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this is just crazy??? they're saying about charging upto £1.34 per mile on motorways at rushhour, by my maths...if you were to do a 20 mile trip on a motorway every single day (e.g. alot of m25 users) it'd work out to £9648 per year!!! is it just me or are politicians getting even more stupid
old news, but yes, been bandied around a bit. labour seem to be gearing up for a SERIOUS govt vs motorist war and we'll just have to see how it goes. they may well get the police on their side yet. no shortage of bastards in the world after all.
besides, he puts the minimum charge at 2p per mile in rural areas (note it doesnt seem to take account of what your car is or how surface damaging or efficient it might be)... if you work out the average annual mileage of 10k miles and assume the HIGHLY unlikely scenario that all of them would be rural, thats £200 a year! Or, some very expensive road tax compared to what you might currently pay on a 1 litre.
Good for those folks who have retired to the country on a massive pension and never have to go anywhere. Bad for the common man who works 8 hours, 5 days a week and lives somewhere in the inner city but off the major public transport routes or is on unsociable shifts. Sounds a lot like a tory policy doesnt it! (i know it would f*ck me if there's a problem on the railways - the centre of bham would almost certainly be a quid a mile, but its not actually very bad to drive on, particularly in the school hols. can get from northern (home) to southern (job) suburbs in under 25 minutes some days - 10 miles!)
The premise that we could end up suffering american style congestion is just stupid however, and obviously dreamt up by someone in london. Where we dont suffer it already, we are unlikely to suffer it, as the situation hasnt changed much in 20 years. Spaghetti junction and the aston expressway, local to me, and the M6 passing through there, have been "nightmarish" at peak hours for as long as i have memory (at 23) - but its nothing compared to what you might actually see in LA, where you'd be as quick to walk as to drive. We don't have the same attitude to transport as the common american (i'm going to drive my SUV to work no matter what, screw you and the environment), or their affliction that, in many many places, driving is the ONLY option. The british population is in a slight decline. There's only so many cars that, in that kind of situation, can end up on our roads. Public transport is already in a lot of places the quickest, cheapest and easiest option, disregarding how packed the average commuter train or bus already is (i dont see them offering realistically to put more buses on the road or SUBSTANTIALLY improve our rail network).
So why do we need this? I think the clue is in the "satellite tracking" part of the equation... you know how your GPS both knows where you are at all times, and can calculate your speed on the fly, too?
I saw in the local notices in a tamworth newspaper at the bar job (forgot to pick it up to scan, dammit - the herald it was) that junction 10 of the m42 is being closed overnight sometime soon for the installation of "traffic detection equipment" on all 4 sliproads. What that may mean is anyone's guess... but its not difficult to add a savagely conspiratorial undertone to it, as i cant tell any "positive" aspect to a thing such titled. (for those who dont know where this is, its where the M42 hits the A5)
(doesnt help my state of mind i ended up randomly surfing onto some websites concerning speed cameras et al, one showing the inventor of a thingy that you can use to test the timing accuracy of a gatso with* being subject to a police raid and held without warrant, charge - or his angina medication. He'd been subject to some harrassment previous and so installed CCTV in his house... catching the event on tape. Plus, (vaporous, but worth noting) plans for 20 and 10mph limits in city centres, applying 24/7 of course, 40mph on country roads, 90kmh blanket limit across europes motorways - is there some burgeoning major fuel shortage we're not being told about?)
* they're supposed to be set at 0.5 seconds, but a lot of them have been found in the 0.63 sec area - i.e. registering a falsely high speed, if you trigger it... and possibly triggering too low to boot. I wouldnt be surprised if the white lines arent actually 1 metre, neither. Device is basically a highly accurate electronic timer-counter gated by a photosensor and transistor switch, both being of very high speed reaction varieties. Indeed its probably not too difficult or expensive to make your own if you get down maplins.
there idea is to stop regular road tax and cut fuel duty so we dont end up paying more
on the telly last night some rac or guy was saying he thinks motorists would be in favour of it
sometimes large motoring organisations can be wrong it seems
in might work out reet if they cut fuel duty so much so that our petrol is less than half price or summin - but it would have to be 30p a litre to be worth it for us
at any rate, change scares people, fear of the unknown etc.
at the same time, theres not a thing any of us can do about it, if its going to happen, its going to happen...
The government have said that they will need broad support from the public before they can even think of implementing this system. It's going to require a GPS tracker in every car to monitor the position and distance travelled of the car, so it's not something that they can just one day press a switch and make happen, that's a serious bit of organisation that'll be required. Mind you, I don't think they'll drop it easily.. GPS trackers in every car is something that the government seems to like the idea of, for speed monitoring etc..
