M.E.N. assistant editor Robert Ridley gives his opinion on the congestion charge debate.

THEY call it the congestion charge. I choose to refer to it as the 'con' charge.

This is the week the public of Greater Manchester need to wake up and realise that unless they put a cross next to the word NO on the voting form that's coming through their letterboxes, they are going to be saddled with a totally unfair tax on driving.

To run a car, I already feel I am being taxed to the hilt with petrol costs, ridiculously high road tax (little of which actually seems to get spent ON the roads) and rising insurance costs - not to mention handing over wads of cash to licensed bandits posing as main dealer servicing departments.

But I keep driving because it is convenient and, frankly, I rarely seem to encounter this congestion that everyone seems to be talking about.

I leave my home in Stockport at 7.20am and arrive at the city-centre offices of the M.E.N. at 7.55am. A 13-mile journey which takes me just 35 minutes.

Total cost for my actual journey is £2.20 in petrol. I know this does not include insurance/tax etc but as I would never get rid of my car altogether, I would still be paying those regardless of whether I used the car to get to work.

Under the new proposals I would have to pay an additional £3 as I crossed the congestion charge rings coming in, more than doubling my costs.

If I decided to use public transport it would involve a 15-minute walk to my nearest rail station (not to be relished in the pouring rain) followed by several minutes of standing around on a dreary platform, a 25-minute rail journey costing £3 and then another bus ride from Piccadilly to our offices. In other words, it would take me longer.

And it wouldn't get any better after the TIF cash is spent.

Going home? I leave at 6pm, possibly the most congested time, and arrive at my house at 6.45pm.

The fact is that congestion is self-policing. By that, I mean that if I was getting into my car at 7.20am and it was taking me an hour and a half to get to work, stuck in traffic, then I probably WOULD start using public transport.

But that's not happening - and I'm not sure these dire predictions of future congestion will happen. A recent report by the RAC showed congestion on motorways around Greater Manchester has actually DECREASED in the last year due to the credit crunch and high fuel prices, with peak journey times having fallen by as much as 5.1 per cent. As I said, car use is self-policing without the need for an enforced charge.

And what really is so unfair, is that for all this congestion charge TIF money, I see little real benefit to me in Stockport apart from a new town centre bus station I'll never use, a few extra buses, even more bus lanes (causing more congestion) and better lighting at my local rail station.

There will be no trams sweeping past my door ready to whisk me straight into the heart of Manchester, and the fact they are extending Metrolink out to Oldham and Rochdale is little use to me or others in Stockport.

If they want to introduce this con charge, then let them put it on roads that run parallel to the existing tram lines. That way, if people choose to drive from, say, Bury and Altrincham, on roads that already have an excellent tram alternative, then they can pay a charge to do it.

The other big point I want to make is this. Where is all the congestion during school holidays? Answer - there isn't any.

The aforementioned 35-minute drive in from Stockport to Manchester takes me just over 20 minutes when the schools are off and even driving home is a breeze. Most of the congestion at peak times, in my view, is caused by the ridiculous number of parents running their kids to school (usually in giant 4x4s).

Instead of spending billions on more trams, simply introduce the American-style yellow bus system wholesale across Greater Manchester at a fraction of the cost and tell parents their children have to catch the bus, cycle or walk (as I used to do).

It would solve peak-time congestion at a stroke.

Conductors

Here's another idea - again at a fraction of the cost. Re-introduce conductors and guards on to buses and trams. More people would immediately start using them, safe in the knowledge they could travel without being troubled by yobs and other selfish layabouts.

It would also mean bus drivers didn't have to take the money - so they could pull straight away from the stop instead of sitting there for five minutes with a queue of traffic behind them.

Another big cause of congestion in my view is the huge number of badly-sequenced traffic lights, bus lanes and other 'traffic calming measures' that cause more problems than they solve.

A great example of this is the lights on Deansgate near the Hilton. They seem to let about six cars through before going back on to red for an age, causing huge tailbacks in the evening rush hour.

And don't even get me started on that bus lane nonsense on the A6 in Stockport.

So what about the environment, I hear you ask? Don't I care as I drive along, puffing out CO2?

Well, I don't altogether buy into this global-warming argument, about which I feel there is more than a touch of `the emperor's new clothes'.

For every scare-mongering scientist you'll find one who will tell you the current warming is purely a cyclical event. A thousand years ago, the planet went through a period of global warming, called the medieval warm period. Temperatures were higher than anything observed during the current warm period.

Where were the cars, aircraft or coal-burning electricity plants to blame it on then? And the same thing happened a thousand years before that, in the Roman warming period.

A recent study by the University of Portsmouth concluded that a herd of 200 cows belches out the equivalent amount of methane to the energy produced by a family car being driven a staggering 111,850 miles.

The amount of methane produced by a herd was the same as the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced by a car burning 21,400 litres of petrol - and methane in the atmosphere is believed to be responsible for one-fifth of the global warming experienced since 1750.

So don't be taken in by all this talk of saving the planet with a congestion charge - it's nothing short of highway robbery.

VOTE NO!