The issue New Labour can no longer duck

Of the various daft things that Stephen Byers has said and done over the past year, the silliest must be his statement at the weekend that " I am not in the business of punishing people because they use their car. I am in the business of improving public transport".

It is typical New Labourspeak, and Byers, after a year in the job of Transport Secretary, ought to know better. First, the word "punish" is inappropriate in this context. The message Byers was trying to get across was one of reassurance to Britain's evergrowing number of motorists. However, he knows that no one is suggesting motorists should be "punished" for wanting to drive their cars.

Second, Byers is ducking the issue through using that type of emotive language. He knows, as does anyone who has ever examined the topic for more than five minutes, including the hapless Lord Birt, that there is a fundamental problem at the heart of transport policy which can only be addressed by attempting to reduce car usage.

Moreover, that will never simply be achieved by trying to improve public transport. We all say we'd use public transport if it was better but for many of us that's just an excuse. There is a need for both carrots and sticks, and for politicians to make the kind of hard choice which Tony Blair promised us in opposition but has not delivered in government.

The simple fact is that life has to be made harder for some motorists some of the time if congestion is not to continue growing and London is to avoid gridlock. The reason is simple. With a few exceptions, such as the odd motorway-widening scheme and some bypasses, the amount of road space cannot be increased to meet demand.

This is particularly true in London. There have been two attempts to drive motorways into the heart of London during the past 30 years, and both failed. In the early 1970s, there was the motorway box scheme, bits of which like Westway were built before Londoners voted out the Tory GLC promoting the idea.

The box scheme was scrapped, saving the capital from becoming a larger version of motorway-dominated Birmingham. Indeed, the extent to which urban dwellers have turned against motorways is illustrated by Birmingham, which is now busy dismantling some of its network of 1960s roads in order to make the town centre more pedestrian-friendly.

Then there were the " assessment studies" of the late 1980s promoted by Transport Secretary Cecil Parkinson, which were a disguised attempt to extend the existing motorways deeper into London at the cost of demolishing thousand of homes and destroying several attractive neighbourhoods. The consequent outcry led to the shelving of the scheme and the abandonment of any further attempt to build more major routes inside the ring of the North and South Circular roads.

Therefore, with the number of cars increasing, with the number of roads virtually fixed, congestion will go on rising unless people can be coaxed out of their cars. In an ideal world, public transport would be made so attractive that no one would want to bother getting into their own vehicles.

But life is not like that. As Steve Norris once famously remarked, the Tube is "full of smelly people". The car has a number of advantages which public transport cannot match. It provides a door-to-door service, it can carry luggage and more than one person, it runs to your own timetable and it is relatively cheap.

Now the Government can do little about most of those advantages - except in the area of cost. Despite the fuel protests of autumn 2000, it is an extraordinary fact that motoring is actually cheaper today in real terms than it was 25 years ago. Sure, we pay over 80 per cent of every gallon in tax, but improved technology, better fuel consumption and mass production of cars means that we get a better deal today than our counterparts in the 1970s. Introducing congestion charging and road-tolling specifically targeted at overusedroads and bottlenecks would ultimately benefit all motorists through reducing traffic, and bring in considerable revenue to improve public transport. But Byers has been lukewarm about congestion charging and has ruled out motorway tolls.

The hypocrisy of New Labour ministers over the party's treatment of motorists is best demonstrated by the saga over Ken Livingstone's congestion-charging scheme. Labour created the legislation to allow charging, but then got cold feet. During the 2000 mayoral election, its MPs were urged to hand out leaflets criticising Livingstone's idea, which had its origins in the Transport Act 2000 which John Prescott, Byers's predecessor, had steered through Parliament.

The other potential way that government can influence car use is through parking. Already, that is an effective barrier to many motorists who want to come into central London. Only those with access to parking spaces can drive into central areas and such spaces could be taxed, and their number could be reduced through planning legislation.

It is interesting that Westminster, the council which has opposed Ken Livingstone's plan for congestion charging, now charges so much for its parking meters that many are often left empty during the day as people have simply abandoned the idea of bringing their cars into central London. Is this the type of punishment which Byers thinks ought not to be imposed on motorists? The policy seems sensible and effective.

While most of us are motorists, we are also all pedestrians. "Punishing" the motorist also benefits other road users. Take the example of Oxford Street. Britain's premier shopping street is a stinking mess because Westminster Council and the Government have never had the courage to close it off for all traffic, which is the only sensible solution, given that 99 per cent of its users are pedestrians. Instead, vested interests such as the taxi cab associations, London Transport and the short-sighted shopkeepers, have prevented its pedestrianisation and, not surprisingly, it is losing its pre-eminence.

It is time for Byers and New Labour to come clean: do they want the present nightmarish situation on our roads to continue indefinitely or are they prepared to take sensible measures to charge motorists more in an effort to relieve congestion? They can't have it both ways, and we should be told what they plan to do.

? Christian Wolmar's book, Broken Rails, How Privatisation Wrecked Britain's Railways, is published by Aurum, £9.99.