Road pricing is 'part of the answer'

News

13th February, 2007

Environmentalists have urged the government to support road pricing plans against a rising tide of protest.

Friends of the Earth Transport Campaigner Tony Bosworth said that whilst road pricing was not a ‘magic bullet’ solution, it was ‘part of the answer’ in tackling climate change. The scheme could see motorists who use busy roads being charged up to £1.50 a mile using roadside tracking systems.

This morning over 1.2 million signatures had been collected on the Downing Street website under an online petition to ‘scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy’. There are reports that at points the website was unable to cope with the influx of visitors.

Yesterday, the Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander decried some of the protestors claims as “myths” and warned that the government was bound to deal with “the growing problem of congestion”:
“We don’t have the kind of luxury of doing nothing, if we are not going to see the kind of gridlock found in American cities,” he said.

This article first appeared in the Ecologist February 2007