If they charge for road use then I'd imagine all the company car drivers will get it paid for them anyway.
GPS would only ever be fitted to brand new cars, there's no way it could work otherwise. And even then, I doubt car manufacturers would be too keen to have their sports cars effectively 'limited' to 70.
or whatever speed they might decide to drop it to afterwards
particularly if youre an opposition activist etc. speak out against the govt and good luck getting anywhere at more speed than a bicycle might.
A good sign of how keen they are for this for nefarious reasons, is how its getting bandied about with no real concern for the full fallout of it. Think of courier van drivers doing deliveries - they have quite underpowered diesels that, for the work they do, are pretty efficient, and the van itself is hardly a heavyweight, particularly car conversions. Often a lot of their deliveries will be in city centres or other quite urban places. Charging an exhorbitant amount per mile will sting such companies a lot harder than a small increase in fuel tax - as will slapping silly and unavoidable speed restrictions on them. Trade secret: right now the only thing stopping the delivery-dependent parts of the NHS from falling apart is the daredevil attitude of their drivers, clocking up a lot of miles and a lot of drops in a distinctly illegal time. Pharmacy staff doing deliveries of essential meds for bed bound patients will also be hit for similar reasons - it's hard enough to do it within the time and cost restrictions already, not to mention the continual complaints of it being late and too expensive a service from the customers anyway!
And again i point to how little consideration of the efficiency of a vehicle is made - no mention even of separate charges for motorcycles etc. Currently anything capable of 15mph or more requires a license - so a 27mph (45kmh) Peugeot electric scooter, it seems, would be charged as much per under this scheme as an imported ford explorer, that's about the size and weight of a luton van (if not bigger) with a V8 hemi under the bonnet. Yay for decreasing congestion. "Less cars" are not the only answer (and yet again i wonder how big the uk population is supposed to get under this prediction, and how many hours it says people will be prepared to sit in their cars before getting out and walking)... smaller cars or a conversion to bikes would also help.
The most heavily trafficked routes in this country aren't that way because of the bloody mindedness of the drivers on them - its because there is no realistic alternative. Look at the m6 toll for heavens sake. If you're going north-south, your only practical routes will likely include one of: M6, M5, M1, A38, A34, A43. All very busy - as there is no really useful alternative (and dropping non-trunk road limits to 40 will ease this?!?!). The m6 toll was created for this very reason.
Disregarding it's nature as a tenous front on a scheme to get a big brother black box in every road vehicle, there are more funny ideas in it anyway. Why should it be replacing fuel tax? Seriously. Limited fossil fuel resource. It ought to be pricey, and the only real way to do that is to tax it (though it would be nice to see the cash going to something useful, like hard, demonstrable renewables research). You use a whole crapload of it in an unneccessarily huge offroader or to get your kicks in a sportscar, you obviously have cash to throw around and shouldn't complain. You drive a very frugal car and you get taxed less. Simple. Why in the world they'd get shot of that is anyone's idea. Afraid of a massive revenue shortfall once everyone is pretty much forced into electrics, i guess?
It could be used to replace road tax on a similar basis as proposed - the further you drive, on hammered and smog-belching roads, the more you pay towards it's upkeep - but the figures officially suggested are laughable. Cut them to a quarter and it would still give quite a lot of people pause for thought about what route they're taking and whether the train might be better (or a shorter drive to the train, anyway) without being an excerable, money-wringing cash cow (i still think 2p a mile on country roads is dippy - make it a ha'penny). A quid forty a mile, gods - a bus ticket across four miles of city centre costs less. The m6 toll seems pricey at less than 15p per mile after all, and is only for when you're desperate or need to go fast.
Wonder if instead of limiting your speed (no money in that after all) and charging for individual offences, they'll just add up how many miles you were a certain amount over the posted limits and make it into a "speed tax"? Still with the current points/fine/ban offenses for more than a specified short burst of very high speed for "emergencies", to discourage autobahn behaviour amongst those rich enough to blat a lambo all the way down the m6 at 170 and pay the "tax"....
this govt seems all about the benjamins after all - you can bet the black boxes wont come for free (see how much even budget commercial satnavs are??) - just like the f*cking ID cards would (will??) be almost a hundred nicker. It wont cost more than fifty pence to make each one, mind. £90 (say) profit multiplied by about 40 million eligble over-16s makes for an AWFUL lot of added revenue on top of an overly tight societal corset.
A GPS tracking device in every car? Hmmm... Are they serious about that?? In a country that still resists the idea of ID Cards, that seems pretty far-fetched to me.
Also, I understand the UK charges drivers for tailpipe CO2 emissions? Is that tax levied when you purchase a vehicle, or do you have to pay a certain amount (based on your supposed emissions) every year?
