Mr Angry Mkinskey writes the the Telegraph: Town hall tyrants waging class war

So, in the twisted mindset of Richmond's rulers, a local resident wanting to park his own car outside his own house in his own street has been transformed into a nasty polluter who should be heavily penalised for his selfish irresponsibility.

I'm sorry. Whose street? In my opinion streets are for the occasional Fortnum's delivery van and young lads in shorts and blazers kicking a football around after the bus drops them off from school (probably St Paul's). Who the hell said that cars should take up all of our public space in our residential neighbourhoods in the way they have? If you want to park a car outside your house, buy one with a drive (a house that is). Those without drives were clearly designed for committed public transport users.

Of course this has nothing to do with pollution...:) But I wonder if there is a correlation between those households with gas guzzlers and those with two or more vehicles.

Elsewhere in the Telegraph, Alan Cochrane obviously hasn't even read the rest of the newspaper he is writing in:

Yesterday's news that Richmond upon Thames borough council is to slap a £300 annual parking charge on 4x4s, instead of the £200 for "normal" cars, is unwelcome but unsurprising.

If what he says is correct, that his glorious British Land Rover Discovery creates less CO2 emissions than the Ford Mondeo, then he'll be in the same group or lower than the Mondeo. From what I can fathom, this is not a crusade against 4x4s per se but based on their emissions. It just so happens that, possibly unlike his glorious Britsh Land Rover, those pesky foreign 4x4s like Porsche Cayennes also happen usually to be the biggest emitters.

On congestion in general though, here in Oxford some like to make out that we are gridlocked most of the time - they must never have seen the Hanger Lane Gyratory, poor provincial things - but I happened to be waiting for a bus to head into town around the outbound peak times the other day and we have some rolling roadworks at the bottom of my street with traffic lights. One crammed bus with forty something people went outbound through the lights and twelve cars with one person in each. Three minutes later when the lights next changed another twelve cars got through. When I eventually got my bus going the other way, I think I counted seventy eight one occupant cars waiting to get through the other way as we passed the waiting line before I gave up counting (the queue went on far beyond my bus's turning). That's something like fifteen minutes worth of wait. Or two bus loads.