“A £1 toll on every vehicle entering a national park, with exemptions for buses, trains and local residents, would raise a huge sum…”
This idea (or National Park congestion charging) has been discussed for at least a couple of decades. Would need careful design & significant political will to do
This idea (or National Park congestion charging) has been discussed for at least a couple of decades. Would need careful design & significant political will to do
Comments
Parks for free, for everyone, for ever.
Taxers never understand this until it's all dead.
Those sheep are someone's livelihood and, frankly, £1 pretty good value for a gorgeous area which has some fairly strict rules to keep it that way
They're for everyone, but you can't just dismiss those who live there out of hand.
The govt announced in Dec it’ll be updating NP legal purposes to include nature recovery. It needs to resource them accordingly too.
We don't have 'traditional' wild national parks in the UK and we can't try to impose them (sorry for the thread)
So, where are you going to find your wilderness then? Because the UK notably is broadly without those places.
I suspect a local tourist tax for those staying overnight might be simpler
Settlements in NPs are often exurbs or suburbs of those cities and the residents already externalise the costs of their car commuting to cities on those cities residents.
The charge should be for leaving a park.
Why pay a quid each way to drive from Meltham to Greenfield when you can just drive through Marsden, Diggle and Uppermill instead.
But yes, I think there are challenges with implementing it in reality and knock ons
Problem is that it doesn't encourage public transport use. Greater parking charges + more comprehensive transport may be better
Wouldn’t dent traffic, but could use revenue to support buses etc. Either closing roads to cars or new charges main way to bring traffic down
But yeah, not sure it's the best way forward
Ultimately there is unlikely to be a perfect solution here (unless we have road charging which I would both entirely back and which is close to politically impossible)