Seems logical to me that if a government wants to reduce the number of cars on the roads, it should provide effective alternatives (ie public transportation) FIRST.
What's the (alleged) point here? Reducing greenhouse gas and other pollutants' emissions, or effectively taking the cars out of the roads?
I think i know what there up to, Eventually in the next say 50 years, cars wont run on petrol, they'll prob be run on water (cracking hydrocarbons) or maybe even electric.
This means that when everyone stops buying fuel and thus the governemt doesnt get its 80p out of every pound spent on fuel, where are they going to get the money to fill the hole?
Its so obvious there are bringing this in now cos they know that once these new cars come out they will be severely short of cash !!!
It doesnt matter what we're opposed to mr ruthless, these sh*ts will still push it through.
I dont remember a referendum or even a house of commons debate on speed cameras / etc. Whatever the ministry of transport does, it seems to be on a purely despotic/dictatorial basis. Unelected, unaccountable, and uncontrollable.
Besides I don't see our promised referenda on the European Consti...(*snrrrk* *ptooie*)...tution or ID cards ever appearing. We'll just wake up one morn and find that Fuhrer Blair has signed us up for it, and we'll then be subject to whatever bats-arse rules the clearly unhinged parliament of MEPs* has come up with next, and a £100 charge for an unneccessary, rights-restricting card.
Hey....... i shouldnt wonder that the high cost of the thing is because it's got RFID or some other tracking technology integrated into it as well. In fact, given enough detector grids (re: junc 10 of the m42...), you wouldnt need satellite tracking and the like anyway. Just cars with RFID tags. It's the next big thing for tracking produce..... money..... and prisoners (or nursery children) just for three. Tiny little chip whose only function in life is to, when presented by a quick burst of radio energy on a particular frequency (charging its capacitor), is to release a 64(?) bit code on a different wavelength - uniquely identifying it on a basis of several trillions to one (even with a code that takes barely a millisecond to transmit at 56k) and allowing anything you attach it to or integrate it into to have it's movements tracked.
* what do you do with a worthless politician who can no longer effectively serve their local community? Pack them off to be an MEP!**
** Geldof for PM***
*** simply because we need someone in charge who swears and isnt afraid to speak his mind when disgusted by the goings on in another, supposedly "friendly" nation.
sick of people like the rac and the economist liking the idea of having this pay as you go charges
cos they all nievly and incredibly stupidly believe that the goverment will drop fuel duty and drop road tax
neither of which they will do
has the goverment ever invented a tax they didnt like?
(the RF tags will make shopping interesting, cos you would walk into a shop stock room, take what you want and then leave - automatically charging you)
(the RF tags will also be in your ID cards too - its not too difficult to get your car gps system to talk to your ID card and track you some-more)
This is a joke aint it...tony's barmy..i pay £110 a year tax (as do most of us) but £1.34 a mile on the motorway is gunna be more like 5k a year.
i read a book saying medieval serf's were actually better off than the normal working man these days as there were less taxes in those days..by god its right!
only the rich will be able to afford to drive soon, we will be back in horse and carts (wonder what mods we can do to them?)
what i dont get about it is, its such an obvious cover for a big brother tracking system --- its supposed to cost you more for driving on busy roads and in city traffic?
well crap doesn't the petrol tax already do that? with an added benefit that those driving overly large or wasteful/polluting vehicles, or too fast/uneconomically get hit even harder?
you take a cruise along an empty road with few junctions and things that cause you to have to slow down..... costs less
you go fast down that road - costs more
you drive in traffic - usually costs more as you use more fuel
you drive in cities - its junctiontastic, even without traffic its quite stop and start - costs more
you drive a tank of a 4x4 with a 3 litre engine, which causes quite a bit more damage to the road than a passenger car (for a 40 ton artic its something on the order of 1000s, so its not linear) and pollutes... well it also drinks more fuel.
surely if its a fear of lost revenue from fuel, then electricity or batteries or hydrogen etc could be taxed instead?
or just install non-crackable odometers and levy a fixed charge?
its going to be prohibitively expensive though, there's going to be a sh*tstorm when they try to install it unless they cheaply convert a load of old army equipment or something. put a gps sat nav in every car, with an obligatory display screen to show how much the road is going to be per mile (can you imagine this getting anywhere without the charges being quite explicit? they could jack any road up to £1.50 a mile without you knowing otherwise). The stuff is a lot cheaper than it used to be, but it's probably pricier than quite a few of the cars being driven by UKP members were.
unless of course it is RFID - cheap enough that they're considering putting it on tins of beans.... and just take a look at all the inexplicable and pretty obvious wire loops that have quietly appeared on a lot of major and even minor roads.
how long have they been planning this silently, one wonders
