Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, Friday the 22nd of September, which makes this the last podcast of the week.

And goodness me, I hope that means that long-suffering government press officers are able to have a good weekend.

You might remember that yesterday I was talking about the proposal to scrap the proposed increase in taxes.

Well, there wasn't ever one, but it's been scrapped anyway.

And at the same time, the Prime Minister also announced

that he had officially scrapped compulsory car sharing. You remember that proposal, don't you?

Well, maybe you don't because it never existed. However, I think the fact that Rishi

Sunak made the pledge that he was going to stamp out something which wasn't going to happen

might actually encourage travellers to look again at car sharing. It's a very good option,

both environmentally and economically. So I've been working through this. It's a

subject I know a fair amount about and that's partly because I've been doing it for a number of

years under the guise of hitchhiking. That's the oldest form of car sharing or carpooling.

Also the most environmentally harmless form of motorised transport

because you just hop in for a portion of the journey that the driver's making anyway.

You use up a little bit of fuel but it is very, very marginal.

Hitchhiking safer than it's ever been, I think, but also increasingly a minority sport.

Now, on the subject of compulsory car sharing, there has been some.

I know of cases, for example, in Cuba, where, given the many, many shortages of fuel and public transport and everything else,

well, the government said, right, we are going to put people in special yellow uniforms on the

edges of town at specific places. They are going to assess how many people can fit into a government vehicle.

And there's lots of government vehicles in Cuba.

And this would involve a small payment, but just a few pesos, so nothing very much.

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