I DON'T own a car, and with the proposal to "pay as you drive", I am glad I don't.

I cannot get my head around Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander saying there is a need for a partnership between a listening Government and a furious public.

"Partnership" in my book implies two parties facing similar problems and working together to find a solution agreeable to both sides.

It should not mean one side (the taxpayer) being forced to account for the failures of the other side.

Surely the Government must realise how much the British public is up in arms about the proposals, taking into account the Downing Street website which crashed with the weight of 1.2 million protesters.

The Government takes £50 billion a year out of motorists' pockets in the form of fuel, road and insurance taxes, plus VAT on fuel and car purchases. It spends £12 billion of this revenue on the country's roads, so where does the other £38 billion go?

Motorists who live in the country are hit hardest. By choice, a friend of mine moved from London to Kent, and he now drives 15,000 miles a year instead of 3,000. He has to do because there is no alternative. There are two buses a week and one train a day from his village to London; superb public transport, eh?

In my friend's neck of the woods, there are hundreds of 4x4 owners, loads of farmers driving 2.5 litre pick-up trucks. This is because they are the best type of vehicle for the surroundings, so why penalise people for that?

One proposal is to charge five pence a mile on a rural A road at rush hour. So driving his two girls the six miles to the train station for their journey to school will cost him £68.40 a school year, not including train tickets.

What will it cost everybody else when it is rolled out for the school run, supermarket run etc?

It has been proposed that in order to charge us for road use, satellite tracking devices would be installed in our cars. Which just goes to show we are the most spied on nation in Europe.

So Mr Transport Secretary, the solution to congestion does not lie in your twisted definition of partnership, it lies in your failure to regulate train services and set up effective transport infrastructure. Simple as that!

If you want cash to fix the transport mess you have made, use the billions you have taken from the hard-pressed motorist instead of diverting that cash into wasteful expenditure in other areas.

Back to petitions. I find it incredible that the road pricing petition received more than four times as many signatures than the one Jamie Oliver delivered to Downing Street as part of his school dinners campaign.

Jamie's efforts were rewarded quicker than you can say turnkey twizzler, largely because they were in line with the nannying sensibilities of New Labour.

I reckon the road pricing petition will fail. Or at best a lame compromise will leave motorists reaching further into their pockets.

This is the Britain we live in, where a celebrity chef with a wagging finger has a greater impact on Government policy than the millions of motorists who are sick of having their liberty restricted and their pay packets pillaged right under their noses.


Paul Willey writes in a personal capacity, and not on behalf of City of York Council. Paul works for the council as head of a street cleaning team.