Bloody Tax Dodgers!

Sunday Times columnist calls for booze taxation to be spent on bigger pubs

Sunday Times columnist calls for booze taxation to be spent on bigger pubs

How can a motoring journalist get this far into a career without knowing how roads are paid for? Why does the Sunday Times give him money for writing articles with such factually incorrect information? At least Clarkson is a parody and often quite funny (Rutherford’s Swampy ‘joke’ is too weak for even the cheapest Christmas […]


[UPDATE] Speeding killer driver given lenient sentence; BBC reporter belittles death of the cyclist, says “[cyclists] don’t pay road tax”

[UPDATE] Speeding killer driver given lenient sentence; BBC reporter belittles death of the cyclist, says “[cyclists] don’t pay road tax”

Kevin Hill, Assistant Editor of BBC East Midlands Today, has sent out a boilerplate answer to all those who complained about a road death story broadcast in mid-April. He admits that the presenter at fault could have asked the “road tax” question “more carefully” and then gives what he believes to be the more carefully […]


Projection bias, highway hegemony, and why cyclists rent the road, they don’t own it

Projection bias, highway hegemony, and why cyclists rent the road, they don’t own it

“They think they own the road”: This is a common criticism of cyclists from a large minority of motorists, a gripe seen on forum postings and letters to newspapers the world over. It would be laughable if it wasn’t meant so seriously. Do you really think you, a cyclist, own the road? A highway, let’s […]


Roadies should be stay-at-homeies, says doc

Roadies should be stay-at-homeies, says doc

Some drivers think cyclists should not be allowed on roads, roads which they mistakenly believe were designed and built for cars. Some drivers have a ‘Get orff moy laaaaand’ mentality because they feel they’ve paid for use of the roads through ‘road tax’ (they should apply for a rebate, backdated to 1937). This feeling of […]


“Even though I pay me road tax they treat me like a clown”

“Even though I pay me road tax they treat me like a clown”

Stewart Topp, AA’s Patrolman of the Year, has taken Ireland’s famous ‘Pothole Song’ and married it to bunch of roads-in-disrepair – and clown – images. The iPayRoadTax fake ‘road tax’ roundel has been placed into the video. It’s slightly out of the original cycling context of the logo but, hey, it gets the message out […]


Page, turn a new leaf, learn about how roads are *really* funded

Page, turn a new leaf, learn about how roads are *really* funded

Lewis Page is an intelligent bloke. He writes for The Guardian, Prospect and is a staffer on tech site The Register. An officer in the Royal Navy from 1993 to 2004, he’s siwritten books, such as Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs, a forensic polemic about financial waste in the armed forces. Page, then, is bright. He […]


Good Motoring mag gives columnist the heave-ho for ‘road tax’ gibe

Good Motoring mag gives columnist the heave-ho for ‘road tax’ gibe

Top marks to GEM Motoring Assist for its speedy retraction of the anti-cyclist article in the latest issue of the organisation’s membership-only quarterly magazine. 60,000 members were treated to a diatribe in ‘Good Motoring’ that was as inaccurate as it was distasteful. Columnist Jane King hated on both cyclists and horse-riders for daring to take […]


When motorists believe they’ve paid for use of the road, they can be dangerous

When motorists believe they’ve paid for use of the road, they can be dangerous

Some motorists believe cyclists are lesser beings, and shouldn’t get in the way of cars. Why? Because of the shockingly widespread belief that cyclists don’t pay for roads. In fact, we do. We all do. Everybody pays. Every tax-payer, that is. Road maintenance, road building and road design are all paid for out of general […]


Jeremy Clarkson: be a man, offend a Middle Eastern religion [UPDATED]

Jeremy Clarkson: be a man, offend a Middle Eastern religion [UPDATED]

On Top Gear, aired 6th February, Jeremy Clarkson made one of his deliberate errors in order to annoy a minority. Now, if he can get away with slanders about whole countries (France, Albania, Mexico etc) he’s sure as hell not going to lose any sleep over “jokes” about killing cyclists who “don’t pay road tax”. […]


Bloody tax-dodgers! (And there’s millions of ’em)

Bloody tax-dodgers! (And there’s millions of ’em)

Some motorists feel they own the road because “they pay for it”. Some hate on cyclists for being ‘tax-dodgers’ even though roads are paid for by general taxation not road tax, which was finally abolished in 1937, a process started by Winston Churchill in 1926. [It’s car tax, not road tax]. Those motorists who think […]