I recently had a trunk road to Damascus experience. You may remember a chap called Saul who really hated those hippy new Christians and made it his life's work to help wipe them out. Then one day while on the road to Damascus to arrest all the Christians there, he had a blinding revelation and changed his mind completely.
He even changed his name to Paul for reasons that escape me.

Now I'm not sure if he paid a toll on that route into Damascus - but I've had a similar conversion about road charging. I haven't established yet if that means I have to be called Paul myself from now on, but I'll tell you about it.

I like simple ways of paying for things, like just paying for petrol - even if it's taxed to the brim. And I loathe trying to work out how to pay the Congestion Charge in London. Equally I never seem to carry change so I equally loathe stumbling across toll roads or the Dartford crossing. And paying road tax at the Post Office requires a mastery of my paperwork that is frankly beyond me.

In short, to finance roads I've always felt they should just put the tax on petrol - and I wish people would stop trying to complicate my life by extracting other payments in various complicated and annoying ways.

Your Institute has always advocated proper national road charging, and I've dutifully written supportively about it - but in my heart of hearts I've be in the Saul camp, set on rounding up all the road charging people ready for execution. Preferably nailing to something.

But at our recent lecture celebrating 50 years of motorways I was totally converted from the error of my ways. The GLC's former Chief Transport Planner, and Institute Vice President, David Bayliss OBE FCILT - the man behind the Docklands Light Railway, the Jubilee Line extension and the Croydon Tramlink, delivered a lecture on how we pay for vital trunk road expansion.…...........more

 David Jinks
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