“Per passenger per kilometre, trains account for up to 55% less emissions than cars”

You’re selling the cause *well* short there. A 12-car Electrostar suburban train has a power output of 4.5MW and carries 690 seated passengers; a car carrying one person has a power output of 75KW.

That’s 11.5x the power output per passenger for the car compared to the train passenger, even assuming the train isn’t full and standing, which they frequently are (if anyone believes that 1-occupant cars aren’t the norm for commuting, then they’re a Silly Person).

So your train only needs to be 1/10 full to be more environmentally friendly than the car, *even if* it’s running off electricity generated by fossil fuels…

[True, power output and energy consumption aren't quite the same thing - I've not got the time right now to multiply the figures through. But power stations, transmission lines and electric motors are very slightly more efficient at turning fossil fuels into kinetic energy than internal combustion engines; train driving is less stop/start than car driving; and trains have regenerative braking which means that power is sent back to the grid rather than converted into hot brake pads when they slow down, so this is unlikely to be distorted to unfairly favour the train...]

The problem with pricing motorists out of their cars is that it always happens BEFORE public transport improvement and has a disproportionate impact on the poor.

In pretty much every area of the country apart from London, you need your own transport to do things like get to work on time, go to job interviews, go to meetings, etc. Public transport is just not a feasible option.

What do you propose to do about this?

“Anyway, despite the market mechanism involved in the imposition of these congestion charges, the truth is that people should drive less.”

In what liberal world does anyone have the right to say this? If people choose to sit in 30 minute queues to move 10 meters then that is their choice. There is the environmental argument to be had which I agree with completely, but the way to encourage environmental action is to promote and improve the alternatives…not to charge and tax people up to the hilt for “bad” practice. Congestion charging and the like hit those that drive responsibly (through car sharing, taking less popular routes), have the necessity to drive through that area and that have less public transport options disproportionately.

The fact is that economically it is poor value to use public transport (if it’s even available) and the only answer anyone seems to have for this is that they can therefore make driving more pricey. In todays economic climate I can completely understand why people would stand against raising charges just to make other forms of transport seem more economically viable.

We can sit here as much as we want and try and claim that people are “stupid” if they don’t accept that they need to change, but the issue is much more complex than you make it out to be.

BTW, I don’t drive, I cycle, I sometimes use the train and I’m loathed to use buses.

“Congestion charging and the like hit those that drive responsibly (through car sharing, taking less popular routes)”

WTF? If there are four people in your car, then you each pay a quarter the CC of someone travelling on their own. Ideal…

“The fact is that economically it is poor value to use public transport (if it’s even available) and the only answer anyone seems to have for this is that they can therefore make driving more pricey.”

No – the real point is, it’s *exactly the bloody same* whether the government makes PT cheaper or driving more expensive. Since the government doesn’t have access to a magic pot of gold, if it wanted to make PT cheaper it would need to subsidise it more [1], and to do this it would need to raise taxes. Taxes raised on PT users would be cancelled out by the fare cuts, which means the net impact would fall on drivers. Which would be exactly the same as, err, charging drivers more.

[1] yeah yeah, ‘cut government waste and spend the savings’, ‘curb the excessive profits of the privatised operators’. In real life, it’s pretty much as efficient as it’s going to get on both sides, and people who believe there’s a big free lunch for the taking without identifying *very* specific cutback plans are naive idiots.

john b. The average car will potentially be less polluting than the biggest trains in a decade or so. Again, the government has spent all their transport money on initiatives and systems to charge people more, but nothing to roll out more energy efficient electric trains. This is why people oppose C-charging, it should be the last resort, not the first.

john b: If you make PT cheaper (and the point about PT is not just that it’s expensive, it’s that it is rarely fit for purpose…if you moved as many drivers out of their cars as people claim they want, the PT infrastructure would buckle and break) then you benefit everyone. if you charge car drivers more all you do is piss them off while the rest of the public still resides with inadequate transport.

