“There was no sign of the flat fee being in use yesterday in Nottingham, I managed to pick up a penalty for paying £1.50 for an hours parking, when I should only have paid £1. Just because I brought my ticket from a Nottingham Council machine, that was not valid for the space I parked in, despite the machine being 20 seconds from where my car was parked.”

“inoffthered

It appears that the Council are prepared to put slightly to one side the desire to raise revenue but keep at least the whip hand regarding the herding and chastising of the motorist.

It is the oldest trick in the book and has scientific antecedents in Pavlov's Dogs.

They are doing the same things with the trees sacrificed the the Holy Tram. On one hand they are chopping them down wholesale and yet now saying there are some they may not need to fell.

Well we should be grateful then!”

“PatrickETree "raking money in?" I bet the costs of monitoring and enforcing the £1 charge will be considerably more than the revenue raised. So as well as driving people away from nottingham, the city ratepayers will be subsidising the whole process”

“I've had to laugh at some of the anti-car comments on these pages and others...Well, for an experiment let the council leave the car parking charges as they are. After a year lets see how many businesses are still surviving, how may have had to lay off workers and how many have gone! My guess is that the results will be a lot worse than losing the car drivers business since last November when these charges were introduced.”

“These morons who are running our city only seem to be concerned with raking money in at every opportunity. Why did they not realise that they were driving people away from the very businesses that occupy the city centre when they introduced these ridiculous evening parking charges?”

“So when does this flat fee of £1 come into effect,i was in Nottingham yesterday and the fee for on street parking was £3 for two hours and then it is reduced to 50pence between 6 and 8pm and then after 8 it is free,also they have put new meters on Station Street where you have to put your car reg num in and at 11am yesterday there was not one car parked there.”

“Sorry MarkXBSSensor, I missed the double-double commas that this site now uses.
It's a terrible system.”

“MarkXBSSensor, you don't understand the difference between charges and taxes.”

“I wonder… have the council shills been out in force over the weekend, clicking on the red arrows?”

“by bosephus Sunday, February 12 2012, 12:21PM

"The answer to your last question is that motorists, just like non-motorists, do have to pay some taxes. Sometimes, a very small proportion of those taxes might be spent on things they don't actually use, want, or even like. I don't use some motorways in some parts of the country, but I don't object to contributing to the costs of providing and maintaining them. I also don't use sports centres or swimming pools, but I have no issues in helping to pay for them so others can use them."

"Pleased to be of service!"

-------------------------------

I keep explaining this, but STILL some people seem to struggle.


We all pay for things that benefit society.

ie all of us.


For example, you might not drive on the motorways, but how do you think the food you eat gets to you? Or are you a vegetarian who grows all his own food (with no "imported" seed, fertiliser, tools, etc!).

You might have never left your house, but how did the midwife get there? How does the Doctor visit? How does the meter man get to you to read the meter? Who delivered and installed your computer and broadband? How did they get from Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, or Taiwan to you?

And when you pop your clogs:

What will the hearse drive on?!

We ALL need and we ALL "use" the road SYSTEM.

But the motorist pays nearly £50 BILLION in EXTRA ADDITIONAL road RELATED taxes ON TOP of his ORDINARY citizens taxes each and EVERY year!

-------------------------


You may not have children, you may never even have been to school:

But do you want to grow old in a society where the adults of tomorrow, its future citizens, are uneducated and illiterate?

Do you want to be cared for in your dotage by a totally uneducated and even illiterate society!

So we ALL benefit from schooling, even if we are childless!

---------------------------

The NHS and the Welfare state are supposed to be a safety net, insurance in case we need treatment or support.

So it is no argument to say that we've never used the NHS and we intend to provide for ourselves in our old age:

We ALL benefit from such provisions!

------------------------------

Similarly, we all get old and frail. We can all lose personal mobility.

Even if we drive there are always times when we might need public transport.

We might lose our eyesight, we might lose our license....

So we ALL benefit from a public transport system.


And sometimes it is cheaper and more practical to provide a few double decker buses than a fleet of minibuses, each with their own engine and driver.

At other times it's cheaper and more practical to provide a fleet of minibuses than using double deckers, because there aren't the passengers to justify a big heavy bus with a big heavy engine.

Sometimes it's cheaper and more efficient to provide a great big train with its own track and signalling system than a load of double deckers, each with their own engine and driver.

Sometimes it's not worth it doing that, but a small train is still a better deal than a load of double deckers.

When, for example you have half a million passengers a day.

Or perhaps as few as a million a week.


BUT IT IS OF NO BENEFIT TO SOCIETY WHATSOEVER TO REPLACE A BUS ROUTE CARRYING A FEW MILLION PASSENGERS A YEAR, WITH A *M*A*S*S* TRANSIT TRAIN SYSTEM, AT A COST OF HALF A £BILLION!


If you don't believe me, ask yourself two simple questions:

Are the passengers prepared to pay the unjustified EXTRA costs themselves?

Is the Council (who, if they are telling the truth, will receive a fortune in extra business rates and council tax) prepared to pay the extra costs themselves?


Hint, if you're struggling, despite the government paying most of the extra costs, the council dare not increase the costs on the tram passengers, and are having to offload them onto drivers who cannot, and will never, use the tram!

"Pleased to be of service!"”