8/8/2019 Unnecessary Laws and Regulations in the Transport Sector

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Unnecessary laws and regulations in the transport sector?By colinbuchanan

The Government has recently launched its Your Freedom website . Its aim is to identify “unnecessary laws and regulations – both for individuals and businesses”. The website

has proved so popular that it has crashed on a number of occasions due to the

unexpected high volume of usage.

A wide range of transport issues have been raised so far, mainly in relation to motoring,

although these have included adding new regulations as well as removing existing ones.

In relation to parking, ideas include; removing all single and double yellow lines unless

they are justified for safety reasons, requiring bank holidays to be treated as Sundays for

parking and bus lane enforcement purposes, banning the use of wheel clamps on private

land, preventing the DVLA from selling car ownership details to private companies,

scrapping Nottingham’s workplace parking levy, removing parking restrictions for new

developments and preventing the use of CCTV cameras to enforce parking restrictions.

Speed limits are another popular area of comment, suggestions include; replacing all the

national speed limit signs with normal speed signs (that is a sign showing an actual speed

limit on it, which by default would lead to the scrapping of differential speed limits for

vehicle types), scrap the lower speed limits for HGVs, abolish, or at least, raise motorway

speed limits, scrap speed cameras and remove speed humps.

On the railways attention is mainly linked with the ability of the railways to issue penalty

fares and its prosecution policy which respondents want removed.

The taxi trade has highlighted a number of laws they want amended including the Town

Police Clauses Act , 1847 which gives power to the relevant councils to suspend a taxi

driver for 28 days if seen, and photographed on a bus lane, or a double yellow line. In

addition there are calls to allow taxis to pick up passengers outside their own council

area.

However, it is the minor changes that people want to see that are perhaps the most

interesting. So, for example, a restaurant wants to be able to provide a courtesy car

service for its customers without having to be registered as a taxi, while volunteers

working on the railways want to be able to do more without having to obtain expensive

insurance cover.

8/8/2019 Unnecessary Laws and Regulations in the Transport Sector

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Your Freedom is a useful concept and it will be interesting to see how many if any of 

people’s favourite bugbears are actually removed.