Get hip to the jive, daddio. Eco-driving! Light on fuel use, light on the causes of fuel use. The new buzzword that means taxing the life out of the countryside.
You like eco stuff, right? Fields, they’re great, aren’t they? Cows, they’re pretty groovy too! Big views of open landscapes, fab! And what you don’t see in that list is the people who live there. Funnily enough, nor does the government. Any government.
Just a few years ago, the car industry noted a trend for drivers to switch cars, from petrol to diesel. Suddenly, diesels had changed from being farmers’s Landrovers or London taxis and started being quiet and giving what seemed like astonishing numbers of miles per gallon. Spurred on by this, petrol engines too got a lot more efficient and where Terry and June might boast of 30 mpg, their grandchildren reasonably expect 50 or even 60 mpg from a lot of small cars today.
So get with it, baby! Spend £15,000 on a new car with money you don’t have to get 10 more miles to the gallon. Sorry, 2 more miles per litre. That doesn’t sound quite so good, does it? Let’s use gallons then. Unless we’re talking about the cost of fuel, but we certainly don’t want people who can just about remember £1.50 a gallon suddenly noticing it’s gone through £10 per gallon at the pumps.
Imperial gallons or metric litres the real measurement is this. It’s nine miles from where I live to the shop. That’s eighteen miles a day. In a week that’s 108 miles. In a month that’s getting on for 500 miles. And that’s a minimum of over £100 in the 4×4 we got on a three-year lease when we were hauling three tonnes of the Fabulous Cheese Trailer to fairs and markets and countryside events. Usually it’s more like £150 a month. So there has to be £300 of sales to get to work. There isn’t an option. It takes over 45 minutes to cycle each way and longer to avoid the A12, where bikes don’t really mix happily with lorries pulling 65 mph, and two feeder rat-runs where there aren’t even pavements to cycle on to illegally get out of the way of the traffic.
The result is over £3,500 that disappears every year, just in fuel. Not counting things like insurance, road tax, servicing and of course, the cost of the vehicle in the first place. Factor that in and it’s much more like £1,000 of revenue a month needed to spend on travel that goes nowhere. Someone has to pay it. You, me, customers, buyers, sellers. Half the average national wage isn’t a level of cost that can be absorbed. The worst thing is it isn’t a level of cost that is necessary. Fuel doesn’t cost that much, or it wouldn’t without so much tax on it. And while taxes are grudgingly necessary, they’re supposed to be fair and equal.
No-one can seriously pretend that where one group of people have transport alternatives and another group doesn’t, that makes things equal. In the countryside there obviously are no Tube trains. But there also aren’t busses, or not ones that will get you where you need to be and back the same day. At this level transport isn’t about choice, except for the obvious choice of choosing not to live outside towns. Which isn’t the road I wanted to go down today, apparently unlike every government over the past thirty years.
