Well, what did they expect?

Last Friday the Daily Telegraph reported that there was between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2008 a fall in the amount of traffic on our roads. The second quarter's fall was also a fall on the first quarter in 2008.

Car traffic fell from 100.7 billion car miles in 2007 to 99.1 billion in 2008, a 1.5% reduction.Overall, including buses, lorries and vans, the overall fall was 0.5%, though it was 2% on A roads both urban and rural. The calculations were done by the Department for Transport using readings from automatic censors and also by human counters.

The consequence was that on the slowest journeys on average the average delay fell from 3.95 minutes to 3.86 minutes.

This compares with an increase in traffic of 14% over the period 1997-2007.

The AA in a survey of 18,500 members reported that 55% were making fewer journeys because of the high fuel costs. In June 2007 the average price of petrol was 97p a litre. By June 2008 this had risen to 118.2p.

It is possible that general belt tightening also contributed, with uncertainty about the future making people think twice about non-essential journeys

What did they do in place of travelling? No answer is available, but it is probably a mixture of several things, such as walking in place of short journeys, sharing transport with friends or colleagues and where possible travelling on public transport.

The motorists are acting like "economic man" as envisaged by economists. When the price rises in most cases individuals will tend to reduce consumption.

This suggests that government schemes of differential vehicle duties are engaged in an expensive bureaucratic exercise of stealth taxation. The "gas guzzlers" they so wish to attack are being attacked by increased mileage usage costs, as they use more petrol. In other words they are attacking ownership when they ought to be attacking consumption of a polluting good.

Substitution by other means of travel, and a reduction in emissions, would happen naturally without the expensive bureaucracy, if motorists are confronted with taxes on usage rather than ownership. Of course, left wingers like to feel that they are protecting the poor and attacking the (undeserving) rich. As it stands some may decide not to buy a car and use it once or twice a year because of the heavy VED, whereas if the tax were "all" on fuel they could perhaps own a car and use it infrequently.

The heavy polluters should pay, - the Government have this right, but they should pay in proportion to their usage, not the engine size, and if they wish manufacturers to produce more efficient engines tax the fuel used.