Off topic. The Cost of fuel, market forces and being green

re: Off topic. The Cost of fuel, market forces and being green

Andrew.Fryer — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:04:00 GMT

Trivia Gary Numan sang the song

re: Off topic. The Cost of fuel, market forces and being green

James ONeill — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:18:41 GMT

Mark, I agree.

I have a bus which goes past my house but it is so infrequent that I can't rely on it to get to the Station. I recently stayed in Tenby and parked my car in the station car park for a week for £10. My local station car park used it used to be free (so did the park and ride car parks in Oxford), but it's full at £5 per day ! Unless the bus is attractive enough for people to leave their cars at home (bus - attractive ? HA HA HA )the only way to keep demand for car parking spaces within capacity is to charge like this.

Rail fares are similarly expensive from my station into London.

From a pure economics point of view the supply of public transport has declined as people have become more affluent. People like the insulation that a car brings. I bet your bus company would still operate that route if there were enough passengers and mine would run a service frequent enough to be useful ... they're in it to make money after all.

Many rail lines into London seem to operating at capacity at peak times and so fares have been set to keep people off the trains, not encourage them on. Only a step change in capacity can lower ticket prices. That would mean many more people on the trains , using more capacity, more cheaply.

Since I tend to be of a free-market disposition, I don't like seeing taxes spent to distort the market: there is no case for subsidizing those who work in the capital - however, I don't think either of us are saying that. Right now fuel prices should be pushing people to use more fuel efficient kinds of transport; which don't have the capacity to take them and can't add it. So there is a case for spending tax on public transport provided it is increase capacity.

As for internal flights if it is a choice between filling seats on a flight and extra car journeys - then flying is greener. Again a step change is required which reduces the number of planes flying, not the number of people on each.

What's interesting from an economics point of view is that a price point has emerged for more plane-seats sold at a lower price and the capacity has been added - which hasn't happened for trains.

re: Off topic. The Cost of fuel, market forces and being green

Mark Wilson — Sat, 31 May 2008 03:33:27 GMT

I really wish that I could use my car less - I have a very similar scheme to you (company car, fuel card - tax bill is the same whether I do 25,000 miles a year or 50,000) but then I look at public transport.

I live in a small market town about 60 miles north of London. One of the local bus companies stopped running through our town as it added 4 miles to their journey. So we lost an hourly bus service to two of the major towns nearby. We still have an hourly service to another major town, but it takes 45 minutes to go 12 miles (around many housing estates) and is not inexpensive either.

Once I reach the station, I'd looking at almost 40 quid for a return train to London (peak) - and if I drive instead of taking the bus, it's £7 to park for a day.

When we stay at my brother-in-law's place in Bristol we use the bus for local journeys. It's the same with friends in Manchester (insert name of big city of your choice) but for those of us who live in provincial Britain, public transport is too costly, or sometimes just takes too long (public transport for the 90 mile journey from me to Microsoft's offices in Reading would take about 4 hours each way and cost a fortune).

But it's not car travel that gets me. It's domestic flights. Why get a flight from London to Manchester when the train will do the same journey in about the same time (city centre to city centre, taking into account check-in times)? It's the same for short haul in Europe - like London to Paris.

Make the "low-cost" airlines pay for their environmental cost and we'll see that they are not low cost at all.

And as for road pricing - scrap VED as it's irrelevant - we all pay a tax based on a combination of the miles we drive and how efficient our car is. It's called fuel duty. And it should be used to fund both improved public transport and road repairs (which are falling behind at a rapid rate - I actually had to swerve to avoid a pothole on the M1 today!). Which gets me back on topic - $9.50 a gallon. What exactly are our friends in US complaining about when theirs less than half that [source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/wrgp/mogas_home_page.html]?