h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Crescent? Are you from 'Sneckie???

Or go out in to the wilds of Lincolnshire or any other predominantly rural county. Where my sister lives has good public transport, 3 buses a day (monay to friday) going between Doncaster and Scunthorpe.

Cloviscat, aye, right enough One thing that the truckers have to be thanked for, is that at 3:19 it is hometime Until later...
BCNU - Crescent

What most people fail to realise is that virtually everything in the UK is now delivered by road - by a haulier somewhere. When the government increases the road tax and fuel tax, the hauliers pass on the delivery costs to the retailers etc and we all end up paying more.
It is not simple a matter of how much one individual spends on petrol (or whether they should use public transport), the knock-on effect of higher transportation costs is higher prices in the shops.

The government is using OPEC as an excuse, it is not a question of producing more oil, it is the refineries who cannot cope. OPEC may be increasing the price of oil (which the government will benefit from anyway), but it doesn't alter the fact that we have the most expensive fuel in Europe. The government is awash with money at the moment, but is saving it up to bribe us with sudden tax cuts prior to the next election, it could easily afford to reduce the tax on fuel.

Eveyone complains about the high cost of our petrol, but the minute someone tries to force a reduction in price, they complain about that too.

Sorry - rant over!!

I think the crap alternatives to cars are at the root of a lot of people's anger about this (this is cerrtainly the case with me). The Govt contrived to give the impression that they would make public transport a viable alternative to motoring so that we wouldn't have to use our cars so much - a laudable aim. They would pay for this extra expenditure by making motoring more expensive. However, the more expensive motoring has materialised, but the better public transport hasn't, and shows no signs of doing so. The flagship train routes are v. good, but then they always have been.

What desperately need improving are the routes that don't involve the major cities. Try going from Winchester to Chichester. These are the administrative centres of neighbouring counties, but I doubt whether you could get from one to the other by rail without going through London or Southampton and changing trains at least twice.

As to alternatives to cars, for personal transport, medium sized motorbikes can be pretty good. After a doese of Slick-50, I used to get 55mpg out of my old VF400 around London, and ~65mpg cruising around on A roads. Also, having to get all leathered up to ride a bike, can be a great deterrent against lazy use of transport for short-distance journeys around town - if somewhere's only a mile or so away, you might as well walk.

Taxes are a swings-and-roundabouts thing anyway. Making a massive fuss about one particular tax seems pretty pointless as reducing it will either result in less government revenue, and presumably spending, or some other tax will end up rising to compensate. Anyone up for a couple of percent on VAT?

P.S. - Where I live in Gloucestershire, there is NO fuel left. Apparently somewhere in Wiltshire a filling station is charging £2.50 per litre - and people are paying it!!

My "ancestral" home town is in Caistor, N.E. Lincolnshire.
I work in Dublin, Ireland

If I wish to go home for a long weekend, I get the DART from Blackrock to Tara Street, get a bus to the airport, a flight to manchester, a train to Grimsby and a bus to Caistor. The journey takes between 4 and 6 hours, which is a lot.

To go by car would take far longer, as even the "Fast ferry" takes 90 minutes, and once I got their I would be as much use as a rubber monkey and just sleep all weekend.

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Go and tell them that.

DJ, I know you're from that part of the world which is why I used it as an example

Bit of Dunkirk spirit - ask to borrow some petrol from your neighbours/workmates or something.
Ask for a lift of someone?
Have you got AA memebership? If so - deliberately run out of petrol...they have to fill it up and can only charge you for the petrol at the normal rate.

Mina's a cabbie in (or somewhere near) London. I think those options won't work DJ

Sorry, I should have said.
If I can't fill the car up after I work, then my parents are stuck to cover booked jobs. If there is even enough in the tanks to cover Saturday night.

I wonder if we could have the cars adjusted to run on LRP for a while?

What make and model and what do they run on now?

K and H reg Espaces, and they use unleaded.

Slick-50?

1st Slick 50 is a suspension of PTFE (poly-tetra-flouro-ethylene?) particles in oil. It is spectacularily slippery so dramatically reduces the friction in the engine. About £10 per treatment which lasts a full year. Described by a friend as "the cheapest way of tuning your car".

Now - using the "wrong" fuel. The only difference between ordinary unleaded and super unleaded is the octane..this means that super unleaded will burn hotter and quicker than ordinary unleaded. This should do no damage to the engine itself, but the exhaust gas will be hotter and this will be very bad for a CAT if fitted. They are very expensive to replace so if your car is fitted with the CAT, don't even attempt it.
If no catalytic converter then running it for short periods on the richer fuel or even a mix of the two fuels will be OK. The engine will over-rev and you may get pinking noises but it won't break down.

Slick-50? - It's a kind of permanent Teflon-based lubricant treatment for engines that reduces friction and wear significantly, and improves economy to some degree.
Makes cold starting *massively* easier - when I did my old CB125 it cut the drag on the kick-start to about a fifth of what it had been before (causing several knocked shins in the process, and after I did my VF400, if I didn't pull the throttle right back to zero *immediately* after firing up from cold, it would go from 0 straight up to 12,000 rpm in about a second.

Regarding taxation and other European countries, I just found the following list of standard VAT rates on the Net

DK, S 25.0 %
FIN 22.0 %
IRL 21.0 %
B 21.0 %
F 20.6 %
A, I 20.0 %
GR 18.0 %
GB, NL 17.5 %
P 17.0 %
E, D 16.0 %
L 15.0 %

Thinking about it, Teflon is more likely...PTFE would probably melt at engine temperatures....unfortunately this is an IT department and we don't have any to hand to check

They don't sell super unleaded locally, only leaded (whatever) and unleaded. And diesal of course.
These cars are obviously too new to go to leaded.