tbh another thing that gets on my t**s is we have a problem with obese kids but you get so many d***head people driving their kids to school. last week i came home from work to find the already tight area where i live jammed with cars and my driveway blocked by some numpety picking there kid up, i know that the world is different to when i was at school and you cant let them walk home on their own yes you can, but nothing is stopping parents walking especially when schools have a radius of about 3/4 mile from the school.

Now THAT is a rant I can agree with 😈

and an open return is £177!!

Off peak is £71, and super off peak is less than £60. I agree that peak rail travel is stupidly priced, often cheaper to stay somewhere overnight.

As an aside it's £14 return from Salisbury to Port Talbot at certain times 🙂 Doing Afan by train this summer…

I have people who work for me and live closer than me and drive everyday then complain about the costs of driving.
They always seem upset when I laugh at them and suggest that fuel isn't expensive enough.

interestingly scale it up

contact lense solution is well over 1000 bucks a barrel !

thats over priced – yet people pay it no bother !

my van moves at weekends for riding only – everything else is done by bike – oil pays my wages – i dont feel like paying my own wages un necessarily !

but do you need 5 litres of contact solution to go an hour worth of seeing?

i think something needs to be done. ok tax needs to be done but really so much on something NEEDED for peoples lifes to carry on.

i remember when the fuel blockade was on last that lasted a week or two was it?

i lived in a hamlet outside in country. no bus routes to or from and working 50 mile away.

so how did i go to work? by planning ahead and buying shit loads at the time. other colleagues never made it in as they couldnt get it (also from a small villages).

The problem is public transport is shit unless you live within the zones of london! its late, trains overcrowded, overpriced through peak times is lets be honest when most commuters are using it. funny that 😉 theres a shit load of tax there that could be used!

your telling me from all the speeding tickets and gatso cameras they still need to charge fuel at these prices? come on…

in my village the public transport is terrible!
2 buses a day through my village now 8.20 or 16.20! thats great for when i started work at 8 😉

returns get me back at 12 and 8.40 great once again. the price is best 6 mile to leighton buzzard on a pop pop bus costs me a £5. now thats value for money!

get in your car drive it, in the warm where your garanteed a place out of the rain with music and wait for the lorry drivers to get so pisssssssed about it again they block it all up once again.

check the states!! 80cent / gallon!

When, in 1990?

It's actually around $2.80 per gallon

when my bro was there in texas 2 months ago 😉

ive just come back from texas yesterday 2.60 dollars/gallon 8)

texas gas (why did I bother)

80 cents to 2.57 in two months is some inflation!

p.s. and a US galon is only 3.785 litres

There are always excuses for excessive tax.

The problem is now that the government are as addicted to fuel duty as the public are to fossil fuels. If we think the cost of travel is ridiculous now, it's only going to get worse.

While fuel prices escalate, it would make sense to divert some of this revenue into public transport. Instead £177bn has been given out to a wunch of bankers.

i reckon when you take into account the fact that cars are getting more and more efficient, the per-mile cost is just the same.

I remember my old Rover 200 costing around 8-9p per mile back in 2001 (when i was young and driving like a wally) and my Golf diesel is now costing around the same.

no one forced you to live in that hamlet …..ergo you do not NEED fuel to carry on life it mearly makes it convienant for you to live where you choose (or where you got a cheaper house)

I filled my van & car yesterday, £93 for my van & £67 for my car, I never think about the expense,I need to use fuel to earn money, I look on it as that's £160 I'm not going to be paying income tax on.

Its simply not excessive tax. Its necessary tax. Where ever taxation is raised from you moan about it – and you also moan about poor services. The money to pay for services has to come from somewhere

As for those who say a car is a necessity – it is only a necessity for your chosen lifestyle. Don't live in dormitory / commuter villages or don't complain about cost of cars.

It is the people who commute from these villages that have made public transport not viable in these areas by not using it and have killed local shops and pushed up property prices to the point that people who work in rural areas cannot afford to live there.

It will take another generation to sort out but petrol and energy in general is only going to get more expensive.

If petrol was 5 times the price how quickly would we have 100+ mpg cars? Those of you moaning about petrol prices why don't you have more economical cars – 70 mpg is feasible now.

Where and when are these cheap train journeys?

We live 40 miles out of London, and its £27 at peak time for a return – and peak been the time everybody goes to work. And you've still got to get to the station (£5.50 to park – or £3.50 each way in a taxi).

So £27 to do 80 miles, and 2 hours in and 2 hours out.

Anyway while I can complain about the price of public transport, I can't about fuel – I run a V8 😆

As an aside, we went to Afan today – 400 mile round trip, best value day out so far this year – try doing that on public transport, on a Sunday!

the point im trying to make is fuel is going up far higher than the rate of inflation, but wages are not in fact people have had pay cuts, the same as many of us on here,

Me too but I don't come on here and moan about my lifestyle choices.

b r – Member

Anyway while I can complain about the price of public transport, I can't about fuel – I run a V8

As an aside, we went to Afan today – 400 mile round trip, best value day out so far this year – try doing that on public transport, on a Sunday!

Game, set and match

"It is the people who commute from these villages that have made public transport not viable in these areas by not using it "

Its the other way round. It all started with the "Beeching axe".

I can't afford a v8.

I run a family hatchback, which I only use at weekends (yes, I use my bike to commute the 5 miles to my local railway station).

Br, read my posts for some examples. And the fact that I can get to afan for £14 from here. Granted, not sure you could on a Sunday, so I'll go on Saturday….

