The huge amount of money saved from halting smart motorway implementation could, in the short term at least, be used to increase the number of traffic police on our roads. Highways Agency staff should be given the ability to quickly report poor driving, with a focus on policing driving standards rather than just collecting speeding fines. Attentive, aware drivers doing 80mph clearly pose less of a risk on motorways than the vast amount of drivers who think texting at the wheel is acceptable.
Richard Bremner
Introduce a smart road-tolling system to replace vehicle excise duty. Every vehicle would be fitted, by law, with a smart GPS tracker.
If you think that’s invasive, well, your smartphone already knows where you are. A standard cost-per-mile rate would be levied across every UK road, and adjusted in realtime according to the vehicle’s homologated weight (taxing weight taxes road wear), emissions (CO2, NOx, particulates) and time of use (from rush hour to dead-of-night), plus the road’s maintenance needs.
Most of the tax would be used for general government spending, as now, but a fixed proportion (20%?) would be allocated to road maintenance and build. Roads needing work would cost slightly more to use, but not so much as to encourage rat-running, to pay for repairs. Foreign haulage operators would also pay.
The result would be the fairer allocation of road resources, as determined by the vehicle’s realtime congestion, environmental and maintenance impact. The tax on weight would encourage reduction, with obvious benefits. CO2 output would additionally continue to be taxed via fuel/electricity duty.
Hilton Holloway
I would introduce significant incentives – guaranteed not to be withdrawn for at least seven years – for the adoption of LPG and natural gas as automotive fuels. It’s a much quicker way of shifting from diesel, especially for commercial operators.

While people struggle with the cost and difficultly of charging battery cars, we are literally standing on a country-wide gas infrastructure. The Volkswagen Group is already producing gas-powered vehicles across most of its brands that are very low on both pollution and CO2.
Road fuel receipts would have the three cash amounts printed on them. Government fuel tax, the producer charges and retailer profit. Elsewhere, there would be three numbers on rail tickets: the ticket cost, the taxpayer subsidy for the fare and the profit per-ticket being made by private operators. It might remind people that motorists pay more than their ‘fare’ share.
Join the debate
Citytiger
My ideas
Bin smart motorways, they dont work.
Bin HS2 and HS3, and instead use the money to electrify the whole rail network, starting with the east coast mainline. Hull to London being the priority.
Ensure rail franchises offer value for money, we have some of the most expensive train tickets in the world - why when the quality of service is average at best.
Stop the stupid ability to make cheap rail travel by splitting tickets, and make direct tickets the cheapest option.
Remove and ban all future bus lanes, unless they can physically prove they dont cause congestion. Start a nationwide cycle path building programme, get bikes off the road and onto dedicated paths wherever possible, ensure they adhere to the highway road, and make insurance, lights, helmets and high vis mandatory for all cyclists.
Get more police out on the road showing a physical presence, not just to issue tickets, but to give advice and slaps on the wrist, common sense policing.
Get rid of the highways traffic officer, and use real highway police.
Get rid of the congestion charge, its a money making scam, and give real incentives to get rid of older more polluting vehicles, tax the most polluting off the road, its simple, reinstate taxbreaks for modern ultra low emmision diesels.
Ensure motorway services offer realistic prices, not just rip off the motorist because they can, bring in a watchdog to police them to ensure they do.
Once we leave the EU, ask industry proffessionals what they would like to see with changes to things like driving hours regulations and training for HGV's, they are the ones doing it.
Finally raise motorway speed limits to 85, but strictly police it, its the average speed anyway, and reduce speeds in more built up areas to 20.
scrap
I’d bin Smart motorways and
I’d bin Smart motorways and replace this with a smart drivers programme: essentially, signs on the motorway saying KEEP LEFT and KEEP YOUR DISTANCE, and increased police patrols to fine and ban drivers who drive badly.
The existing motorway is used inefficiently because drivers hog the fast lane like morons.
Peter Cavellini
Some ideas....
