Highway robbery

Sir,
So they are thinking of putting the cost of petrol up by 5.5 cents per litre and scrapping road tax. This is nothing short of highway robbery. Take a scenario, a low usage road user who puts, say, £10 worth of fuel in a week, they will pay an extra pound a week for the same amount of fuel. If that individual lives out of town and has to travel daily to work, multiply it by three to four depending on how far away they live and the car they drive. Commuting between the main towns, take that amount a day as a minimum.

Using an economical car, such as a 1 Ltr Toyota Yaris, nothing extravagant, the road tax is currently £20 a year, based on the first scenario, the cost to a road user would be approximately £50 a year. Sure, if you have a diesel car, you might save a bit, but for normal road users it will be a horrendous hike. Personally I calculate that the increased cost would work out at about £3.50 a week, a whopping £182 a year, up from the current £20 a year.

Someone travelling daily from Limassol to Nicosia is looking at an increase of at least a pound a day, depending on the car they drive, that is a whopping £300 plus – even for the most economical cars.

In the absence of a viable public transport system, my hands are tied. And all this assumes stability in the cost of the price of oil, and we all know how volatile that is.
Barry D Fraser, Episkopi

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