The Wardman Wire

David Cameron tells the BBC:

“There are still around 40 flights a day to Manchester although there is a perfectly good train service.

“We do need to try to have taxes in areas that would change people’s behaviour and have an impact, rather than just clobbering passengers, which is what Gordon Brown did when he doubled air passenger duty in the budget.”

The main effect of such a move would be to clobber the Manchester economy.

He does not ask the question why people shun Richard Branson’s overpriced, godawful, rail service that costs more for an open return than any other transport method. In my experience, Virgin makes major hashups 30-50% of the time. The correct approach would be to force Richard Bransons to deliver an efficient service.

A standard, open, secondclass return, costs £219.00.

According to the AA, the cost of a £15000 car doing 12000 miles a year is around 40p / mile/ According to the RAC, the round trip journey is 400 miles.

So - even one up in a decent car - it is around 30% cheaper to go by road. In a carefully chosen correctly secondhand car, even that cheaper cost can be halved.

Come to your senses on this question, Mr Cameron. The Conservative way is competition between transport modes delivering a good service - not by slugging taxes on the ones people want to use and forcing them to travel in unpredictable Virgin trains.

Tags: Parliament, Politics, Greenery, Transport, UK, United Kingdom, Tax, Air Transport, Matt Wardman

[tags] Parliament, Politics, Greenery, Transport, UK, United Kingdom, Tax, Air Transport, Matt Wardman [/tags]