Government petition please read.

hello guys and gals,
im sure you or at least some of you have heard about this,
personally i think it is way out of order and is going to tak away our freedom rights.

Sign and pass it on. It only takes a minute.

The government’s proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you having to purchase a tracking device for your car and paying a monthly bill to use it.

The tracking device will cost about £200 and in a recent study by the BBC, the lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery driver.

A non working Mum who used the car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one month.

On top of this massive increase in tax, you will be tracked. Somebody will know where you are at all times.

They will also know how fast you have been going, so even if you accidentally creep over a speed limit you can expect a NIP with your monthly bill.

If you care about our freedoms and stopping the constant bashing of the car driver, please sign the petition on No 10’s new website.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/traveltax/

Also what are your thoughts on this matter?
Cheers
Andy.

Any links to this so called proposed traveltax ?

Heard of the Insurance based on this principle but not a goverment one.

The insurance one only based the tracking for charging the insurance but speed info would not factor into your insurance.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4610755.stm
Only one i could find after a quick google.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6055128.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6160877.stm

Signed it some time ago…

this is rediculous, if they do this there will be civil uprising

signed because if you bashed two heads together you’ll still not find a brain cell between either.

Its not the answer to congestion you just shuffle the problems to other area’s
we have no decent public transport / a goverment not interested in giving proper public transport a growing population in a culture where car = freedom
to move around as you like to get jobs in area’s where you may not find local to where you live.

They will just push the vechicles off the main routes to the side routes and then you will find yourself in a jam in the middle of knowhere in some ickle village along with all the other people attempting to get home cheaper.

I suspect if such a proposal went ahead there would be quite a market in tomtoms programed to keep you off the main routes planning journeys by road pricing maps instead.

And then you hear on the radio of a Derby man who could get a train to
work but Would have to cross one side of Derby to the other in his car due to issues of buses not available at the times required, once at the train station he’d have to pay £8 car parking free so he’s spent about £10 before he’s even caught a Train and paying what-so-much to get him to near his destination and possibly a bus journey to get to final destination.

/controversial mode on

The technology for the system end to end is a long way off just yet. Trust me I’ve been there in a past existance. For sure, it sounds do-able at the top level, but when you get down to the detail it just falls apart.

The accuracy of said devices is simply not acceptable for a legally enforceable system. The gaps in coverage, the vast quantity of data involved, the network bandwidths and infrastructure, the design and development lifecycle and production facilities for the vehicle end system, the secure fitting facilities the security holes in the system, fraudulent uses, legislative controls, etc, etc, mean that it just simply won’t get off the ground.

This big brother stuff is scaremongering among the Tory press for their own ends. It is illegal to use data for those purposes and whatever the press say, those in places who do have access similar data just now are actually very switched on to the dangers of data leakage and spend a great deal of time and money making sure the data is secure and destroyed immediately after is is obsolete.

Much more likely is a voluntary system where a motorist gets a tracker type system fitted and in return dvla set his road tax to zero for that year. Very similar to the insurance deals. Key thing there is that they are just recording mileage and are not interested if you are using congested roads or quiet backroads. That makes it so much easier as there is no real time 2 way data transmissions and only a few thousand rather than 30 million.

Heard the guy on the radio the other day and it just does not hold water. Vast sums of money being bandied about, but with what hard facts behind them? None that I can see.

Move along here, nothing to see :frowning:

/controversial mode off

good point.
however alot of company vehecles have said devices alreaddy.
and do work extreemly accurately.
a friend of mine worked for a company and he was given a company van with a tracking device.
and that recorded the speed of the vehcle and its position down to the spot.
and the device on the vehicle was no larger than a phone sim card with an areal.
so at a guess the government would use a device like this. but with the way technology is going with GPS and stuff alike it must surly be possible to do this.
and from what i gather it will be fully automated.
so i would say if you are within the law and you stay the limit the road has set then it will be information that is automatically discarded.
as for milage it would probably go per month. and in that sense it would work like a utility bill.
and as for the knowing where your vehicle is… i would say that it is possible for them to do it… altho i would have thought it would only be used in the instance of law and order.
just my thoughts.

/controversial mode on

Mr Lordy you would not know controversial if it came up & kissed you.

Why should we as a populace submit to having our movements tracked without so much as a referendum?

That’s the real question.

As to the other points:

They keep picking on car drivers 'cos they are an easy target as Government infrastucture already exists to track cars & drivers.

Why the hell would we pay for road usage when we already pay more for our vehicles than anyone else in the known universe? I certainly would NOT.

Sod them, if it is true which I doubt then I ain’t paying so come & get me @ 4am Tone’s Gestapo !!

/controversial mode off

Surely there is a system for taxing the motorist who drive more miles all ready i belive it’s call fuel duty, which makes people who drive more miles and have larger engines pay more here and now.
No need to employ loads of cronies, install computer systems which will be over budget, late and then still wont work and require millions to repair.

If this pay per mile system was to come in would the current taxation systems still apply or would they be be just slapped on top of them.

