Has anyone noticed that all the news stories about the road charging proposals are quoting "a survey", where the majority of people "are in favour of satellite tracking devices" for various reasons.
It's all good news according to the survey - but I wonder if the people were told about the initial cost of the tracking unit that THEY'LL have to pay for. Also I wonder if they were told about the fact that they could be caught speeding at any time, on any road, if the government choose to.

I smell male bovine droppings...

DJ

an informal survey of people at work shows 1 in favour and everyone else agiainst. most common complaints:

It will cost more
it will remove the incentive to drive greener cars
I can't drive outside of peak hours - I have to get to work when the boss says.
big brother will be watching
I'll have to pay for the box

The problem is that there are more people want to drive than there are roads to hold them.
SOLVE THE PROBLEM, don't just play with it, especially not with our money.

The survey they're quoting is asking the question 'do you think the roads are too congested?', everyone says yes to that. The government just twists it along with everything else!

Sounds like the ID card debate.

I keep hearing from the government how such a high percentage of people are in favour regardless of all the negatives:

- loss of civil liberties
- initial cost of card (£50- £100)
- cost to taxpayer of system (estimated 10billion pounds)
- cost of 40million people taking half day off work to get card (will we have to use our precious annual leave?)
- inconvenience of carrying it
- it's lack of ability to prevent terrorism
- advantages to major criminals that once they forge them they'll be trusted
- inaccuracies in database
- bureacracy involved in correcting the myriad of flaws in the system
- every Goddamn hacker in existence trying to trash it

These things are all well known points and still the government tries to argue that 'most' people are in favour. Yeah right!

James

I think I'm getting more and more suspicious as the days go on - it's starting to sound just like the plot of a Yes Minister episode.

Basis of plot: the government is short of cash, and raising petrol duty is an easy target. The trouble is that there would be a huge outcry.

Appleby trick: The government puts forward an outrageous scheme that is full of holes, ridiculously expensive and seriously unfair (GPS mileage tracking). As expected, the public outcry is huge and the government gets a hard time, no matter how they try and justify it.

Outcome: The government says it has listened to all the arguments, seen that the scheme is flawed, so here's another idea - we'll put a few pence on each litre of fuel and scrap the road tax. Public thinks this is fairer, and the legislation is passed.

Later on: The government decides that it can't get rid of road tax just at the moment, but keeps the extra fuel duty.

Remember - you heard it here first!

Quote:
Outcome: The government says it has listened to all the arguments, seen that the scheme is flawed, so here's another idea - we'll put a few pence on each litre of fuel and scrap the road tax. Public thinks this is fairer, and the legislation is passed.
Unquote:

Exactly the scenario going through my (small) brain at the moment!

Putting a road tax on fuel would in my opinion (and many others i have spoken to) be the best, cheapest, fairest and easiets way to pay for road tax. If you have a big thirsty car....you pay, simple as that!

Should get a few of these huge 4x4's off the road too

quote:

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Originally posted by donut
Should get a few of these huge 4x4's off the road too

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Ever see a TV series back in the late 1970s with Edward Woodward called "1990" where everybody had to carry an ID card that could be tracked by satallite ? Looked pretty far fetched and totallitarian then even at the start of Mrs T reign of destruction.

Re road charging strange it was kept quiet about in the run up to the election. Public support my bum --- it was rejected by a vast majority when put to the vote in Edinburgh.

Isn't it strange how any recent UK goverment won't clamp down on the use of handheld mobile phones in cars, and also won't ban large SUVs ( should called UAVs urban assualt vehicles) --- why because the big users of such devices are MPs and other powers that be that that Downing Street don't want to upset.

What is wrong with this country is we have too many people in a small area and strangely we have a goverment that wants to increase the population by bringing in people from other countries to do dirty jobs for a less than a living wage. We can't all work in "financial services" time to wake up even those jobs have been exported to bread line countries, soon the only thing that wil be left is frying burghers.

We have to to the dirty jobs ourselves, we have to pay people a decent wage to do them. Ever tried to get a washing machine fixed recently -- most washing machines have more computing technology than the space shuttle but very few repair guys can actually fix them because fixing washing machines like fixing cars is a branded dirty manual job and from the Thatcher era to the present day because it was looked down on, hence nobody with even a moderate IQ was attracted to such jobs instead most ended up sitting in call centres.

We need to make our own steel, we need to grow our own food, we need to clean our own toilets, we need to have plumbers that actually know about plumbing --- if we don't in 10 years we will be as stuffed as MG-Rover



[Edited on 9/6/05 by britishtrident]

One of the governments reasons for this is to " reduce the amount of traffic on the roads".

If this is the case then where the F(lip/*ck)ing heck is all the traffic going to go?.

On to public transport?. What public transport I say. we have little or no proper bus traffic/routes and these are basically only run during normal working hours.
We have NO proper Train sytem any more, good old doctor beeching and various governments since have seen to that. SO I ask WHERE/WHAT other forms of transport are we supposed to use.

Before this black box monitoring is implimented the government should re-instate the old rail tracks (so they have been built over - TOUGH) renationalise the railways and the bus companies, ensuring that the trains and busses start when real people need them. Then re-instate long distance freight haulage by rail/barge, using LOCAL delivery only, so that it reduces the need for all this traveling in conjunction with local employment at realistic wages.

This country has, for far to long been controled by accountants who have reduced everything that we do to being done down to a 'COST' rather than up to a standard.

Disclaimer. -
This is my opinion only and does not reflect upon the operators of this site.


Enjoy

quote:

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Originally posted by jollygreengiant
One of the governments reasons for this is to " reduce the amount of traffic on the roads".

If this is the case then where the F(lip/*ck)ing heck is all the traffic going to go?.
snip

Disclaimer. -
This is my opinion only and does not reflect upon the operators of this site.

Enjoy

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So this may be the way to cut down on speed cameras. As GPS speedos are no longer new technology. It would be relatively easy to automatically sense speeding any where any time and auto generate a fixed penalty!

Scary BB stuff




[Edited on 9/6/05 by jimgiblett]

Hmm My 20 year old land Rover is still good for another 20+ years... And It will shake any modern electronics to destruction

it would be good if they could find a way to encourage freight haulage to be done at night. GPS taxing could technically do this, but there would be too much pissing about in reality.

A Mate of mine is planning to relocate his haulage firm to northern france. When fuel costs sod all over here he wont be able to compete with the European firms who already commute over and nick trade in the southeast.

Suggestion: if you are ever forced to carry an ID card with you (like we do in Spain), put it in a microwave for a few seconds. It will look exactly the same, but you fry any chips inside (tracking chips like those RFID they put in clothes and big bank notes, an EEPROM carrying personal info, anything).

It's probably paranoid to do this with each pullover you buy (still some people do it!), but you can do this once to an ID card you will be keeping for some years (ours is renewed every 5 years) just in case.

A friend of mine who works in IT teached me this trick, he used to microwave stuff like motherboards when they had intermitent failures which made it difficult for him to get them replaced for free because they would freeze the computer from time to time only. He would microwave those, causing no apparent damage whatsoever, taking the problem from "it freezes sometimes" to "look, it doesn't work"

Cheers,

Alex


[Edited on 10/6/05 by Alez]