No-one seriously suggests any vehicle drivers are above the law, but as I said before cyclists actually subsidise your use of the roads, and number plates slow down cyclcists. If licencing or number plates created safety how do you explain the high road toll this year?

When I do drive I am overwealmingly held up by traffic lights and other cars. It is rare to be truely held up by a bike rider, and in fact in dense cities bikes are often faster then cars look up TOPGEAR’S (yes that car show) race across london on youtube, if you dont believe me.

Save driving for people who have to genuinely take loads of stuff or go to remote places etc. Not people going 2kms to an office, and taking just themselves, thats just moronic.

Hence, you are again not adressing the REAL cause of that stop start traffic, and pollution, namely, the fact that to many people are travelling by car. The answer then is to give them an alternative (eg a good rail network), or alternatives, cycling combined with train travel. If you add more roads you will just get more motorists, you wont solve the problem. Hence the real answer is what this report suggests, cease funding of Highways, START funding trains.

Also, what are you going to do about peak oil?

Also, from what you are saying, you basically want cities to be one big road, yeah that makes loads of sense! Cars take up more space per person then any other form of transport except trucks!

Furthermore, you cant actually construct free flowing roads, and or freeways unless you vastly increase the space, and distances between locations, thus negating any so called reductions in emmissions from free flowing trafic by increasing the distances that that so called free flowing traffic has to go.

By their very nature cars take up much more space per person then practically any other form of transport. So, it remains that you either increase travelling distances to better the flow of traffic, (and or take up more space), thus negating any advantages of that said flow, or you end up not catering to cars and having normal distances the cars end up in gridlock.

The analogy is the same as an obease man who is getting more obease trying to solve the problem of his obesity by getting bigger pants and a longer belt. The problem is the obesity, not the pants or belt. Thus, the solution lies in getting more people out of their cars and onto trains and trams, and yes bicycles, rather then trying to have more roads.

Also, why should governments spend the taxes paid by EVERYONE, so that people can use the most inefficent form of transport in terms of space taken per person. Also why, pray tell, should society, and those people who want to not take up all that space or see their town/ city turn into a tarmac desert suffer, and not be allowed or be restricted in going from place to place, because you want to use the most inefficent land intensive personal transport known, pray tell?

To clear up some falsehoods:
* Rego does not pay for roads it simply goes to general revenue, and mostly includes admin charges/ insurance charges.

*Local roads are funded by COUNCIL LAND RATES, something that everyone who owns a house pays and passes this cost on to tenants, so they in fact also effectively pay.

*Sure, petrol tax goes to paying for some state road funding, and maintanance, but as a whole roads are funded by general tax revenue, that is a FACT! The confusion comes because of the miss quoting of how revenue is gained from motorists and what it is spent on, EG only a portion of the petrol tax funds roads, but as I said Local Land rates fund local roads. As a whole roads are payed for by everyone.

*As taxpayer(s), non or low car users pay for the cost of the carnage caused by cars in the form of deaths by motor vehicle accidents, much of which is not covered by CTP Greenslips, such as the costs for people at fault. This is the case even though the people paying, may not drive a car at all, so they pay for the cost of the death caused by car use, since taxes are said to fund expenditure, (although this is debatable), and everyone pays for hospitals.

*Everyone pays for the pollution caused by cars even if they dont drive. They pay economically and they pay, by the illness that they suffer.

*People who use active forms of transport, pay the hospital bill for the people who choose to drive everywhere and then get fat. Obesity, has now overtaken smoking as the leading cause of Morbidity in this country, FACT! Also despite the fact that Australia is considered as one of the 2 worst countries in terms of attitudes to cyclists by motorists, you are still better off healthwise by riding a bicycle then not.

*Just 1 car does the same damage to the road on average as 2000 bicycles. As I said, we all pay for roads through taxes/ Land rates.

*When a cost of motoring vs amount motorists contributed to that cost analysis was done a few years ago, there was a 16 Billion dollar defecit (Not taking into account obesity and being generous to motorists). Let Me spell that out NON MOTORISTS SUBSIDISED THE RIGHTS OF MOTORISTS TO DRIVE
TO THE TUNE OF $16 000 000 000 (Count the zero’s)..