Edit, and just think of all thoose automated speeding fines they could give out :eek:

[QUOTE=Mojo;362226]/controversial mode on

Mr Lordy you would not know controversial if it came up & kissed you.

Why should we as a populace submit to having our movements tracked without so much as a referendum?

That’s the real question.

As to the other points:

They keep picking on car drivers 'cos they are an easy target as Government infrastucture already exists to track cars & drivers.

Why the hell would we pay for road usage when we already pay more for our vehicles than anyone else in the known universe? I certainly would NOT.

Sod them, if it is true which I doubt then I ain’t paying so come & get me @ 4am Tone’s Gestapo !!

/controversial mode off[/QUOTE]

I agree Mojo…mostly.

Kissing controversy? I usually prefer to shake my head and wander away muttering, 'cos getting wound up about it destroys rational thought.

Anyway…

Some time back, I worked in an area that delt with such systems and tools. The question you ask is a very valid one, but we are a long ways off from implementing a big brother system for real.

You can track a large body of people (as a single entity) to a high degree of accuracy all the time. You can track an individual with a high degree of accuracy all the time. You can track 30 million motorists with very low accuracy all the time. But you cannot (yet) track 30 million motorists with a high degree of accuracy all the time.

For the system to work, every vehicle would need to be tracked to within a couple of metres 24hrs a day. That simply is not possible yet. Yes, there are systems that can locate an individual to that resolution right now (mobile phones for example), but that is one person and the system is targeted to identify and locate that single person. Yes there are loggers that can fit to the vehicle and log it’s motion and where-abouts, but that comes back to the problem of scale and techology interoperability. The camera network in theory could register a lot of cars, but like the London charging system, that is a boundary scan network, not a tracking network.

From my rural location I get clicked by perhaps half a dozen traffic cameras on my way to work. If I lived in a city it would be 10 or a 100 times higher - but they still would know exactly which roads I travelled and hence it would not be submissable as evidence for road charging or big brother activities.

I do agree however that if a system were to be built to indentify and track individuals (it would then the be whole populace - 60 million of us), then we should be allowed to have our say about it.

It’s just that the petition that this guy organised has gone off on a tangent and is no longer about road charging - it’s about civil rights and that’s a different subject matter that as I’ve tried to show can’t be done just yet.

Preecey is right, fuel duty covers most of the requirements for road charging. Add into that a boundary scan system, as in London and you have a system that satisfies the “green manifesto” of the government while raking in more dosh.

By the way, Edinburgh City Council recently held a local referendum to determine if residents wanted a boundary scan road charging system such as London’s. The answer was a resounding no. Shame really, if you have ever fought the Edinburgh rush hour traffic you would know what I mean - A medieval city layout choked with 21st century traffic. So now the residents can’t complain. The funds raised would have been loaclly administered, even if there was a levvy from Government it would have gone to the Scottish Executive and not to Westminster. In Scotland, our roads are mainted using local funds. But no, irational thought by people caused a ground swell that was concerned that they may be identified and tracked. That won the day and Edinburgh suffers the consequences.

And we complain about Government? How about mis-information disseminated and propogated by those who have their own agenda?

how’s that for controversy?

[QUOTE=Nightlord;362229]

how’s that for controversy?[/QUOTE]

Much better, you show promise Young Jedi :slight_smile:

Um, but isn’t Europe about 3/4 through launching it’s own, more accurate technology as an alternative to GPS? And I wouldn’t assume that the technology and resources available to the military and/or government is the same available to jo-public. And as ever - the solution to a technological target is a convergence of technologies anyhow ? Just a thought…

Oi dont u mean this http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4555276.stm 1st sat went up 28th dec 2006

Is Galileo a “Big Brother” or “spy in the sky?”

Galileo, like GPS, is a passive system; it cannot of itself track individuals. Just because someone carries an active receiver does not mean their every move can be followed.

This only becomes possible once positional information is forwarded to a third party.

Some individuals will choose to do this; one can imagine a mobile phone service that alerts friends when you are in their area.

Companies will “tag” high-value deliveries that report their position so that customers have a better idea of when their goods will arrive.

And governments will, in certain circumstances, insist this information is forwarded to collection centres. A good example would be road pricing, where a vehicle’s movements built-up from sat-nav data are passed to roadside beacons or reported over cellular phone networks.

THE FIVE GALILEO SERVICES
NAVIGATION Open Access This will be ‘free to air’ and for use by the mass market; Simple timing and positioning down to 1m
Commercial Encrypted; High accuracy at the cm scale; Guaranteed service for which service providers will charge fees
Safety of life Open service; For applications where guaranteed accuracy is essential; Integrity messages warn of errors
Public regulated Encrypted; Continuous availability even in time of crisis; Government agencies will be main users
SAR Search and Rescue System will pick up distress beacon locations; Feasible to send feedback, confirming help is on its way

Sounds fair and gives you a secure feeling doesnt it…
dont forget computer systems can be cracked…
i predict bad things.