Re: Doom and despondency

[Tom Nas <tnas@euronet.nl>]

Aleksander Mierzwa <alexaudi@kki.net.pl> wrote:

>Certainly it's a food for thought for our US listers who often think that
>Europe is a land of high performance cars and liberal speed limits.
>Such legislation projects used to be annoying, but now it's getting scary.
>We do not have just an anti-speed culture here, it's already a general
>anti-car culture which reminds me of darks years of communism when
>passenger cars were considered "politically incorrect" or the infamous
>British "red flag act" from the 19th century. Our authorities are doing
>everything they can to make owning and driving a car as frustrating
>experience as it can be. I believe in all European countries people pay
>some sort of tax for owning a car (for example in Poland it is included in
>the price of fuel), so it is logical to expect in return better roads to
>make us get faster from point A to B. And what do we get? Lower speed
>limits and more cops to enforce them, sometimes in an illegal way (unmarked
>cars with video cameras tailgating people to make them speed up). Orwell
>"is turning in his grave", like we say in my coutry.

Over here, some roads are literally infested with speed cameras (regular
visitors may recall the A9, or the A12, or the A10 Amsterdam ring road for
that matter... still, the Cabinet minister who wanted to lower all speed
limits was not allowed to do this. There's even talk of higher speed limits
at night (which would make sense to me).

Anti-car culture? Sure... how about $500 annual road tax for my 90q, never
mind that it barely moves a wheel... or $1.20/litre for regular unleaded?
We even had a 'car-free' day here last Sunday (which I celebrated by taking
the 90 for a spin). Bl**dy environmental mafia...

Tom
Zeist, The Netherlands
87 90q NG engine