I holland the same ideas where proposed, the idea was 'billed driving' where your car gets monitored and the owner of the road (probably the government) sends you a bill each month. I really must agree with you that measures like this won't help unless there is a feasible alternative, which I think there just isn't in Europe at the moment. Really the Dutch railways have no comparison to their Japanese counterparts, so they just can't be counted on that much if you must be somewhere at some time.

You know Japanese trains are only as good as they are because the government spent a ton of money on it (then wrote of the debt and privatised it!). I don't know about Dutch railways, but in the UK they might as well scrap and rebuild. It would probably be cheaper in the long run. It's what you get for being the first block - your trains and track become the oldest on the block the quickest!

The thing I remember most about trains in Holland was that our ticket was never collected on the airport-Amsterdam route. Not when we got on, not during the ride, and not when we got off.

I put Japanese businessmen on a train at Amsterdam Centraal on an inter-city express to Antwerp. They had a 4 hour appointment there. The train broke down just outside of Amsterdam and they finally got to Antwerp 2.5 hours late! :+(

Still, rather Dutch trains than British ones. ;+)