Let me repeat.. TRANSPORT IN THIS COUNTRY IS INADEQUATE (though perhaps those of you in London may not see this). Simply increasing tax on cars doesn’t solve this fundamental problem. It also doesn’t help to quote train emission figures that only apply to something like (at most) 40% of the train stock.

Well, since you put it like that, I hope your lot get voted out by all those motorists you don’t care about and think are stupid.

“The average car will potentially be less polluting than the biggest trains in a decade or so.”

No it won’t. See: physics.

“TRANSPORT IN THIS COUNTRY IS INADEQUATE (though perhaps those of you in London may not see this)”

Rurally, true but irrelevant – nobody’s suggesting the Rutland congestion scheme. But in Manchester, where I commuted for 4 years without a car, it’s perfectly adequate. Same appears to be the case in Edinburgh and Brum, althought that’s just based on off-peak transport use and talking to friends there.

I don’t know where my last comment went, so here goes again…

“No it won’t. See: physics.”

See the facts… http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/article2067255.ece

You also seem to be ignoring that Congestion Charging in Manchester is a green light for other councils to do it around the country, in places with much less adequate transport. Money is actively being removed from transport strategies that don’t include congestion charging in places such as my home city of Bristol.

As a principle I’m against a form of charge that ultimately means those getting charged are (in the ideal hypothetical end game) the ones that must use the areas being taxed. If we were truly charging and demonising only those that definitely could and should be using alternatives to the car I’d be marginally more happy. But like I say, I don’t see a liberal argument in congestion charging in any form at this stage.

Um, don’t we have congestion charges on the trains already – it’s called peak rate fares – and a fat lot of good it has done to reduce congestion on or off the railways at those times.

The problem lies in the inelastic demand for transport due to the limited flexibility or working practices, which enables any operator to make the case for additional charges without ostensibly desiring fatter profit margins.

So sorry, no suggestion will start to solve the problems unless it addresses all related issues with radically different political vision.

“a fat lot of good it has done to reduce congestion on or off the railways at those times.”

You don’t know that. Indeed, it’s highly likely that peak fares do reduce congestion, as highlighted by the extreme crowding often seen on the first morning off-peak train and the last afternoon off-peak train. Just, they don’t reduce it to the levels that you’d like to see.

they shouldn’t be driving, they shouldn’t be on the train…have we invented the personal teleporter yet?

“By 2022, more efficient power generation will have reduced the emissions of the GNER trains to 28g/pkm. But the emissions of the Voyagers, which are only five years old and are due to remain in service until after 2030, will be unchanged. On present trends, emissions from the average car will have been reduced from 131g/pkm to 98g/pkm by 2022.”

From the times.

Ah good, it’s Ben Webster. In general, if he writes an article, you should ignore it.

The Kemp study assumes passenger cars are occupied by 1.6 people, which is blatantly false at rush hour, and that trains are full to 1/3 of seating capacity, which is blatantly false at rush hour.

And the comparison with Voyagers is particularly stupid, since they’re short trains with relatively few seats that travel on popular routes and are nearly always full. The trains which run empty and get the daily average down as low as 1/3 are the long off-peak fixed-formation electric ones as used on NXEC and Virgin, which are much more energy efficient anyeay.

But by far the most stupid and misleading part is Webster’s quoting of the Kemp study to derive train and car figures for 2022: his figure for diesel trains assumes no improvement in efficiency or utilisation (despite rising passenger numbers and likely improvements in technology) while assuming cars will continue to improve at both…

“The Kemp study assumes passenger cars are occupied by 1.6 people, which is blatantly false at rush hour, and that trains are full to 1/3 of seating capacity, which is blatantly false at rush hour.”

Proof of this? Besides, you cannot move from the car to the train at rush hour (or vice versa) as both are at capacity in terms of the available space. In fact it is much more sustainable to make car sharing schemes more encouraged than it is to get people out of their cars. And really what is the benefit of congestion charging when it does so little to make it more expensive to drive? I absolutely will not be surprised if £5 on the top of a tank of petrol will be cheaper by 2013 than the price of a return train ticket.

