ats:
"Taxes on air travel and "gas guzzling" cars should be raised to cut greenhouse gas emissions, says a committee of MPs."
... where "gas guzzling" is actually defined in a reasonable way, so I don't have any particular problem with this, but...
... the aim here is to discourage people from travelling. Will it work?
The impression I get is that the majority of people who're doing long car and plane journeys -- and who own silly cars -- are white-collar businesspeople, and making it more expensive for them to travel is just going to get passed on to the consumer.
So perhaps we should give them an incentive to travel less (i.e. a carrot to go with this proposal's stick) -- legislation that'd encourage companies to have people work from home.
The problem's the culture, and fiddling with the economics of the situation isn't likely to work any better than it has elsewhere in the world.
(Fixing the public transport system would be nice too, but given that the last forty years' British governments have only managed to dig it deeper into a hole I'm not holding out much hope there...)
The other thing that caught my eye about that proposal was that they want to reduce motorway speeds.
Is the aim there just to irritate travellers, or are they under the misapprehension that it'd reduce pollution?
I was under the impression that most cars were at their most efficient in high gears, and if I could only do 60 on the motorways I'd never get to use fifth gear on my car...
Besides which, isn't a blanket reduction in the speed limit likely to increase congestion? (At least, that's what it sounds like they're suggesting -- managing speed limits in real time to break up jams is very effective, but that relies on having fast bits and slow bits.)
David: A sysadmin day song, to the tune of 'As Someday it May Happen' (Gilbert and Sullivan)
(requires Flash)
ats: Our sysadmins in the lab resorted to putting up a big Sysadmin Day sign this year.
David: I resorted to being on holiday