ChrisMcKee Designs

Simple ways to relieve congestion in Manchester.

• Remove bus lanes, as blocking a lane on a busy road a road at the busiest part of the day is counter productive, and considering the bus only comes every hour its ridiculous.
• Introduce the yellow bus scheme and FORCE parents to make their children use it, parents dropping their fat lazy kids off is the main creation of traffic jams. This is very easily noticed during the summer when children are off for 6 weeks and it suddenly takes me half an hour less to get to work.
  
• Restrict charging to the inner circle, if you want to reduce inner-city congestion then fining the rest of us just because we were zoned as being in Greater Manchester and charging us to get to motorway access routes is just lazy money grabbing.
• Introduce the US system that allows cars to turn left through a red-light, giving way to other traffic.
• Invest in designing a better road system, as the current half arsed throwing together of roads obviously hasn't worked.
• Replace buses with street trams, after all the original ones over 50 years ago worked well and were only removed due to corruption in the government (what's new) and pressure by the Oil groups.

Gutting the government cash-cow (drivers) will only in the long term create larger social divides as you very quickly price the poor out of driving. This will quickly affect the rate of unemployment as people won't have a realistic, low cost replacement; public transport is never a realistic choice for long distance travelling to work, or travelling to a minimum wage job.
People who use vans are providing a service / running a business that doesn't allow them to use any other means. Although I'm not a van drivers, I'd rather not have my cost of living ramped up again by what is essentially a tax for living in Manchester.
For a group of councillors that feel this is a "real" solution (see money making scheme) I couldn't helped but be amused by them all turning up for a meeting at Bury town hall in separate cars, where they even failed to pay to park. A nice way of reminding us all that, a) they won't pay the congestion charges and b) its one rule for us and no rules for them.