What exactly, john, do you suggest people do when you’ve made it too expensive to use a car (which is pretty much the same price of going on an overcrowded train at peak hour), not even considering that there are swathes of the country that live in no place that would allow them to use any other public transport than a train to commute? Is this the grand Labour plan, to charge people the world for travel and then say “lump it”? Your view on this is entirely short sighted and lacks any kind of real objective. The objective seems to purely be “stop people driving cars” without any kind of thought as to how to cater for such changes.

If this is genuinely a cross-section of what motorists think then frankly they’re too stupid to be allowed an opinion never mind suffrage.

You know along with Sunny’s comment about Republicans being scum and the above I can’t help feel there’s a hint of an arrogant tone rearing it’s head on LC.

I know it’s only two articles but I’m not convinced such ideological snobbery is wise; it’s needs to be checked pronto if you ask me.

I think there was also an article a while back going on about how all Tories are just evil, I think that was on here. Some writers do need to check their arrogance of opinion for sure.

@10 sorry *except at those times.

The demand for transport to get to work is inelastic, so congestion is only displaced, which may make it more managable, but doesn’t reduce it.

It’s one of those old conundrums whereby companies interests are opposed to consumer interests because demand and capacity must be equated.

While customer demand for transport peaks during rush hour the provider is interested in operating at maximum capacity. As structural costs remain proportionately high the provider is incentivised to minimise spare capacity.

Ultimately, therefore, our transport problems are due to the long-term inflationary policies of successive governments which include increasing the distance travelled to work under the guise of increasing mobility (thereby also offsetting social mobility).

You could say that inflation is a consequence of bad financial planning, which itself is a result of a general inability to make long-term plans come to fruition indicative of policy failure. Since both spatial and developmental plans are weakened by the fragmented nature of local government policy implementation beomes susceptible to the volatile forces engendered by any reorganisation (and we’ve had 5 major reorganisations in 80 years) – just consider the additional difficulty in progressing the channel tunnel and rail link over 25 years caused by the transfer of relevant authority between governmental bodies in that time, not to mention the increased expense.

One byproduct of this volatility is the pressure on government to avoid or neuter democratic public enquiries covering major projects (thus more centralisation – eg the recently mooted strategic planning authority). This not only creates opposition and gives it a focus, but it also fails us by not meeting the duty to reach anything more than adequate or interim political solutions.

“You know along with Sunny’s comment about Republicans being scum and the above I can’t help feel there’s a hint of an arrogant tone rearing it’s head on LC.”

It’s not just here, it’s across the left-wing blogosphere. Way too many leftists have specialisms in sanctimony and arrogance – especially when they aren’t doing too well in the polls.

It’s not just here, it’s across the left-wing blogosphere. Way too many leftists have specialisms in sanctimony and arrogance – especially when they aren’t doing too well in the polls.

I aint saying its worse on the left, I think the right can be just as bad, my point is we should be better.;)

18: Great post, saying what I’ve been trying to much better.

Oh dear.

And here we have a perfect specimen, in the wild, of the sort of illiberal, nanny knows best, “you aren’t allowed an opinion”, sanctimonious, patronising Leftism that turns the voters off in droves.

You will find no better evidence of why totalitarianism has largely been a left wing poison over the decades.

And you wonder why the Left is at an all-time low in the polls?

If the answer is denying people their opinions, you are asking the wrong question.

Firstly, I don’t like the tone of the original article – if you’re going to get people out of cars onto public transport you need to make a open, honest deal with them and put in place the mechanisms that allow you to keep your side of the bargain, rather than just hectoring them. It’s not motorists that are the problem, it’s cars.

It’s also about trust, which is why this is a seriously bad time for anyone in the Brown government to start pushing congestion charging as an idea outside London. As an aside on that note, if things won’t work as well outside London why not take a few lessons from London about things like bus route tendering or tightly managed public rail concessions? Manchester’s scheme includes something very like Oyster as well as CC, so why not go the whole hog?

