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If a motorist, smoker and drinker walked into a bar.. I think the motorist would probably not be the worst done by. Like tobacco and alcohol, motoring has *always* been heavily taxed and most people will have by now internalised it as a fact of life when making lifestyle decisions.

I enjoyed that confusion of metaphors too. The reader was is invited to contrast balloons, which are big and round, often colourful, and tend to float upwards, with rabbit burrows that tend to be narrow (hence the shape of ferrets), dark, enclosed, and lead downwards into the ground. Almost...

Reduced fuel duty does not get passed onto motorists. Evidence suggests that lower fuel duty simply leaves money on the table that fuel vendors pocket themselves. Motoring clubs were complaining after the 5p cut a year or so back that the prices they were paying had not reduced. So for those of...

I'm glad the budget continued the trend of canning haghway schemes. This goes hand in hand with the reduction of fuel duty. Revenue from petrol is in real-terms decline so why would government want to invest in that area? Nobody wats to grasp the nettle of road pricing. Better to give the...

Motoring is in big trouble. This article from the Guardian includes rather startling data on the collapse in car sales within Europe as a whole: And before the "railways are losing their sustainability advantage in the face of the electric car transition" crowd respond, they might like to...

I saw that term used in the Guardian. This is the UK mainstream media we are talking about. Those of us familiar with their quality of analysis and editorialising on HS2 (shout-out to that paper's Mr Jenkins!) hardly have confidence in reportage on high speed rail more generally.

Exactly. And what better way to avoid being drawn into a fight than to be less dependent of resources that everyone else is going to be fighting over? I don't especially like all this braggado about national security and all the rest anymore than you, but it is soo in fashion this year...

Yeah, well I meant in pitching for investment, both expansion you note is needed and electrification. Alstom, for instance, should articulate the national security implications of giving Derby some orders, both in terms of UK industrial base, but also make strongly my argument that the trains...

The argument for a greater modal share by rail is its energy efficiency. This always seems to be framed in terms of carbon emissions, but unfortunately the current governemnt does not seem to care about that. With the sanctions against Russian oil, and the Middle East a tinderbox, I think rail...

Another day, another XC overcrowding thread. What is there left to discuss that has not been covered 100 times before?

As somebody currently living in Jersey I see the appeal. But I think it is wrong headed to use it as an excuse not to sort out the inequality that exists on the island, by bussing in what I'm sure the powers-that-be consider an expendable workforce from the EU. But fortunately that plan is...

You would have to be a "fist of quality" grandmaster like Roger Ford.

It seems to me that Boeing has become like AnsaldoBreda was a decade back, during the period when they forgot how to build trains and had to be brought by Hitachi. Although this time the Japanese may not be able to repeat the trick: Mitsubishi recently shut down their own aviation subsidiary and...

Maybe so, if we decided Russian oil was not so unpalatable as we previously thought.

The horrific situation in the holy lands gets me down, so perhaps it is better to divert the mind thinking of a relatively trivial thing related to our own interest in transportation. If the major oil producers in the middle east were to place an embargo on oil to the West, what would happen in...

You should give WNXX a go. We are a bit more feisty there than the so-called political realists that inhabit this forum. HS2 is inevitable and nessasary in a growing and/or greening economy. As I see it, we are either a nation that will grow and/or green our economy and need an HSR system. Or...

You know full well that nothing is certain till the fat lady sings, but that is the general mood music. Combined with the undeniable logic underpinning a continuous link between Northern Powerhouse Rail and HS2. International investors have been vocal about the need for the UK up its game with...

Oh no I mean that, if I were an executive in HS2, I would be absolutely foot dragging on undoing work on phase 2 that would have to be redone when the programme restarts under the next government. Which yesterdays by-election makes even more probable.

The new infrastructure report is getting some coverage. I think world events demonstrate the need for a proper transport system rather than hoping people bring their own car everywhere. If the Arabs will turn off the taps in the next few days it will look pretty stupid to have curtailed the...

Go back further (I’m talking the days of Adonis as transport guru towards the end of Labour in the noughties) and I remember Wolmar confidently predicting that there will never be high speed rail north of London in the UK. Well we will have soon. And that is something to build from. When Chris...