Posted on 07/21/2002 2:00:55 PM PDT by vannrox
All cars will be fitted with a 'big brother' satellite tracking meter to charge drivers up to 45p a mile for every journey taken under radical plans to slash congestion on British roads.
The scheme, proposed by the Government's independent transport advisers, would see drivers handed monthly bills charging them for every single journey.
In a landmark report to be given to Ministers tomorrow, the Commission for Integrated Transport will recommend using existing Global Positioning System satellites to track vehicles via electronic 'black boxes' fixed to the dashboard of all vehicles.
The information recording the movements of motorists would be beamed back to computers at the various highway authorities or to a private company contracted to the Government - but with strict controls to protect privacy.
Prices would be set and adjusted periodically according to levels of congestion and could range from 45p a mile per car for central London in the rush hour to a penny a mile on rural roads. The average weekday charge would be 3.5p per mile on motorways and 4.3p a mile on other roads, with travel free off-peak and on quiet roads.
Tomorrow the commission will propose universal road pricing and tell Ministers that such a scheme could cut traffic levels by 5 per cent and almost halve congestion within 10 years.
In its report, the commission will warn that even huge improvements to train services and bus routes and massive road-building projects would not be enough to clear Britain's choked roads.
Professor David Begg, the commission chairman, told The Observer: 'We have the worst traffic jams in Europe. Without congestion charging we are not going to solve it - we can never road-build our way out of this or provide enough public transport.'
Begg said that even doubling the capacity of Britain's train, tram and bus network - a near-impossible task - would only absorb five years' worth of traffic growth before the roads became gridlocked again.
The report will recommend scrapping vehicle excise duty - the annual road tax disc - and reducing fuel duty by between 2p and 12p a litre in return for the launch of road pricing. It wants the Government to make motoring taxes fairer by linking them to congestion rather than car ownership or flat-rate fuel duty, which penalises rural motorists.
Drivers and hauliers who insist on commuting or delivering in the rush hour and using motorways at the busiest times would end up paying hundreds of pounds in additional costs, while others would save money.
The Government is also set to launch road-pricing for all lorries driving in Britain within two years. Trucks will be charged on the basis of the distance they travel, weight and emissions, with cleaner-engined vehicles paying less.
A senior source familiar with the proposals said the scheme was a 'Trojan horse' for universal road pricing, and if it proved successful for heavy goods vehicles it could be extended to cars by 2010.
Despite a denial by the Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions, the source said: 'This is being driven by the Treasury, not Transport. Chancellor Gordon Brown can see what congestion is doing to efficiency in commerce and industry and every time he meets business leaders they bang on about it.'
The Government is unlikely to welcome Begg's report at such a sensitive time. Ministers, and Transport Secretary Stephen Byers in particular, are under fire for the collapse of Railtrack and the sell-off of air traffic control, as well as failing to solve the wider transport crisis.
The motoring lobby is likely to accuse the Government of being anti-car if it supports the report.
But Begg has already warned that, without serious moves to persuade motorists to leave their cars at home, the Government will not even achieve its own modest target of reducing national congestion by 6 per cent in 2010.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone is expected to announce this week that he is going ahead with congestion charging for London in 2003 at £5 a day for cars. Vehicles will be tracked via roadside beacons and gantries that display prices - with satellite technology likely to be used at a later date.
They've also started talking about it quietly here. It is the wet dream of those who just can't wait for Orwell's most terrifying visions to pale in comparison.
Imagine flipping it around where politicians and bureaucrats are monitored evrywhere they go. Surely they have nothing to hide so they should lead the charge in being guinea pigs for a five year study monitored by the taxpayers.
All the bad ideas of the British socialists eventually wind up in the minds of American socialist, i.e. Democrats, via the Ivy League Universities. This is where the income tax, capital gains tax, sales tax, and estate tax have been imported from. Coming next: Total confiscation of private property, specifically, legal private firearms.
Remember, all things not permitted in Britain are forbidden. T.H. White.
It is so much easier to control or gas or poison a population if you drive them all into cities.
10-4. This approach "feels" as you describe it - reduce mobility. Maybe they can get away with that in Birtain but not in the U.S.
There was a time when innovation benefitted the people to produce utilitarian commodities at so efficient a cost they nearly seemed free.
As a culture, so many benefits have become utilities that individal budgets have been consumed in providing those 'utilities'.
Even though the efficiencies, safety, comfort, security, labor, and amenities gained by the utilitarian culture have advanced us several orders of magnitude by those measures, we are today continually faced with decisions poorly quanitfied or normalized with respect to comparative utilities.
Opportunity for charlatan fraud run amok amongst public policy proponents now becomes more commonly encountered without sound resolution.
A popular attack on sound deliberation is to appeal to individual responsibility and accountability, while ignoring the layman's unquantifiable opportunities which arose from 20th century utilitarianism.
Today, a higher than average net income is quickly dissipated on rent/housing, electrical power, natural gas, water, sewer, car, insurance, medical care, cable TV, Telephone, Cell phone, PC, newspaper, cheap groceries, coffee/tea, laundry, and petroleum. It isn't too difficult to deplete one's income on simply securing half of these 'basics' if one isn't prudent or fortunate.
No matter how the budgets, whether personal or public, are allocated or distributed, it appears the same density of these amenities will consume individual effort, attention, devotion and preoccupation. Granted, quantified choices exist with demonstrable differences between available choices, an underlying lack of wherewithal seems to remain.
The amenities of concentrated populations are desired in the rural, now suburban environment. The freedom, solitude, privacy and appeal to nature is desired in the urban, now metropolitan environment. Transportation in the Americas has provide access to both for the common an over the past century.
As infrastructure ages and a greater percentage of the public is devoted to maintenance of those utilities, their costs increase and competition amongst an initially most efficient designed system merely increases the maintenance of the deliverable utility.
When the utilitiies were first designed and constructed they were based upon economics of the time and least cost variables. Greed for easy gain was concentrated at control of largely amassed financial concerns. A slight percentage of the multibillion dollar industry would still make a poor man wealthy.
Today, many of the physical variables are unchanged, yet the economies have changed, hence the initial design of utilitarian value in these commodities has changed. Competitive choices in requisite utilities in a fixed budget may now drive popular choice towards direct accountability. The greed for easy gain in recent years focuses on a microfraction of profit for every transaction. Unnoticable to the public, but enough to make a poor man rich.
The more things change, the more man remains the same.
When I ask the people here if these cameras don't bother them inevitably they reply with "No, they make me feel safer".
I went to watch Minority Report recently in the neighboring and larger village and found the movie pretty sobering. As I was walking out the theatre I looked up and what do I see? You got it, a camera pointing right at us. I had always known that camera was there of course but just seeing it like that right after watching that movie just served to drive the point that much further home.
Americans! Do not let them do this to our country! It's freaking scary. The worst part is how quickly you get used to them! You notice 'em for a while and after that you don't think about 'em anymore. You live your life and the whole time Big Brother is watching you. Don't let it happen across the ocean.
Raise it to 100 pounds/km and they'll cut congestion immediately.
More proof that the power to tax is the power to destroy.
Bet they never get around to buying roads...
Freeper TightSqueeze, meet Freeper Bert at post #20.
If cameras could make us safer, Japanese tourists wouldn't get mugged.
But if they're going to tak people per mile to fund the upkeep of roads, why not do it the old way and just have private toll roads?
Maybe because the tracking feature is such an interesting and useful tool for a government that is afraid of the people.
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