Leasedrive Velo Blog

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

Well there’s some good Christmas cheer for diesel drivers, the price per litre has fallen below a £1. Petrolheads are still ahead, however. For many this will be the only glimmer on the horizon for some time to come. But while it promises to be incredibly tough over the next year, it’s the time when the tough get going.

The best New Year resolution anyone could make come 1 January 2009 is to tackle the year ahead with a positive attitude. After all, the change in economic circumstances is a good time to take stock, re-evaluate priorities, adjust and move forward.

So what have we to look forward to? I can name six straight off the bat.

Firstly, lower oil prices. These are reckoned to stabilise around the $50 per barrel mark next year, which should see energy prices across the board come down. So apart from cheaper motoring costs, there will be cheaper heating costs for all.

Second, a stronger global desire to tackle climate change. Roll on the new US Administration and in particular Barack Obama’s environmental ‘dream team’. At last, we can look forward to the world’s only Superpower taking a lead on the environment. While it’s something it should have done long ago, better late than never.

Third, better regulation of the financial markets. The pursuit of wealth by the so-called “masters of the universe” had got completely out of control and the lack of tight financial regulation sees us all pay the price, and for years to come. One thing’s for sure, the financial regulatory bodies will have to reign in the financial community.

Fourth, after all the ‘bubble’ warnings of the past, sanity may well return to the property market, making for a more stable and accessible playing field. First-time property buyers, essential to oiling the wheels of the housing market, will once more be able to step on to the property ladder.

Fifth, greater consumer conscience – about what they buy, where from and whether it’s essential. We’ve enjoyed a runaway shopping train for the past decade, fuelled by loose credit management. Conspicuous consumerism, fuelled in part by the celebrity culture, was never a good thing, creating an even bigger divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’ Hopefully, we’ll be more careful with our purchases in the future which, while not oiling the economic wheels quite as well as in the past, may perhaps help the environment in turn.

Lastly, better management. The economic crisis will allow better managers to rise to the surface to better micro-manage enterprises. This in turn will drive efficiencies and, in time, as we come out of the economic gloom, result in stronger organisations. For, make no mistake about it, we will come out of our woes. But our attitude of mind will dictate how long it takes. So remember, stay positive, whatever you have to face in the year ahead.

Happy Christmas!

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

Is it surprising that our economy has come to a grinding halt, when we do so with increased frequency on our roads today?

In the past week, I have suffered significant sense of humour failure behind the wheel of the car.

It all started on Sunday with a scenic trip to the West Country avoiding the more conventional route of the M4 motorway. In the past few years, due to increased traffic levels, this trip has extended from an average of an hour and 20 minutes to an hour and 30. On the way out, it took over two hours due to gridlock in Devizes. OK, I was not best pleased but roadworks at a major intersection on a Sunday I can live with. It makes far more sense for temporary road works to take place on a Sunday than during the busy business week.

Knowing the same delays would take place on the return journey I opted for the M4 only to grind to a standstill in central Bath at 7pm. It took three quarters of an hour to move about four miles and it was then stop/start all the way to junction 18. Journey time – two and half hours.

Then on Monday, a commute that regularly takes twenty minutes took three-quarters of an hour. Why? Because some genius in a road traffic planning department has come up with the brainwave of allowing two sets of roadworks to take place in the same town within half a mile of one another at major intersections causing the second gridlock in 24 hours! Given that one roadworks was related to necessary drainage works and the other was linked to a new building site, why the latter was allowed to go ahead when it did was beyond me.

Tuesday passed incident-free with just heavy traffic to contend with.

But yesterday took the biscuit. Having stopped off on the A34 at a services, I re-joined immediately behind a wide load that took over nearly all of the two lanes. There was no room to pass, even if the escort vehicle had let me. For the next five miles, we proceeded at a snail’s pace as the traffic backlog probably queued all the way back to Oxford. Fortunately, I was able to slip off at East Ilsley and re-join ahead of the log jam. Time of day? Not 11.00pm, when you could have forgiven such a traffic movement. No, mid-day! Can you believe the road traffic authorities permitting such a transfer at the height of a busy working day on a major arterial road serving the South with the Midlands?

As I said, no wonder the country is grinding to a halt if personal experiences in the past four days are anything to go by. If this country is to be allowed to run smoothly it needs proper planning in all areas, including road traffic. If we let mindless bureaucrats have their way, the forecast national gridlock will be on us much earlier than we all feared!

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

Am I the only person worried about the insidious rise of the Big Brother state?

Tomorrow a Bill will be published, to be rushed through Parliament, allowing Government agencies to swap personal information on every citizen of this land. MPs are apparently going to be denied a full vote on the proposed data sharing! Worst still, there is going to be no control over the thousands of civil servants who will have access to this information. So someone working at DVLA in Swansea can find out all about the medical history of an old school friend now living in Scarborough.

Even the Council of Europe’s commissioner on human rights believes this country has gone too far in creating a “surveillance society”. The old argument that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear does not rub with him. After all, we are presumed innocent until found guilty – the key principle of criminal law.

With the Government’s appalling record on personal data loss, this latest stealth tactic does not bode well for you and me. Unrestricted data sharing is simply not on and the sooner the average citizen wakes up to what is going on quietly around them the better. We are fast losing our right to claim we live in a truly democratic society.

Meanwhile, Government blunders on with the announcement of yet another major inquiry, this time into the state of our major road networks. The Commons Transport Committee has been charged with considering current and future road demand. Well I can tell them for free that motorway traffic has risen by a third since 1990 and forecasts predict a possible 82% growth in motorway traffic by 2025. So the Committee had better get its skates on before we all grind to a halt in the most massive gridlock imaginable. If the statistical forecasts are to be believed, it has just 16 years to get things sorted, and counting.

I just hope that this Committee has the wider remit of coming up with a totally integrated transport policy. It’s what we all know is required but nobody seems to be taking the issue seriously enough. Platitudes to looking at “alternative strategies” and “taking account of climate change” are not enough. We need firm action and sooner rather than later. We are already in serious danger of missing our CO2 carbon emission cutting targets. Less of the hot air Government, and more concrete action! What we need is an integrated transport network, not an unsupervised, unchecked data-sharing network.