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Monday June 6, 2005
Stupid Idea

The weekend inevitably leads to Monday. Overcast, not very warm, and a full stack of work for me. Not that it’s bad as such, just typical.

To really add to the spice the government unveil their latest stroke of genius that is “pay per use” roads. The basic plan is to fit each car with a GPS unit and data recorder. As you drive, the GPS unit tracks where and when, and the data recorder racks up the bill. The more congested your route (as decided by the government), and the closer you are to rush hour, the more you’ll pay. So blatting round the countryside at midnight will cost you peanuts, whereas driving through the M5/M6 junction at 8:30am will probably cost a fair whack. To counter this, petrol and road tax will be dropped.

As far as I can figure it, this is a really stupid idea.

The first issue obviously comes to down to privacy. The box will obviously have a record of when and where I/the car have been. Which is obviously great for MI5, the police etc. Not so great for me. Even better from the government’s point of view is the ability to issue speeding fines automatically and without expensive cameras. And if they tie them into ID cards (which they’re rolling out), not only the car but the person can be tracked too.

The other question is whether it’ll have any effect. At the moment petrol tax is a nice way of charging per use. As well as distant, the more efficient your car is the less you use, the less you pay, so there’s an incentive there to use a more environmentally friendly vehicle too (not that I’m convinced that cows aren’t worse for the environment than a car). The new method of course iradicates that efficiency aspect and simply replaces the distance aspect.

So where’s the benefit? Apparently it’s to do with the time area. If you use your car on a busy road at rush hour you’ll pay more. What they’ve obviously not gasped is that people don’t choose to sit in that jam because they like it. If there were a viable alternative you can bet your bottom dollar they’d have found it.

And the reason there is a rush hour? Because everyone’s going to work. You’re not going to stop people going to work easily. And for the most part they’ll do it at core hours. Why? Because in this day of immediate responses, it’s not much good if your business is closed when everone else wants to call it, and open when everyone’s asleep. But that’s for a different discussion.

So what we’ve got is a black box that’ll cost a shed load of money to install, introduce a whole raft of privacy issues and then charge people just the same as petrol tax did (easy to administer, collect, and reasonably fair), with no real extras that I can think of.

They just don’t get it do they. You can’t just keep using a stick to beat the motorists. They have to do it. They have to get to work, they have to get to work at that time, and there’s really no other way.

Public transport isn’t an alternative, it’s unreliable, overpriced and takes too long.

You need to stop using the stick and start using a carrot. Give all the drivers causing the congestion another alternative, some other way to get where they’re going. An example would be brutally improving public transport so that it becomes a real alternative.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it were improved, and were a real alternative, that all that would be required was a little eductation/advertising, and all those stuck in a jam would take the obvious action and switch to the new alternative.

If you don’t do that, if there is no alternative then this stupid initiative will change nothing, other than the bank balance of the government.

I was going to say I can’t undersand how they got relected last month, but to be honest, I can. Firstly this wasn’t announced until after the election, so not an issue. Secondly there’s no real alternatives. And finally it’s being marketted to the stupid so they’re all happy, because they think they won’t be affected.

Well, here’s news for you. Do you really think the government will give up the billions they rake in from motorists? Of course not, this new scheme will cost just as much, if not more.

Here’s some further reading should you want it:

Posted by Phil on June 06, 2005 09:19 PM | Categories: Thoughts | TrackBack

Hi Phil,

Great story!

Reg

Posted by: Reg at July 5, 2006 1:14 PM