Thousands of drivers have already signed a petition calling for the tax on fuel to be reduced following months of soaring prices at the petrol pumps.

So far the Government has resisted on the entirely reasonable grounds that recent rises have been caused by oil companies and not by any increase in duty.

But if Tony Blair and John Prescott were bold, they would do the reverse and go for a seriously-large rise in petrol tax. It would be the first real sign that the Government really has the green credentials it is always waffling about and it would shock drivers into thinking whether all their journeys were strictly necessary.

Motorists say the car has given people great freedom. But in a crowded country like Britain, that freedom is constantly diminished by congestion as more people take to the roads.

Widen the M25 to 12 lanes, as has been proposed, and you solve nothing.

More traffic is sucked on to the motorway and cannot get off again. Build a bypass at Arundel, as happened in the Seventies, and a bypass of the bypass is proposed now.

Yet motorists, cocooned in their comfortable cars, will not easily be persuaded out of them on to rackety, expensive and unreliable public transport.

That is why a radical change in policy is needed - and needed quickly.

Drivers tend to reckon their costs in petrol, forgetting insurance, road tax and depreciation.

If petrol was put up to, say, £5 a gallon, a guarantee could be given that a fixed proportion of this tax would be spent on transport instead of frittered away on other services.

Some of it could be used to resurface roads, remove dangerous crossings and provide other safety measures.

But most of it could be diverted into building a deluxe public transport system people could be proud of, like those already operating on the Continent.

It could be used for luxury trams, as in Grenoble, for high-speed trains elsewhere in France and for the kind of rail-bus interchanges that exist all over Holland.

With this sort of money, it could be possible to build a rail and tube system in Brighton similar to that running in Rouen in Normandy. Buses could be given proper clearways so they could run without delay.

Millions could be spent on huge projects needed to take the railways into the 21st Century. This would include re-opening the Uckfield-to-Lewes line and electrifying it and giving coastal services a proper high-speed, east-west link, instead of the slow, dirty old trains currently languishing on these lines.

Most urgently of all, four tracks rather than two are needed on the Brighton line south of Three Bridges. They might have to go underground in some places, but they would enable whoever gets the South Central rail franchise to run a speedy service unhampered by stopping trains or engineering works.

Britain seems obsessed with running public transport inefficiently and on the cheap. In countries such as Germany, car ownership is greater than ours, but drivers use them less often because there are good alternatives.

Only this kind of change will solve the problem. But I very much doubt if this or any other Government has the guts to defy the howls of anguish and do it.