Road Pricing again - the spy in the sky is back...
 

Let the letters and petitions begin... or just sit on your ar*e if you think that'll be more helpful:

Road Pricing 2.0 is two years away | The Register

Wankers, thank God I leave the UK in 4 days. Can't be arsed with all this money grabbing being hidden behind "green" issues or health and safety agenda's.

Mate, the community on here is a bit hit and miss TBH - I attended a fuel protest a while back that over 300 people said they would attend - in the end there were about 20 of us.

Can't help but think a few of us lack conviction nowadays to follow things through and put this useful bunch of tw*ts (read Mr Brown et al) back into the sewer from whence they came... undoubtedly he'll ignore whatever petitions are thrown at him - but I'll still sign it - what have we got to lose ;)

Totally agree - we talk a good game but when it comes to following something up....:(

I detest the very idea of a satellite tracking me around in a car. They'll track your speed for sure and vape your licence for the most minor or transgressions for our increasingly laughable speed limits. In fact I won't even entertain the idea of such a tracker in my car.

Would the tracker not infringe on some Human Right if they were made mandatory?

Would have thought surely?

Labour won't be in power to complete the tests so I wouldn't worry

True - though the lack of a statement from the Opposition along the lines of "We hereby categorically state that we will not introduce any system for routinely tracking, monitoring and logging the movements of private vehicles" is worrying.

If it replaces the current road tax system, as opposed to being an additional cost, then I think it is a good idea. Being able to charge motorists for the roads they use and the miles they do rather than purely for the car they drive is a step in the right direction.

As for the ability to be able to track a car being an infringement on your privacy and/or human rights... well, a lot of cars can already be tracked for different reasons, those of security. Those that aren't tracked can quite easily be pinpointed due to the existing network of CCTV and number plate recognition technologies, so this argument against a new technology is nonesense really.

Tracking a car will of course need very strict rules and regulations so it cannot be misused, but you could say that about most things really.

There are several holes in that argument, though.

We already pay for the distance we travel via fuel tax. This tax is cheap to administer, involves no massive IT infrastructure, hard to evade and completely fair. You drive twice the distance, you pay exactly twice as much. Drive a car that emits twice the CO2 and you also pay exactly twice as much. Drive on congested roads and you pay more than empty ones (any car with a trip computer will show that this is true).

By introducing road tax bands, the Government has shifted attention away from this onto the fixed cost per annum of taxing a particular vehicle. This may have been a shrewd political move (or maybe just an attempt to placate the environmental lobby, successfully managing to p*ss off both sides of the argument in one go) - but it doesn't justify bringing in some other hugely complex and intrusive system to rectify the 'problem'.

Note that, of course, no change to the charging structure has any effect whatsoever on an individual's need to travel. Making it more expensive to get to work on time doesn't affect the need to do so. A change to employment law requiring employers to grant flexible working hours (where possible, of course) would allow people to travel at quieter times, reducing congestion and emissions, and could be done whether or not accompanied by a change in road charging structure.

It's not 'nonsense' at all - far from it. Monitoring the exact movements of every car on a routine basis is a whole world away from keeping an eye out for specific vehicles for specific purposes.

Consider a few possible, perfectly legitimate scenarios:

1) You drive a company car. Your bill for road use is sent to and paid for by your employer's fleet department, who know exactly where you've been from the road tolls you incur. You visit a competitor's premises for a job interview, and a week later get sacked,

2) Entirely by coincidence, your car's movements match those of someone suspected of a serious crime. You are dragged into the investigation as a result of mining the road tolls database.

3) You say to your partner that you're off to play golf, but you're not ;) They see your bill for road use a week later and you have some explaining to do.

I'm sure you can think of many other cases where a record of a car's movements represent an unacceptable risk or invasion of privacy.

Any infrastructure is subject to feature creep. Whatever assurances might be given today can always be altered by a future Government, never mind the same one in a year or two's time. We should speak up before the infrastructure is allowed to exist, because when it does, it'll be too late :(