Surely Building/Maintaining roads and traffic signals isn’t free? The council has to pay the costs of running those? Why not remove/shut-down roads so they can avoid paying maintenance for them?
@PowerCrazy You’re saying we shouldn’t have buses, bicycles and ambulances either?
I believe we can reduce the number of cars by maybe 70 to 80% over the next few decades.
But there’s a lot to do to get to that point. We can’t flip a switch overnight to eliminate *all* cars without dealing with accessibility, housing, prejudice, new rail lines, a whole bunch of problems, some of which will take some time to fix.
On the other hand we *can* make significant progress by investing in public transport, especially buses, combined with some mildly coercive measures such as LTNs, reduced parking, lower speed limits, bike lanes, bus lanes, etc.
I’m just trying to follow the logic of removing the speed cameras because they couldn’t “fund them”. Why remove speed camera’s but not stop lights? Ultimately Infrastructure costs the government money, that is one of the fundamental things that government collects taxes for. So why a distinction between speed camera’s and traffic lights?
Are traffic warden fine being sent to the central treasury as well? Have they decided to fire all the traffic wardens, after all traffic wardens surely must be more expensive then speed camera’s.
@PowerCrazy Because they have a bunch of things that they’re legally required to do and not enough money to do them all.
Some of them are easier to downgrade, ration, or scrap, than others.
Central funding was largely eliminated, while local government can no longer increase its own taxes beyond a certain threshold (requiring a referendum), thanks to laws passed by central government.
So they have to cut something.
Speed cameras save lives. It’s politically easier to get rid of the speed cameras than to get rid of the roads. Mostly because our cities remain car dependent, and even buses depend on roads. Local government cannot get rid of cars for free; that will take a sustained national effort with considerable funding and political will.
Would you rather they cut the already very limited funding for helping old people who can’t afford their own care needs?
Of course it’s a political decision. But the cuts, the restrictions on raising taxes, and turning speed cameras from something that saves lives, enforces the law, and generates revenue, into a cost, are all carefully calculated to restrict local government’s choices and blame them for the central government’s cuts.
How can you be anti-car and still anti-speed-cameras?
And yes, the rule that the national treasury keeps the fines did not apply to traffic wardens. Central government specifically set out to cripple one of the main tools for reducing road deaths, to make a populist political point.
Though whether they make a profit on traffic wardens is less clear. A fair bit of enforcement is actually by the police, which is of course a different budget.