In saying all this, I am NOT advocating that we cease to have publicly funded hospitals or roads. What I am advocating is that we stop creating more highways, AND we make motorists pay the FULL COST of their decision to drive, PARTICULLARLY the ones who drive short city distances.

However, when you take into account the vast amount of space taken up by roads then compare this space to the required space for trains, and the amount of people each train can take for the given amount of space that it occupies you will see, if you possess any logic at all, that cars are far from efficent and are not a sensible choice. Further, advocating using up valuable space to create highways, the most inefficent use of space to transport people from point A to Point B, is just plain Moronic. When you take into account the amount of space needed on the road for a car (usually a single occupant), and then add the space needed for safety, eg the DEATH ZONE in front of the car, you simply see that a car takes up too much space to transport just one person.

This is not taking into account that oil is either running out, and or its production is going to be More Polluting, and more costly. There is no other cheap form of energy in the foreseable future to power the Cagers bloody cars!

Why is it that governments could not give everyone in Australia their own private beach? The answer is obvious. There simply is not enough space. This is the same issue as cars, and car use. Cars are great, when you have only a few of them, but when you have many cars they either require more space, in the form of roads and parking, than any other form of transport, thus negating their effectiveness because the distanes required cancel out speed advantages or they simply form gridlock, and end up travelling slower, (often much slower) than a bicycle.

What people and governments should be doing is going away from cars and advocating good public transport, and cycling, which are much more efficent in cities, because they can move far more people for a given amount of space. You save so much space, and can open up the land wasted in the development of highways to more efficent public transport, and still have lots of land left over for sensible use of public space.

In big cities the car is often the slowest form of transport because of this very fact. In the cities that dont spread out in order to help the car, but remain in their current form this becomes obvious. You get gridlock.

Additionally NRMA’s own figures show that the cost of car ownership amounts to hundreds of dollars per week. If you actually work out the average speed of your car in traffic, then take into account the time you spend at work PAYING FOR YOUR CAR, then logically add that time to the travel time, you will find that your car is not fast at all. This was actually done in Canberra, by someone as an experiment, (and Canberra is actually a place were the average speed of a car is high compared to say, Sydney). The person found that the average speed of a cyclist was 18 km/ h, after time spent paying for it was counted, and the average speed of some cars was as low as 14km /h (this was actually for a Holden Monaro), with cars average, in this idyllic car city being between 14 km /h and 20 km/ h.

As I said earlier, even if you dont take up time spent earning the money to pay for your car, in natural cities, ones that have not spread out for the sake of avoiding gridlock, and negating speed with distance needed to be travelled, the car is usually the slowest form of transport. If you dont believe this simply look up race across London, on youtube, the episode was put out by the pro car show “top gear”, in which they raced 4 forms of transport across the centre of London, a bicycle, a boat, public transport, and a car. Ill let you in on a little secret the car came dead last, and was slower than public transport which was 3rd by 15 MINUTES. The guy on the bicycle won, by the way.

The average car uses up the same space on the road as a suburban house. Sure it does not actually do that, however when you add the space that is required in front of a car at any speed to avoid collisions this is the case, or you get slower speeds, so congestion occurs.

Cars are not effecient at getting large numbers of people around, the most efficent method is trains. You can get hundreds of people onto a train on a track narower then a road. Those same hundreds of people would take up much more space if they were in cars.

Private cars are subsidised by the rest of society. If you were to make car drivers pay the total cost of driving a car to society, then petrol tax would have to increase by between $1 & $4 per litre.
The reason for this is briefly:
Car drivers do NOT pay the full cost of the deaths that occur from car accidents, only some of the cost of the ones that are directly their fault.
They dont pay the cost of the pollution, that causes the premature deaths of thousands of people, and I have not even mentioned the carbon emmisions, im just talking here about the cancer causing, asthma, and disease causing pollution.
They dont pay for the real cost of the real estate which they drive on, that is they dont pay the cost of the land, that if the roads they drove on were not there or not so wide, could be dedicated to something more useful.
They dont pay the full cost of the roads, and in fact local roads are funded by council land rates, NOT by car registration.
They certainly dont pay for the cost of the obesity that results from people driving instead of using active transport methods such as walking, or cycling, or walking to the train station.
They dont pay the true cost of ripping up the oil out of the ground and the pollution, and damage this creates.