Whacking the price of fuel up penalises the poor

How? Poor people can’t afford a car in the first place.

The cost of the fuel/energy is less than 10%…

So how exactly has the cost of fuel “allowed the end cost of public transport to escalate beyond all reason”? Based on your figures, if they got the fuel for free then the trip would still cost 4 times as much as it does in Germany.

Oh, and of course that’s all without getting into the point that train companies don’t pay £6.30 a gallon!

BTW, are the rolly eyes because you don’t understand the point that increasing the cost of road fuel would actually make PT relatively cheaper compared to driving given the different cost bases? I certainly can’t see anything in what I wrote which deserved them.

Peyote – Quoting is fine. Quoting every scentence in a post individually is annoying and hard to follow and for me to respond to every point would require me to quote your quotes and then we would all be ****.

Fuel Subsidies: The World's Dumbest Transportation Policy?

I haven’t seen anyone arguing that fuel should be subsidised. Just that paying for the impact of motoring via general taxation is preferable than purchase tax since general taxation is progressive whereas purchase tax is regressive and that making car ownership less affordable is a bad thing.

Fundamentally the argument can be boiled down to

a) people who thinks personal motorised transport is fundamentally bad and its side effects can only be reduced by reducing access to it via financial penalties

vs

b) people who think personal motorised transport is good for quaility of life and its not the cars that should be reduced but the impact of these cars