Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Petrol tops £1 a litre!

AndyR

AndyR

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 9, 2005
907
30
Auckland, New Zealand
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4941262.stm

Well, it already has here. Unleaded is now £1.02 per litre here! :eek:

Filled my Seat Leon Cupra up this morning and it cost me £52!!!!! Why the crap won't the goverment take of the 75p per litre tax they have or at least half it or something as its getting stupid now!

I know the US litre is slightly less than the UK but at these prices is $1.82 per litre or for my car in the US would cost $92 to fill up and I'm doing this every 10 days. Geez this sucks big style!
 
is it really 75% tax ?? thats very very steep but hell people are still buying it though

£37 for a full tank in my mrs corsa
 
AndyR said:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4941262.stm

Well, it already has here. Unleaded is now £1.02 per litre here! :eek:
~snip~
Geez this sucks big style!
Click to expand...

OMG!!! When did this happen? Around my way (Surrey), it was 95.9 - 96.9 last night (haven't been out today). Is this an inner London thing? I looked at your Beeb link and they were only forecasting it as a distinct possibility.

Whatever, it is surely now high time that the petrol-duty was reviewed and we had some sort of shelter from these price hikes. I bet the Greens are laughing themselves sick, though. Maybe they are correct - *sigh and shrug together*
 
As long as...

...the people don't start to conserve energy on a big scale it is still far too cheap.

Living in the South West of London and seeing every weekend* just traffic jams everywhere tells me that the price should be much higher.

In my opinion it's also time to put some decent tax on aviation fuel. Unbelievable, that there's hardly any tax on it.

With all major oil fields in (production) decline and no discovery worth too mention in the last decades, we should use oil for more important things, i.e. agriculture, medicine etc.

The taxes should be used exclusively for developing sustainable energy alternatives.

And please don't come up with nuclear power... the demand is already double the supply at the moment.



* There are also traffic jams on the working days of course.
 
satty said:
...the people don't start to conserve energy on a big scale it is still far too cheap.
Click to expand...

I agree with this - and I believe public transport should be better and subsidised. Driving should be a luxury that you do because it's the only way to get somewhere or you have to transport something you couldn't do using public transport. At the moment it's cheaper and easier than using public transport in most places, which means people inevitably use it more and more.
 
Lau said:
Driving should be a luxury that you do because it's the only way to get somewhere
Click to expand...

It's a balance though... the last thing that should happen is that we regress 70 years in that motoring does become a 'luxury'... only to the rich (something which Mad Ken is trying his hardest to achieve) and that IS inherently wrong.
 
I saw a breakdowon on petrolprices.com and when fuel was 91p a litre, 60.6p of that is tax for Gordon Brown!!!!

I would be much happier if they just scrapped road tax and kept fuel prices as they were. So many people don't bother to pay road tax but everyone has to by petrol so use the tax this way.

Added the fact the goverment are looking at have this GPS tracking charge per mile on a live trial in a few years time so we will be paying for road tax, petrol tax and per mile tax.

If Gordon Brown and Tony Blair really want to get our support, drop the petrol tax and walla! Everyone votes for you :D
 
AndyR said:
I would be much happier if they just scrapped road tax and kept fuel prices as they were.
Click to expand...

Never happen, road tax funds nearly everything else with only a small percentage actually being spent on roads, road safety etc etc.

Get rid of that, and Mr Brown really would live up to his name, because he and the economy would be in so much sh*t.
 
iGav said:
It's a balance though... the last thing that should happen is that we regress 70 years in that motoring does become a 'luxury'... only to the rich (something which Mad Ken is trying his hardest to achieve) and that IS inherently wrong.
Click to expand...

True - I think what really needs to change is the culture - at the moment it's seen as kind of 'poorer' in a way to get public transport or walk or cycle, even if it's the more sensible option. If they made public transport cheaper and better, it really would be the better option for most journeys, and if the attitude about public transport changed at the same time it would be good. London's (and a few other big cities) are good examples, it's much more socially acceptable to get public transport, and it's usually the better option as well. Hence it's much more widely used. It's not perfect, and it's fast becoming not cheap, but it's a hell of a lot better than in some other cities and most towns.
 
Lau said:
At the moment it's cheaper and easier than using public transport in most places
Click to expand...

Also... we simply do not have the public transport infrastructure to support mass migration from the car.

We're somewhat spoilt in London, if you live in London, there's really no need to own a car in that public transport is good enough to negate the need for one. Other cities however are not so blessed.
 
Lau said:
it's seen as kind of 'poorer' in a way to get public transport or walk or cycle, even if it's the more sensible option.
Click to expand...

cycling is cool... or so says this 28 year old bmx'ing oaf. :D
 
There's the tax on petrol then they add some VAT as well don't they?

Public transport just isn't a practical option unless you live near a major road in an urban area. My experiences of catching the bus to work when I lived in South East Wales were generally poor. Usually late, often not turning up at all, and when there is only one bus per hour that's a major problem.

