Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Oct 5, 2006
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days that all these memories come flooding back to me.
Future Transport
I have been reading and watching a lot of news items recently about proposed plans for the future of our transport system. There have been many ideas and proposals put forward by people we voted into power thinking that they were going to represent us and improve our way of life. Some of these ideas border on the edge of sanity, while others leave us with thoughts of the lunacy suffered by the people who have suggested them.
The most recent one I saw on the news was for road tolling, with the idea of making us pay by the mile to drive on certain main routes. As if the poor old motorist was not paying enough already! I mean we pay road tax and insurance not to mention the huge amount of tax we pay on every gallon of fuel. In fact, looking back on my years as a driver, I can honestly say that I can remember the good old days of motoring while many of our younger drivers will never have the privilege to say the same. Days when petrol was a lot cheaper than it is now and the roads were relatively quiet as compared to today's congestion. Of course, we didn't have the motorways and dual carriageways that we have these days but, then again, the volume of traffic on the roads back then was a mere fraction of the present load.
Those were the days when you stopped to help your fellow motorist if you saw them in trouble at the side of the road and when the AA or RAC man on his motorbike and side car would salute your car if he saw you were a member of their organisation. The adverts on television for the petrol companies showed footage of happy young families driving down empty roads and all the kids smiling as they sat in the back seats.
I have already seen some of the petrol stations with gas and hydrogen pumps already fitted and have even seen some drivers filling up with these. I would never have thought that such things would ever exist on our forecourts in my lifetime way back then.
Yet they are here now and I think that, once the percentage of vehicles using such fuels is increased to the desired percentage, we will see the end of the petrol pump as we know it. The oil companies are going through the motions of developing such fuels, at a rate that suits them for the time being, but once the cost of these new-fuelled cars comes within reach of the average working man, there will be a scurry by all the oil companies to cash in on the new fuels.
It seems that the governments of past and present have tried to tax the motorists off the road altogether and put us all onto public transport. Then again, the public transport system has never been able to cope with demands as it is, so it appears to be a catch twenty two situation, no matter how we look at it. Then there is the suspicion that all us motorists have, that as soon as the volume of cars using alternative fuels reaches the desired amount, the government will then hit that particular fuel with such an increase in taxes that any advantage of using that fuel will have gone and we are right back to square one again.
As a long term motorist myself, who has driven thousands of miles in the past, I would be wary of such a move, by which ever government was in power at that time. I have experienced all the increases in the past and the cost to me as a car owner has been crippling at times, especially when you have to drive to work every day. I have, on occasion in the past, been without my car and found myself begging lifts into work due to the fact that the public transport system simply was not there. This was either due to my shift patterns, or simply that there was no service at all. In fact, we used to run what we called a share scheme where we took it in turns to use our own cars and take at least three others with us, but even this was not always suitable for various reasons, as we did not all work the same length of shifts - the supervisors and inspectors had to start earlier on every shift and then stay behind to hand over to the next shift.
Still I look forward to the day when I get behind the wheel of a hydrogen-powered car, as some of the future designs I have seen have been outstanding to say the least. I even saw a model of one, recently, where you could actually change the vehicle into anything you wanted, be it a seven seated people carrier or a sporty two seater, to even a pick up, simply by changing the bolted-on carbon fibre body shell. So I have all this to look forward to. Until then I can always sit my great grandchildren on my knee and tell them all about the good old days when we all had cars, sometimes three of them in one household, and they ran on a substance called petrol, on strips of tar that we called roads, and that it used to be fun.
