It appears that though I thought I had, I haven’t actually got everything off my chest about the whole transport and congestion charging malarkey.

No, there’s definitely more to be said. Again, I keep reading about people in pinstripe suits who like to drive Bentleys and Mercedes telling me about our rotten public transport system and how terrible it all is and how if it was a better service they’d immediately hop back onto trams, trains and buses. And how the world will be a greener place if a few suburban oiks were shunted off the roads and herded onto cattle-buses into town being prodded by fat cats speeding by in Aston Martins and Range Rovers.

It’s like this for me, it ain’t all that bad. Yes, you need to make an effort but £3bn later you will still need to make an effort, I guarantee it. I also guarantee £3bn will become 4,5,6 and so on….looking forward to my council tax bill that year! For me, it’s great. Twelve minute train journey from Burnage on a clean safe comfortable train or a half hour drive through moderate traffic at rush hour. Non brainer. If I miss the train, I walk a little further and get a bus – there’s no missing both. On other occasions, for example the couple of times a year when the train is cancelled it’s been an easy enough task to recruit another 3 people off the train platform who look like they need to be somewhere in a hurry and Kingsway Cabs (officially the best cab firm on the planet) are with me within 2 minutes (on a bad day). Approx £3 each later, I’ve made some new temporary friends and we’re all safely tucked up at our desks. Easy.

The point being that most people don’t use public transport because they are socially conditioned to take the easy option and be lazy. They probably prefer ready-meals and use gym memberships half a dozen times a year. The system, though it could be better, isn’t that bad – I have enough city-wide experience of it to realise that. It’s certainly not bad enough to prevent most people getting from A to B.

I also don’t accept that it is fair for Roger Tarquin-Henderson of Upper Chelford to drive his Rolls Royce into Manchester and pay the same as a mum of two from Wythenshawe who has to drop two kids at school in the morning before guiding her medium sized family car into the city centre for work. One will pay, one will have to either change jobs or seriously compromise her lifestyle. End result? Rog needs to drop his February ski break to Chamonix from 5 star to 4 star plus but at least gets into work 15 minutes quicker every day.

To further my depiction of a flawed funding system, is it also fair that people get to vote who aren’t even affected by it. So you live and work in Stockport. You are asked the question – if someone else pays for it do you want a better local transport system? Hmmm.

For clarity, there is plenty that can be improved public transport wise – I do appreciate that I’m quite lucky where I am but this is not a £3bn magic wand. There’s also plenty that could be done to provide some genuine cost-effective alternatives. Car sharing is an alien concept to most and walking a forgotten art. Cycling is largely prohibited by lack of places in town to safely store bikes and get yourself a wash or shower before work. I’m sure these simple initiatives could have an equal impact to the fantastic proposals to revamp Hale and Bramhall train stations.

Park and ride is surely something, that if viable, would already be provided by one of the major public transport operators. Surely market research has been done here? I bet anything it concluded that Rog (sorry, he’s taking a hammering) has absolutely no intention of ever leaving his pride and joy in some car park 15 miles out of town and sitting on a bus or train into town. It’s just not the same showing photos to the girls in the office, they need to touch the plush leather interior.

It won’t cost me a penny more but I’ll be voting no until someone, somewhere presents a balanced argument and not a lop-sided one.

Public consultation, I certainly don’t think so. It’s like war-time propaganda out there on them streets. I keep looking upto the skies expecting leaflets to drop from planes telling us how the congestion charge is the only way for the inhabitants of the Independent Republic of Mancunia to survive a sure but painful death. I swear I saw a tank ploughing it’s way up Portland St, with Cllrs Richard Leese & Pat Karney in full military garb addressing pedestrians via megaphone.

“Stop what you are doing, return to your homes immediately and vote yes or spend ten years solitary confinement in Liverpool”.

How many pro-congestion campaigns can there be? The latest one, United City (nice and clever that, I get it, just!) contains the usual self-proclaimed champions of industry aka Manchester business leaders getting their names in print, spouting about Manchester this, Manchester that. It’s all great stuff but most of the businesses supporting it have little genuine passion for the greatest city the world has ever seen. Without shaming and naming loads of them I would really question the true intentions of the majority, especially those who operate out of London. Are their hearts or wallets in 0161?

Most of the rationale from this crew for public transport improvement, hiding behind a thinly veiled environmental argument is to make Manchester bigger, greater, better business infrastructure, more economically powerful, world class city blah blah blah. Yeah ladies, coz bigger is always better.

Sorry chaps, I’m a Mancunian, not a wannabe Londoner. I love the place. I love the fact that whenever you go out you bump into someone you know and equally find yourself speaking to people you don’t know like you’ve known them for years. Yes, this is Manchester, a historical centre of political and social reform, industrial revolution, women’s rights movements, canals, railways, the computer and best of all, Vimto. Home to the Peterloo Massacre, the Busby Babes and more recently the IRA bomb. You see this city doesn’t simply lie down and die. It fights back everytime. These are world class attributes you can’t ever copy – quite frankly £zillion per sq ft prime office rents and the number of 5 star hotels simply won’t be talked about in the same way a hundred years on.

So please just leave Manchester as it is. The airport is already busy enough and provides more than enough pollution to the surrounding areas – and we’re talking noise here as well as other stuff. If you really, really want somewhere bigger to live then just move to London.

Though the idea of a vastly improved transport system is appealing to everyone, myself included, the bottom line is that we shouldn’t be subjected to this form of political blackmail. To provide a context, the government was able to find close to a billion pounds to form a limited shelf-life southern-centric tourist attraction called the Millennium Dome. Now they are telling us that to give Manchester the £1.5bn funding that by rights we should have had drip-fed into us in the past, we’ve got to stump up the other half. Hmmm, doesn’t sound that fair to me.

Maybe I’ve got the Mancunian Way running through my veins a little too much but if it was upto me I’d wheel out Jack Duckworth and tell them to shove it where the sun don’t shine. Tell them it’s a disgrace how the North West of England has been deprived of much needed funds in the past and that we’re not going to be some form of urban guinea pig for the rest of the country.

After all, we’re mancunian, we’ll cope won’t we?