Your views

HS2 Donald Trelford

Dear Sir,
In response to your recent article on HS 2 unfortunately it follows the usual trait of negativity with “ no solutions”.
Let me garnish you with the facts.

1. The SouthEast is overpopulated.
2. The M25, M1, M6, M62 are all giant car parks.
3. The population is due to expand to 73m by 2030.
4. The UK is bound to reduce carbon emissions
5. Nobody wants new runways & airports for domestic transport.

I therefore challenge you in your next article to propose some development plan that links the English major cities to the global centre that is London.
Doing nothing is a far bigger crime than having a go.
Kind
regards

Mark Dyson

Currently on holiday in S’Argamassa, Ibiza we have enjoyed reading the Daily Bulletin provided each day at our hotel.

I was interested to read the short feature on the decline in car rentals, which the hire companies attribute to poor economic conditions. However the truth is probably more to do with the Full/Empty fuel policies that even the big companies now impose.
In the old days you would collect your hire car with enough fuel to get you to the nearest petrol station and return it at the end of your vacation with the same amount of fuel.
Then some clever person came up with a new way to boost revenues, charge customers for a full tank of petrol and tell them to bring it back empty. This sounds reasonable enough but,as they say, the devil is in the detail.
The last time that I hired a car on Ibiza was last September when we came for a 7 day holiday. We rented a super mini grade car at a reasonable weekly rate but were told on collection we would have to pay for a full tank of petrol.
I cannot remember the exact amount but it did seem to be a lot for such a small car. We were also told to bring the car back empty because there would not be a refund for any fuel left in the tank.
Modern small cars are very economical and Ibiza is a small island, so we would probably had to drive around the entire island a number of times to empty the fuel tank, not something that you want to do on a short sunshine vacation! We did use the car most days but still ended up returning it with almost half a tank of fuel, which the rental company would then ‘sell’ to their next customer, making a 100% profit.
When I got back to the UK I made a point of checking the manufacturers specification for the car that I rented. I divided the fuel tank capacity into the amount that I was charged for the fuel and then checked the prices being charged per litre at petrol stations on Ibiza. The cost per litre charged by the rental company turned out to be 40 cents per litre more than the most expensive filling station on the Island.
So there you have it, what was a very lucrative little hire clause for the rental firms is now starting to backfire on them as people like myself realise that, for a weeks holiday it is much cheaper to use public transport and even taxis than pay exorbitant petrol prices for renting a car.
Some rental firms do offer Full/Full and Empty/Empty hire terms but if there was any doubt about the, highly dubious, Full/Empty system, one only has to compare the three different rates to see that hire charges for the first two fuel terms are considerably higher than the latter. I wonder why that is?
Regards
Paul Green
Newark
Nottinghamshire