Secondly, you may not like it but John B knows his stuff, he reads (from experience) much the same stuff as myself, which is to say really quite geeky, in-depth examinations of transport energy economics produced by people like Roger Ford (in fact both of them are frequently found on uk.railway discussing just these things). Just throwing articles in the Times at him is going to make your argument fall over faster than Paul Staines coming out of the Adam Smith Institute. Porcupines and arse-kicking contests spring to mind.

The truth is that John’s original example of a twelve-car regenerating Electrostar (I’d add running off overhead electrification, too) is the state of the art for moving people around in bulk with the lowest possible energy use. The best cars, in comparison, are nowhere and aren’t going to catch up in fifty years let alone ten (particularly on journeys in urban areas), and the double standard applied to energy efficiency improvements for cars versus trains knocks the argument dead anyway.

Thirdly, where would you put all the cars if you want to get rid of congestion without taking active steps to move journeys to PT? Large scale urban road building went seriously out of fashion in about 1971 and hasn’t come back and isn’t going to come back (land prices, apart from anything else, not to mention the tendency to destroy the city they serve). You can’t road-build your way out of congestion, so the only solutions are behavioural – either persuade people to travel at different times or by different means. I point to the example of my old man, who for years was a leather-glove-wearing petrolhead, but now cheerfully jumps on the train for trips he’d previously driven on. Build it and they will come, get the basics right and they’ll come back, and no one will be crying about illiberal measures when their shiny new train pulls in on time.

Oh, and as for removing funds from councils that don’t do CC, there’s one good reason I can think of – it’ll be more efficient to spend it somewhere that does. If a city’s population are selfless and forward-thinking enough to voluntarily accept limits on car use, naturally via democratic means, surely government should keep its side of the bargain and put in the cash to provide a quality, affordable alternative? If not, not. That’s fair.

Damn, should have seen this debate earlier!

The article makes a lot of sense – generally, when it comes to making choices people are stupid and should be treated as such. Ask someone how much driving costs, and they will almost always underestimate,by the better part of a two-thirds.

2) Jennie is right – to an extent. One of the reasons congestion charging was rejected in the early days is because it is retrograde; however, with the technology now we do have the ability to differentiate by type of vehicle or by having registered non-payers, which can off-set some of those issues.

6) The issue with PT is less about cost and more about quality. You could reduce fares to zero and it won’t get everyone out of their cars, but improve the quality and reliability of the journey and it becomes a lot more attractive to non-users. That’s why everyone raves about trams (despite that they don’t do that – another debate), and why bus use in London and a few other cities is increasing.

15) I tend to work to 1.2 pax/vehicle as a starting point when assessing transport schemes, though in many cases it’s lower. I’m not aware of any situations where 1.6 wouldn’t be laughed out – even on some more aspirational schemes 1.5 is a best-case outcome! There’s various tools – TEMPRO, which is free to download, and TRICS which is a professional tool for assessing the transport impacts of developments, which give different car occupancy rates but they generally tend towards around 1.1-1.2.

Tom, in all honesty I couldn’t give a fuck if I’m wrong on the issue of the carbon emissions, I consider myself “told” on that one and oh what a sore bum I have. However it doesn’t change the fact that the article written, and a lot of John B’s views, are intrinsically the wrong way to go about solving the problems we face.

Similarly I don’t think your thoughts are entirely realistic on aspects of the situation either. Funding for building PT systems that actually would potentially provide regular affordable transport systems in a city, or removing them in favour of forcing a CC on people? Let’s just go the whole hog and just ban cars for christ sake if we’re going to be that arse about face and illiberal about it.

Why shouldn’t people pay to use roads?

Better to pay by the mile than road tax.

I have no problem with the idea of fuel prices going up in tax for the abolition of VED, if that’s what you mean.

[16][22] Quite. We’ll be imitating those Political Betting wallahs at this rate.

The article makes a lot of sense – generally, when it comes to making choices people are stupid and should be treated as such.

Does that apply to those who chose to vote Labour? Activists who chose to join political-faction-of-your-choice?

Surely cars need support as people need freedom. ::