"Roger Millin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >so long wide boats, should not pay more than long narrow, boats and yet wide >boats >consume more resource...ie space? I say, let the market work and charge >by the area consumed! It will discourage wasteful use of the resource >IMO. >Roger
It is appropriate to have a charge related to size only where, er, size matters. To have one where size does not matter would be like charging people with red hair more for cinema tickets than those with other colours. For example, for moorings in a basin, it is appropriate to charge by length x beam,, because some of the (limited) area in the basin is consumed by mooring the boat. However, for navigation, it is not appropriate to charge by craft size, because there is no shortage of water surface area on the waterways in general, and because a vessel (of a size within the gauge of the waterway) passing along the waterway effectively "consumes" the same amount of space irrespective of its beam. One could argue that a larger vessel takes more room in a lock, and in the extreme one such vessel requires a lock(ing) all to itself while two smaller ones could share. However, BW has calculated that the marginal cost of of any vessel navigating a waterway is so small that it is not worth charging for, so the difference between "so small" and "half so small" is not significant enough to reflect in the charges. Also, two vessels which could share a lock may actually not do so but each lock through by itself. It might be worth considering charging per cycle of the lock, to encourage sharing (and thus the saving of water), but this could probably be justified only when water is in short supply as very often the saved water would run to waste over the bywash anyway. The same arguments apply to length as to beam. So there is no logical argument for the current BW practice of levying a higher navigation charge on a longer boat than on a smaller one. Adrian Adrian Stott 07956-299966
