Just bump up fuel tax or drop the exemptions for fuel that currently exist. The normative tax structures will help enormously. It will stimulate the economy as well.. local manufacturing improves once it is too pricey to ship interstate.
Reducing the entitlement is easy. Change the rules, and the people change with them.
Hmmm. I recall when petrol was around 25c per gallon (about 5 cents per litre) and the oil crisis was hitting (early 1970's) when people and commentators predicted that once petrol got to, say, 50c per gallon (10 cpl) that there would be a wholesale exodus from driving. Even after taking the rising CPI into consideration the price has well and truly got past that. People just got used to it.
Making it expensive does make a difference, but only for a while. People get into the habit of the extra expense and are forgiving of it.
On the other hand they also find tougher parking become once experienced for a while is accpetable. Hitting parking seems to be a good thing to do. (The City of Perth's free CAT buses are funded by an increasing levy on parking bays. Clever. Drivers are funding the alternative for those that do not drive.)
On political will I make the following observation. The cost to add an extra lane to existing freeway or highway in a built up metropolis is massive - the cost of adding a lane to our existing Polly Farmer tunnel was stated as $50m for the 1.6km and that required no actrual widening of the tunnel. Yet governments do not balk at doing it when congestion hits drivers. No government will allow congestion to to happen for very long without being seen to do something about it. This and related public transport along the congested conduits became about the major issue in the year leading up to our last state election after a period of ignoring it.
I think that the sort of decision where a government chooses NOT to address congestion is only made when the cost of the works is so massive that the political pain from not having money for other essentials is even greater.