I'm glad I don't live in England..pay by the Km driving.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/story.jsp?story=644303

That’s gotta suck.

Makes sense to me, in principle. The plan includes removing fuel duty - bringing the cost down from US$6/gallon to a quarter of that. The plan also involves the charges being greatest on the most congested routes and times, which can only help spread the traffic load out more evenly.

There has been talk of doing this in California, but it hasn’t happened (yet).

Please tell me this is a joke. Does anyone make enough money to pay that kind of fee? If you have to drive those roads every day for work or school, that could pretty much eat up your entire paycheck. I’ve tried to apply it to my commute here in Ohio…ten miles a day, each way, on a busy, congested road at rush hour at let’s say $2.50 a mile…that’s 20 miles, $50 a day, and I only make $100 a day before taxes…yep, can’t afford to work.

Like GorillaMan said, it could be good for some folks if the other motoring taxes were eliminated.

It’d never fly in the states, but as I understand it, folks in England do considerably less driving than we.

Road pricing has already been introduced in bits of London, and the sort of system proposed has proven pretty effective in Singapore, among other places. As pointed out, the UK’s exorbitant fuel duty already constitutes a very real form of road pricing; the effect of the proposed scheme would just be to assign different values to different sorts of roads. For example, it might cost more to take a modern, swish, fast road than it does to pootle around country lanes. This does have a good deal of sense to it. The downside, as pointed out in the BBC’s article, is that the incentive to use fuel efficient cars is greatly reduced. Should the government desire a tax-based incentive to use such cars, however, I’m sure it would prove possible to either implement separately or incorporate into the road pricing scheme.

Roads have to be paid for somehow, and I don’t really see how this scheme is any more scandalous than any other method of extracting payment; quite the reverse, since it’s much more directly linked to the value gained by those using the roads.

kittenblue, here in the UK I couldn’t afford to run a car on pre-tax pay of $100 a day as it is. We’ve got much more developed public transport over here, making commuting by car through congested urban areas much less attractive. And according to the scheme, the road price in rural areas without public transport coverage would be much less (of the order of 2p per mile according to the story). This would actually be an improvement; if I lived somewhere where commuting was a necessity, the running cost of any car I had would likely be reduced. With roughly 80% of our fuel price representing duty at present, at 85p/litre a 30mpg car would cost approximately 13p per mile to run (he said, horribly mixing his units). With a pricing scheme and no duty, a 2p per mile road would represent a combined cost of barely 5p per mile. By contrast, I would pay through the nose if I wanted to drive into central London, and rightly so, since the roads there are at such a premium. Tube’s perfectly good. Well, it’s alright. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp umbrella, anyway, although that frequently happens on the Tube, but I digress.

As a tangential matter, I await with some amusement the inevitable Tory rejection of this plan, creating yet another instance in which Labour bizarrely prove to be the advocates of a market-based reform in the face of Tory opposition. It’s a topsy-turvy political world, it really is.

An old saying: The English think 100 miles is a long distance. The Americans think 100 years is a long time.

Road pricing, yes. But it would remove a very large component of the current fuel duty, which is to create a disincentive for people to drive fuel-inefficient vehicles. It wouldn’t cost the owner of a Hummer any more to drive the same length of road than it would cost a Fiat owner (beyond the actual pre-tax cost of the fuel, anyway). Plus heavier cars do more damage to roads.

You must remember that we live on a small island, with much of our population in cities built for horses + cart. Most of London’s roads, for example, (with about 8 million inhabitants) are single or double lane, with frequent traffic lights.

By compensation there are buses, trains and the underground system. One way to avoid the crush is to drive to the outskirts of the city, park and travel on by public transport.

Yes, one major rebuilding of London took place after quite a nasty fire. You can understand why they didn’t put many 3 lane roads in then for the cars - it was 1666!

It looks like, from the article, that the only revolutionary thing is the satellite tracking. Other than that, it sounds like a toll road (albeit making all roads toll roads). I can go from Topeka to Kansas City for 2.25, which works out to a little less than .04/mile. Since it’s a limited access highway, it works out as paying by the mile, because you have to enter and exit at certain points (toll booths). Also, if I have more axles (pulling a trailer, being a semi, etc), I get charged more, which I didn’t see a provision for in the article (although, presumably when you get you vehicle outfitted for a satellite tracker it would get taken into account).

