End this class war on motorists

If there was an award for the city that was most hostile to motorists, London would win it hands down. Part of the problem is that there are far too many cooks spoiling the broth.

London drivers have to suffer 33 different borough parking regimes, not to mention Transport for London and the Highways Agency. One of the reasons I supported the idea of a directly elected Mayor is because we need a powerful voice who can pull all these players together and make some sense of it all. Sadly, that is yet another challenge Ken Livingstone has failed.

To be fair, it is not Ken who has produced the latest assault on drivers, which is the Association of London Boroughs' outrageous plan to increase the headline fine for overstaying at a parking meter to £120. We all know that means half as much if you pay in time, but £60 is still a huge amount of money to fork out for being five minutes late at the dentist.

The point of these fines is to make sure we all remember we are renting a bit of road rather than acquiring a freehold. But if my eyes water at the odd £40 hit, many people with rather less disposable income than an old Tory minister like me must be really hurting.

The only justification for an increase would be if there was any evidence that we were suffering dog-licence syndrome, in other words we had got to the point when nobody cared when they overstayed because the fine didn't matter.

If any borough leader thinks £40 is insignificant they truly have lost touch with reality. The truth is this is an outrageous and utterly cynical money grab by the boroughs, which just want to have their share of the plunder from drivers.

At the bottom of all this is the question of what road-charging in all its manifestations is actually for. It is certainly not just another excuse to insert a governmental hand into the motoring trouser pocket, although every Chancellor, Labour or Tory, appears to think otherwise. I have consistently argued that charging should be an aid to decongestion and improving air quality. But on that basis both the boroughs and Livingstone have lamentably failed to make their case.

In a crowded city we need to keep roads flowing as smoothly as possible, optimising space for people rather than any particular class of transport. That means walking and cycling instead of using the car for the 15 per cent of car journeys that are under a mile long.

It means riding a scooter or a motorbike to get to work fast and avoid the Ken tax if - and it's a big if - you can find a bike bay to park in. And of course it means using the bus, Tube or train if you possibly can, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of trying to find a parking space in the first place.

It is never a question of demonising car users. That approach is both stupid and politically undeliverable. The truth is very few people regard a car journey in London as a pleasure. For most it is a necessity, even before Ken's £5 a day hits those car drivers who can least afford to pay.

I used to irritate Ken when I was briefly on the Transport for London board by calling his plan "Roads for the Rich", but that is what it is. Those of us who can afford a fiver a day without too much pain might even be tempted back into our cars if congestion is genuinely reduced.

The people who are going to be forced off will not be those with the most obvious publictransport alternative, assuming any exists, but those least able to pay.

Like the head waiter who parks his car outside my West End office at 5.30 in the evening because he's going home at 1.30 in the morning when the last punters have shuffled off in their cabs. Anyone who thinks there is public transport around at that time of night clearly has never tried it.

There are two preconditions for any road pricing scheme to be successful. One is that it ought to be possible to drop off the car and pick up public transport before entering the charging zone - the parkand-ride concept. The second is that there should be real public transport capacity to handle the new passengers.

Neither of these conditions exists in central London, unless Ken is suggesting we turn Regent's Park and Hyde Park over to concrete. And all this talk of extra buses is fine except I don't know a single Londoner who has actually noticed the difference.

Residents of Westminster and Kennington wanted a stay of execution at least while we had a serious look at these issues. At the very least, they argued, we ought to have had a public inquiry to confirm that the plan will actually work before we're all stuck with them. But Ken's unexpected win in the High Court last week now means he won't be able to blame someone else when it all goes wrong. He has been given enough rope to hang himself - and he has shown a remarkable propensity of late for tightening his own noose.

Only one type of driver will probably not worry too much about parking fines in London - the lucky few with an offstreet parking space. I have never understood why an old Trot like Ken did not see this extraordinarily privileged cohort as a far more logical target when it comes to reducing congestion.

Workplace parking charging would raise money far more efficiently, with no hard cases such as you inevitably get with Ken's scheme, and target the cars that actually cause peak-hour congestion - which are unsurprisingly the ones who have somewhere to park at journey's end.

Not for the first time my advice to Ken is to think harder about what will bring results, rather than indulging his gut instincts. We all want more ordered, safer, less choked streets.

Deliberately inconveniencing and irritating motorists on the grounds of fighting a class war against the car is not the way to get them.