Cars users get raw deal relative to rail

New research published today has exposed the scale of the raw deal that car users get from the government.

The study into government spending on road and rail infrastructure when compared per passenger kilometre reveals that for every £1 of public money spent on roads, a massive £10 is spent on rail services.

That spending on rail outnumbers spending on roads by a factor of ten to one when actual usage is taken into account is particularly unfair given the huge amounts of tax paid by car users every year.

The study estimates the motorists' tax burden at over £30bn a year - increasing all the time.

Even this figure only takes fuel duty and road tax bills into account, yet is still £18.4 billion more than the combined total cost of road spending and road transport greenhouse gas emissions.

Credible comparison

The conclusions of the study, which was produced jointly by the Drivers' Alliance and the TaxPayers' Alliance, were based on total spending in 2007/08 of £8.2bn on rail and £8.3bn on roads.

While those two figures are roughly similar, campaigners say 59 billion passenger kilometres were travelled by rail in that period, compared with 749 billion by road.

The use of passenger kilometres means both the number of people travelling and the distance of their journeys are taken into account, to accurately reflect how each mode of transport contributes to keeping Britain moving.

Not even green

Such a disparity in spending cannot even be justified on environmental grounds, since a rail industry report concluded that it can often be greener to travel by car than catch a train.

The Rail Safety and Standards Board study confirmed that a journey by a family of three would produce half the emissions if travelled by car than by modern diesel train.

Peter Roberts, Chief Executive at the Drivers’ Alliance, said: "We desperately need to prioritise roads before rail if congestion is to be tackled.

"Adding road capacity is cost effective and provides genuine savings in journey times for the majority of individuals, goods and services.

"Spending vast sums of drivers' taxes on extravagant rail projects will not address the immediate transport problems we have in the UK.”

Funding switch

The time has come for the government to drop the tired old dogma of treating car users like cash cows and giving very little in return - especially splashing the vast sums that car users pay in tax on far less efficient and less environmentally-friendly forms of travel.

Huge sums being sunk into the railways must be rebalanced back towards the far better investment of road infrastructure instead.

With public spending cuts looming large on the political agenda, this study clearly shows that it is cuts in rail expenditure that should come before chopping road improvement projects.