We live 3 minutes from the M60 and another 2 minutes from there to the M62 and M66. So we’re always the first to know whether there’s a problem on the motorway. What normally happens is that we see a sudden influx of cars crawling slowly past our door.

Take today…

I’d not listened to the radio or seen the TV so I didn’t realise that a band of bikers had set off from Birchwood Services on a fuel protest to the centre of Manchester. That meant they would go past the slip-road I normally use to join the M60. What alerted me to the problem was, you guessed it, a bunch of slow moving cars outside the door.

I bundled the school-runners into the car and we set-off. For the first 3 minutes everything was great, a clear road as usual. Then we got onto the M60 (originally Junction 1 on the M66) and discovered a lengthy queue starting to build up.

So avoiding the M60 I continued straight on to the M66 to exit via the Heywood Distribution Park exit, the next junction down.

As we passed under the M60 you could see countless cars and lorries simply parked on my favourite “free” car park.

Without wishing to get overly political it does seem rather crazy that we appear to have the most heavily taxed fuel in Europe, maybe even the world. And I don’t believe that using tax will make people more green. Looking at our island population we’re a tiny drop in the ocean of polluters, CO2 and methane producers so us “doing our part” by taxing everything that moves doesn’t really help the environment and instead makes our goods even more expensive to transport.

And yet transport companies across Europe can fill up with cheaper fuel there and then come over to the UK and because they’ll be cheaper they’ll get the jobs currently done by UK hauliers. That means that the majority of lorries which transport almost everything we buy or sell will not be affected by the UK’s green tax on fuel. Instead that burden will be taken on by the car driver.

With one fell swoop the government has managed to decimate the haulage industry, increase UK taxes through the back door and actually achieve very little for the green cause.

Carbon Neutral Lorry Journey

Finally while I was in one of the queues getting back home after the school run I noticed an advert for something on a lorry. Below the advert it said that some company was making the lorry have a carbon-neutral journey. What are they doing planting a tree for every 5 miles they travel.

If the lorry is moving it’s not carbon neutral! Even if you off-set the carbon it produces by saying that the advertising will be seen by thousands of people so you don’t need to do advertising in print which has a carbon cost. You’re fooling yourselves. If that’s how it works every supermarket lorry that delivers around the country would also be carbon neutral because they’re advertising their store on the lorry sides.

If someone knows what it means for a lorry to be carbon-neutral I’d be interested to hear what it really is…