Also, I didn’t get a feel for if the price was high enough that the satellite positioning margin of error would come into play.

Take care,

GES

Yeah, I actually pointed that out myself. :slight_smile: But for starters, we already tax different categories of vehicle differently, and the satellite trackers would be tagged to individual vehicles, so I don’t think it would be too complex to factor fuel efficiency into the pricing system. Another factor is that if the intended reduction in congestion occurs, emissions would be substantially reduced by dint of not having thousands of cars stationary with the engines running at peak times. And finally, I don’t really think we’ll ever have the same sort of gas-guzzler culture here in the UK as you see in the US, for the relatively silly reason that cars that large simply don’t fit on our roads…

If that’s the case, it may be the way to go.

But this is just atrocious…

Yeah, I know. Us pesky Americans and our privacy, right? :slight_smile:

I need to see more details on what the average driver would end up paying before i come down firmly, but I am tentatively in favor.

In my viw there are basically going to be 2 camps in this one, people who don’t drive so much and will thus save money, and people who drive a lot who will end up paying more. Guess who’s gonna bitch?

The reality is that roads need paying for, and road users should be the ones to pay. If a given motorway happens to be £1.34 a mile, then car share, or take public transport. Of course it would be helpful if moneys gained from the scheme were used to improve public transport.

This would only be possible if the overall tax revenue exceeded that of present fuel/car/road taxes. And that would be a political mistake - keeping the overall burden the same would be the only way to get the public to accept the system. In which case, there’s no extra cash for public transport.

Unless perhaps the revenue stayed the same, but the cost of maintaining the roads decreased due to less use due to people being encouraged to find alternatives such as car sharing and public transport instead of travelling on congested roads.

I know that is a very simplistic view though.

There are huge civil rights issues in this, along with plenty of others.

First, we could all be tracked, and when you add in the forward facing speed cameras, along with the city crime surveillance cameras, it really doesn’t bear thinking about.

Those new digital speed cameras, link right back to the vehicle licensing authority in Swansea, they check your speed, and link it through to your Tax disc to discover if its valid, and it takes a digital picure of the vehicle occupant.
Add this to the sattellite tracking system, and the fact that software is being developed and used to identify individuals on surveillance cameras, its not good.

Add also into this mix, the National Identity Card scheme too, and a picture emerges.

Folks often say ‘If I’m not doing anything wrong I have nothing to worry about’, but they are mistaken in this approach.

If I’m doing nothing wrong then why should the state track me, and have the ability to monitor my associations, because ultimately this technology will be able to monitor noT just the individual, but also that individuals contacts.

When there is serious union activity such as strikes, monitoring already takes place, without publicly acknowledged warrants, exaMples of this could be seen during the miners strike.

Imagine the G8 protest, if such technology is in place then the movements of activists can and will be tracked, and it will be so much easier to do.
From there its not hard to then monitor their communications, their emails, phone calls and the like.

Legitimate protests will be tracked, in the case of the McLibel two, investigators monitored their activity, and infiltrated their little organisation, none of which was suspected of any criminal activity, nor was there any hint of any terrorist activity.
The invesitagations were carried out so as to gain access to information that might be used in a libel action by the plaitiffs, McDonalds foods.

The European courts found that the McLibel two had had their rights to free speech effectively curtailed by the inequality of resources and the methods employed by investigators.

Now colour me cynical, but I really do believe that investigators, wether public or private will use whatever source of information they can employ, and use them to whatever end they wish to achieve.

The next issue is how transparent will this road pricing will be ?

Not very, we can fairly easily work out how much the prices rises in fuel and excise duty will cost, but when you get road pricing, it sort of dissolves , an increase on a particular road will not generate large amounts of publicity, and instead we will get creeping rises around the country, bit by bit the cost of road usage will go up, but each change will only affect a fairly small and un-newsworthy portion of the public, this tax is set to be completely unnaccountable and almost unobservable.

Basically the Chancellor of the day can raise taxes any time he wishes, and the public will not see it in the obvious way, it means he can look very good by appearing to cut taxes in some areas, and yet raise them a great deal more in a way that isn’t going to attract as much adverse publicity.

This makes the Chancellor far less accountable for tax regimes.

Well, then there is an obvious solution.

If this is implemented, I’m wondering how many days (not weeks or months) it will take for someone to find a way to disable the tracking devices.