Who’d be a Politician?, we all have our “ what I’d do” moments,but, the abiding thing is, where would we get the money from?, nobody in the article mentioned this or indeed how much it would cost.
Zeddy
Peter Cavellini wrote:
Well, they could start to be honest (eh?) by admitting that the motorist is a cash-cow (or is that a Qashqai?) and that most of our taxes go to the national health service et al rather than back to motoring related issues.
Citytiger
Peter Cavellini wrote:
It doesnt matter how much it would cost, the money could come from Labours magic money tree.. Diane Abbott could work out the costings but it will probably be slightly more than a dairy milk chocolate bar..
GD
Thoughts...
From a safety viewpoint I really believe there should be a considerable slowdown in the process of introducing autonomous vehicles, be they cars or commercial vehicles. Computers are still too unreliable. I would far prefer to remain in control of the vehicle I am riding in. This headlong rush into the future is, I believe ill-advised.
grimble33
"Britain's" transport minister??
What a shame there's such a schoolboy howler in the very first sentence of this piece. Britain/the UK doesn't have "a" transport minister..... it has 4. One for each of the 4 countries in this artificial multi-nation superstate.
There are 4 transport departments, with 4 sets of policies, and 4 sets of priorities. That may make a lot of sense in tailoring the completely different policies appropriate to the Highlands and SE England for example - but it undoubtedly leads to a lack of joined-up thinking when there are different departments running transport on each side of the Severn Bridge, or between the M6 and M74.
And it's led to utter nonsense like the Transport Department in London deciding to spend tens of Billions on a "high speed" rail line which will actually make trains to Glasgow SLOWER.... because unlike Pendelinos, HS2 trains won't tilt, so will have to travel slower on the increasingly twisty West Coast Main Line north of Preston.
harf
my thoughts
We're not about to spend lots of money on more roads, even if we wanted to. I think its about using the space we have more efficently. People will in future years question that everyone started and finished work at the same time and the roads were jammed for those specific times of day but not so bad otherwise - why did you do this?
1. Allow overtaking on both sides on the M-way. More evenly distribute traffic across lanes. Get around those middle laners more easily.
2. MINIMUM speed limit for cars on an M-way of 60mph. A lorry should NEVER have to overtake a car on the M-way.
3. Not a hater of smart M-ways - i think they work if managed properly - but i like the idea of higher limits when empty.
4. Otherwise, bin HS2. As someone said somewhere, its a Victorian answer to a modern problem. By the time its finished autonomous cars will exist to some extent. I'm not against trains but don't build a new line that connects existing centres for another £50bn to save 15mins on a journey - ludicrous.
5. Charge people in ULEV zones who have a car that qualifies freely to enter but then is running on ICE instead of battery power. Just having the appropriate car for free entry is not enough.
Will86
What I'd do...
Some good suggestions above, here's my take:
1. Mandatory 10 year refresher courses for all drivers. Not a retest, the consequences of failure would be too high, but something to highlight those bad habits.
2. More traffic police to help improve driving standards (middle lane hogging, using a phone, not signalling - leave speeding to the cameras). Even simply using scrap's suggestion above of putting reminder messages on gantries to get people to keep left would help and could be implemented tomorrow. I've seen this done a few times but it seems to have stopped.
3. I've no problem with smart motorways but they need to be smarter. Being told to slow down miles in advance of a hazard is excessive and counter productive.
4. Much greater push towards electrification. Thinking through energy generation, infrastructure and adoption of electric vehicles.
5. Invest in better tyre and road surface technology. One of the major blights on this country is road noise. It's amazing how far the sound of a car can travel irrespective of what powers it. Perhaps VAT on tyres should be based on their width - the wider the tyre the more you pay.
6. Ditch fuel duty and impose a pay per mile system. The rate will vary depending on the time you travel and what roads you use. As Richard points out above, we are all already being tracked by our phones so there isn't really any loss of privacy.
7. Go metric. I mean its 2019, surely it's time to switch to kilometres.
Citytiger
Will86 wrote:
Never, what will you suggest next, we switch to driving on the right as well. There is nothing wrong with miles.
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