RichPenny – I'd like some examples please. My g/f and I wanted to book tickets to visit friends in Morpeth, but the cheapest we could find was the thick end of £250.

Where's the incentive?

"It is the people who commute from these villages that have made public transport not viable in these areas by not using it "

make it cheaper in the first place and we might??

Easter is approaching, people using cars for staycations = higher fuel prices. The price will go down for a couple months and then rise again end June beginning July.

HoratioHufnagel – Member
"It is the people who commute from these villages that have made public transport not viable in these areas by not using it "

Its the other way round. It all started with the "Beeching axe".

Not just that. Where I was born in the countryside there were no trains and no buses except for the school bus twice a day. If I had followed the family norm and become a farm worker(40yrs ago)then I would not have needed a car and in fact did not own a car for the first 6yrs of my working life. Part of the reason all that time ago why I did not go into farming was due to the downturn in jobs due to mechanisation.
Those who argue that we "choose" to live in the countryside as a life choice forget that some people are born into the countryside because there parents live and may work there. It is not quite as simple as that and a countryside clearance and creating larger towns/cities/ghettos is not the way to go either.
I sometimes wonder what our policy makers are thinking about the time when we stop tarvelling and what will happen to all the visitor attractions and areas such as the Lakes. Less fuel used = less revenue!!
Due to this being the 3rd yr in a row when I will not be getting a pay rise I have already had to cut back on days/weekends away as have my workmates.

I cannot get a bus to work so it is car or bike. No car share because no-one working with me stays anywhere near me.
If my wife were to use buses it would take 1hr to travel the 5mls with a change of bus half way.

Fossil fuel users are cash cows, pure and simple. 90% of everything travels by road at some point, the 'high fuel tax' advocates don't get that. Do you know how many bike panniers you would need to fill to get your average 40'trailer load of goods to market? Neither do I, but I reckon it'd be a lot. Net result is the high tax on fuel has a direct cost implication on everything including the mass transportation system which last time I looked didn't run on fresh air.

Why not just tax those who are selfish enough to drive large fuel ineficient cars for their personal gratification.

'I asked him how he thought I could tow the caravan behind a train (once he has priced me off the road) – he did not reply to this question.'

Now that made me laugh.

Weester – I tend to go on holiday by bike and train and camp once there. Rarely but sometimes I hare a car

I can't fault you TandemJeremy. I wish I could but the 4 year old and the wife with Scoliosis might not wear it.

Interesting thought though, how many miles to the gallon does a train carrying 300 people do?

"Fossil fuel users are cash cows, pure and simple. 90% of everything travels by road at some point, the 'high fuel tax' advocates don't get that."

I'm sure most of them do. You'll find most people who support high fuel costs also support reducing road haulage and improving freight infrastructure as well as public transport. But transportation costs are a small part of point-of-sale prices.

Good news Folks since Tesco have opened in Newtown Mid Wales a price war has broken out and all the petrol&diesel there was at 1.09 a litre…handy if you are local or passing!

Ok let me put it another way, how many bicycle panniers would you need to fill in order to transport 16 tonnes of scrap metal to the docks?

Ta weester – I try not to be a hypocrite on this. Week before last I had a hire car to go up into the mountains to do some mountaineering. The first time I have driven a car for a quite but winter mountaineering is very difficult without a car. I probably drive of be driven less than a couple of thousand miles a year.

Indeed northwind – I would like to make all transport more expensive which would encourage local production and sale. Supermarkets are particulaly bad for transporting stuff all over the country – if it became more expensive for them to do so they might alter their distribution. Many super markets have one distribution centre – so food produced near to a store may travel hundreds of miles to a distribution centre and back again.

dunno about the MPG of a train – I shall google it. I believe per passenger mile they are better but I'll see what I can find.

Edit Weester – there are some things indeed that a car / van / truck is essential for – people who travel with tools to different sites such as tradesmen for example. could the scrap you mention not go on a tain?

weester, let me put it another way, that's a ridiculous straw man argument and I have no idea why you'd even bother to type it.

Northwind, how do you and your ilk intend on moving anything too heavy to put in a car?

UK Freight train average about 1.5-2.0 MPG Loaded. Compared with road transport it is very efficient; if lorries did the same trip they would use 70% more fuel than a freight train. Uk Passenger trains average from 8MPG – 12MPG.

Cunard state that their liner, the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2, travels 49.5 feet per imperial gallon of diesel

😯

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation

"Northwind, how do you and your ilk intend on moving anything too heavy to put in a car?"

I have an ilk? Well, I'll get the ilk to carry it.

Correct answer is trains, the perfect heavy materials transport. Your next question will be "What if there's no trains nearby", the answer to that is that a) if we want to get away from our ridiculous overdependance on road haulage we'll need more train lines but also b) Mohammed can go to the mountain. Same issue as commuters who "have" to drive 30 miles because they live in the wrong place.

Your actual green would point out that shipping scrap metal to the docks so that it can be transported around the world to be reprocessed in china is nuts. But if we're going to live in a global economy mad stuff like that is going to happen, so they can just deal with it. However, they would be right to say that if increasing road haulage costs by say 25% makes hauling something unviable, the other answer is to not haul it at all.

OK! But how does any of the above help the OP as a small independent trader?

shouldnt be costing him "any" more – prices should be adjusting accordingly

I'd be happy to commute by public transport, however the last time I did, it took nearly two hours for what takes 30 mins in the car. Given my normal working hours that'd mean leaving the house at 6am, getting home around 9-10pm. What an awesome life that would be.