Budget 2018

[rmurphy195]

No mention of cycling (or walking) in the speech... but it gets cheaper for drivers:

"…we will freeze fuel duties for the ninth successive year…

"…bringing the total saving to the average car driver to over £1,000…

"…and to the average van driver to over £2,500…" https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/budget-2018-philip-hammonds-speech

I read somewhere that the fuel duty freeze has cost like £40bn so far, in money lost to the treasury; that's quite a subsidy for the motorists...

If the fuel duty freeze has cost that much (at maybe a little over a penny per litre each year for - what is it - 9 years), then I wonder how much is actually paid in fuel duty (and the VAT on it) which is a cost to motorists?

[mjr]

Did I read correctly from a recent Cycling UK mailing that current spending on UK cycling was under £1 per head compared with £80 per head on roads? Alas, we have a government that seems completely oblivious to climate change and air pollution ignoring the latest reports from science and health leaders that we need to take immediate action.

Don't we cycle on the roads then?

The bulk of spending is on building roads or bits of roads which are generally nasty places to cycle like the A11 and A1270 and A142, or on repairing damage mostly done by motorists to such roads. Motor vehicles do thousands of time more damage than cycles, so thousands of times more portions of that £80 are basically spent on motoring and the fraction on cycling is pretty much too small to mention.