Of course the congestion charge was only part of the deal, there was a £3bn investment in public transport that would have been implemented with it. Before it in fact; the charge wouldn't have been introduced until the transport improvements had been delivered.
I personally see this as a perfect illustration of how the majority of our population seems to think. I wouldn't call it stupidity as such, it's more of a confirmation bias in favour of the received opinion that the car is the only form of personal mobility.
Nobody sits down and calculates how much it really costs to run their car, per mile.
Nobody likes to accept the fact that it is physically impossible to provide enough road space for everybody to use a car in a densely populated area.
Put cars into politics and people start behaving completely irrationally, so putting this charge to a vote in the way in which it was done was clearly not a good idea. I'm not a fan of congestion charges actually, but that's a discussion for another post. The fact is that better transport comes at a cost, and someone has to pay for it.
Perhaps next we should have a vote on whether we want to pay income tax or not. Of course we know what, all things considered, the rational answer to that question is; I just don't credit the population with the ability to be that rational.
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