Stut.net

Road charging. This is a hot topic in the UK at the moment. The gov’t have decided that the best way to tackle the problem is to charge us by the mile. And it seems most experts agree. Charges quoted so far are anything up to £1.34 a mile for the most congested roads. I’ve been thinking about this recently, mostly worrying about how much it would cost me to travel to work, and it occurred to me that if this technology was placed in everyones cars as a requirement there are many other things it could be used for. So I thought about it some more and came up with two benefits beyond making the gov’t more money.

I travel approx. 35 miles to work and 35 miles back each day. I don’t know what the charge per mile would be for the roads I travel on, but whatever it turns out to be it will add up to a very expensive journey. However, I fully agree with their plans. It makes sense. It’s the only way the experts have found to tackle the problem. Plus, by the time it comes into force (2016 IIRC) I will either be filthy rich of living close enough to work that it won’t matter.

Now, aside from the cost the biggest objection to the scheme is the potential invasion of privacy. The technology involved is dead simple and readily available today. Basically it’s a GPS unit that sits somewhere in your car (probably the boot), and tracks where you go. Quite how these boxes would feed back their data I don’t know, but it could involve using WiFi to talk to wired boxes at the side of the road or using a GSM network. However it’s done whatever data these boxes collect would be fed back to some central database where the numbers would be crunched and your periodic “road tax replacement” bill would be calculated. More than likely is the fact that this system would allow said central database to be queried for your cars movements since the scheme began right up to potential a few minutes ago. And this is everyone’s problem.

Given that these proposals are almost inevitable, there are a couple of benefits that have occurred to me. These are side-effects that I feel should have time and money spent on them to make them part of the system from day one.

• Theft tracking
  At the moment people pay a fortune to have satellite tracking systems installed in their cars so that if they get stolen they can be tracked. The police liase with the company that supplied and monitors the tracking system to get a fix on the car and get it back.If everyone had the system needed for the charging proposals such companies would become obsolete. Well, almost. One of the things these companies increasingly do is work hard to hide or disguise their equipment within the car. It’s likely that to keep costs down the box required for the charging proposals would be fairly obvious and easy to remove.

  On the other hand, the cost of the system is likely to be the car owners burden (as it should be) and said owners should therefore have some amount of choice in what they install. If they pay a bit more they can get a box that’s harder to find and remove/disable.

• Speeding
  Ok, ok, so this “benefit” will probably not seem like a benefit to a lot of people, but it is potentially the solution to the contraversial issue of speed cameras. The box to be installed could be given knowledge of the speed limits on the roads, either by way of updates distributed to the boxes or by reading signals from other boxes on/in/by the roads. The box can then detect when the driver is breaking the limit. Once detected it can follow a procedure of warning the driver either visually and/or audibly that they are speeding and if the driver persists it could report this to the central database along with the record of roads used. It would be like having a speed camera that watches the whole country.The benefits here are two-fold. First and most obvious is that the authorities can finally crack down on speeding on a nationwide level. The second, less obvious but more important benefit IMHO is that it relieves drivers from dash-watching. Maybe it’s just me but I feel more dangerous in my car when I’m constantly having to divert my eyes from the road to check how fast I’m going. Having a system that will beep at you when you cross the limit currently in force has to be safer than having to constantly keep an eye on your speed.

So those are my thoughts. And I’m sure there are other ways such a system could benefit the drivers. I hope the gov’t thinks hard about the ways this technology could be used in addition to their initial requirements. It might help soften the blow when costs start getting assigned to roads.

I also wonder how they are going to stop people removing or disabling these boxes in their own cars. The only thing I can think of is that they will require that each box contacts base periodically even if the car hasn’t moved since the last time. Even then there will be people who devote their lives to finding ways to “cheat” the new system. Let’s hope they build it on Windows!!