I usually catch the train each day to work now in Maidenhead and this is still a pretty rubbish experience, it costs a lot and seems to rise a little bit every few months, the trains aren't punctual, often cancelled and when you do manage to get on one you often have to stand.

Car prices and running costs go up - this pushes people to public transport which is then over capacity - government/train companies raise public transport prices to push people back to their cars to reduce the overcrowding...car running costs go up...repeat to fade..
 
iGav said:
cycling is cool... or so says this 28 year old bmx'ing oaf. :D
Click to expand...

Too right. :) (The cycling being cool bit, not the fact you're an oaf, as I have no frame of reference for that one :p )
 
Agreed that it does massively depend on your town/city's infrastructure to countenance not using cars so much. I've never owned a car simply because I've always lived in locations where it was more trouble than it was worth - and it would be cheaper to rent a car on the few occasions in a year (read less than one on average) than have one sitting in the drive most of the time. I quite like jumping on buses/trains - you can read/listen to iPod without needing to concentrate on the road etc.

The trouble with fuel tax also going up is that it also hurts public transport forcing their fees up.

I'd cap fuel tax (since it's a %), everytime the price goes up, the govt get a windfall after all.

And I'd abolish/limit the charges for public transport companies so they can keep their costs/fares down to encourage use/fund more buses/tubes/trams.
 
Lau said:
I agree with this - and I believe public transport should be better and subsidised. Driving should be a luxury that you do because it's the only way to get somewhere or you have to transport something you couldn't do using public transport. At the moment it's cheaper and easier than using public transport in most places, which means people inevitably use it more and more.
Click to expand...

americans dont have that luxury of the bulk of its population being able to "commute" by public transportation.

we love our suburbs too much.

besides the US's blissful world ignorance etc, we just dont have the capacity that the EU does to drive for 2hrs and be in another country, another culture, another language.

As bill cosby once said "you could drive (in america) for eight days and not run into another language"

every EU person I know speaks 3 languages plus, in the US you are lucky to find whites who speak anything but english and hispanics who speak more than spanish and english...

/rantover
 
iGary said:
That's almost $8 a gallon US.
Click to expand...

Only because our dollar is in the tank. :(

As you know it is dangerous to compare directly like that.

Based on my short visit to London in late February I view the Pound as being equal to the US Dollar in terms of we we lived there. A double burger at McDonalds is 99p in the UK, and 99 cents here in the US. With the job listings I saw seemed to 1 on 1 with what is offered here in the US (meaning that if a job paid 20k pounds, that same job would see 20k US $.

I was impressed by mass transit in London. Even being in what I thought was the core of London (Westminster, Picadilly, and the such). Traffic (cars)seemed to move. Every Underground station I got on or off at had local guides to the buses and where they went.

I stayed at a B&B in Hammersmith-Fuller. I was able to tube any where I wanted. But did take IIRC the 9 bus back from Picadilly to Hammersmith. If getting around the DC area was so easy. :)
 
As others have said, public transport isn't an option for many. The few times I have been to London "The Tube" is by far the best option, same for New York. However this isn't the case everywhere.

I live in Northampton, a failry large town in the UK and only a few months ago had to manage without my car for a week while it was having some work done. Trying to get to and from work using buses/trains was a totally pain! The nearest bus stop that picked up around any useful time was 2 miles away. This bus then took 50 minutes to get to near my work and I still had a 15 minute walk after that. So my usual 20 minute drive to work was replaced with nearly 1 1/2hrs of public transport each morning and the same at night. Then on the last day the bus didn't turn up!!! Little did I know it didn't run that day so I'd walked 2miles to the bus stop for no reason. Thought stuff it and jogged to work and made it 15 before I would have on the bus!

If the infrastructue was there I would use it but in most places it just plain sucks.
 
People over here would be going ******* if gas hit $8 a gallon. We'd probably just shift all our troops from Iraq to Saudi Arabia and drain the whole damn country of oil.

I take mass-transit everywhere, I think I've used a car maybe once a month and the trips were very short.

This summer I'm just going to park my car at my house and use my bike to get places, it's going to get very expensive to drive this summer.

Stupid energy policy FTW!
 
Right now 87 octane is about $2.80, and NE Ohio is one of the cheapest places to get gas in the US. :)

I'm expecting the price of fuel in the US to start climbing steeply and frankly I
am not over-concerned. For one thing $3 per gallon is still cheap, and for another I don't feel any sympathy for all the people that spent $30k on a 4Runner or Yukon etc. daily driver that gets crap mileage.

Our public transportation system is marginal inside cities, and a joke outside cities. So we are very much dependant on the car for now.

On a side note, I just checked out my mileage and my Nissan Altima got 40mpg on a recent road trip - not bad considering the EPA rates the Altima at 25/30mpg. :cool:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back