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Proposals for dealing with traffic congestion
The Secretary for Transport, Mr Haider Barma, today (Friday) announced proposals for dealing with traffic congestion.
He pointed out that in putting together the package, the Government had taken into account comments received during the three-month public consultation exercise on the Report of the Working Group on Measures to Address Traffic Congestion.
"Some of the proposals made by the Working Group had been revised and a number of new initiatives emerging from the public consultation exercise have been included in the package," he added.
On fiscal measures, Mr Barma said if the numbers of new car registrations again exceeded the rate that our roads can accommodate, he proposed considering:
increasing First Registration Tax (FRT) for private cars by a rate sufficient to reduce the rate of growth in private car numbers to about two or three per cent per annum;
raising Annual Licence Fees (ALF) for private cars in line with inflation since last increase in 1991 (i.e. an overall increase of about 40 per cent).
Mr Barma explained that the increase in FRT for private cars was considered to be the most effective way of tackling congestion in the short term.
"However, the rate of growth in the number of private car has recently slowed down to a significant extent after an average annual increase rate of 10 per cent in the past three years.
"The rate of increase over the first five months of 1995 was five per cent and indeed the rate of increase for the last two months was negligible. But this cannot be taken as indicative of a long term trend.
"In view of this, increases on FRT cannot be justified on transport grounds for the time being, but we need to make the preparations now to be ready to propose an increase by the appropriate amount if the rate of car growth rises significantly beyond our target of two or three per cent a year," he said.