The police state road-tax scheme
Since nobody in the blogosphere has got round to panning this stupid “road pricing” scheme all the papers are talking about today, I thought I would start the discussion. Alistair Darling, the British government transport secretary, has announced plans to introduce a “road-pricing” scheme, aimed at cutting congestion, which would replace road tax and fuel duty:
Alistair Darling said change was needed if the UK was to avoid the possibility of “LA-style gridlock” within 20 years.
Every vehicle would have a black box to allow a satellite system to track their journey, with prices starting from as little as 2p per mile in rural areas.
OK … two obvious objections to this stupid idea.
First, everybody hates fuel taxes. But they do fulfil a valuable role, which is to tax motorists not only by how far they drive but how efficiently as well. So the 4-by-4 “Chelsea tractor” drinks more diesel or petrol than the little Cinquecento, and the owner pays more accordingly. With Darling’s scheme, although the suburban Jeep driver pays for more fuel, he pays the same tax as the guy who causes a whole lot less pollution by using less of the world’s increasingly precious oil.
But the second is, in my view, more disturbing: it requires a surveillance system, under which every car is fitted with a “black box” by which its position is monitored. And surely we don’t want the state knowing wherever we are at any given time?
So, it seems that the government is about to slip an environmentally unfriendly police-state scheme past us in the name of solving traffic congestion and pollution. The fact is that most congestion is caused by the school run and by commuters. With the school run, the only way to sort this out is to establish group walking-to-school schemes, and other methods of making non-car alternatives safer. As for work commuting, people wouldn’t commute if they had nowhere to park when they get to work! In areas like central London, they need to remove all the parking space other than what is used by residents, traders and the disabled, as well as short-term parking.
I’m not convinced by the “regressive taxation” arguments regarding the present Congestion Charging scheme – we’re not talking about a punitive tax which affects everyone and which you can’t get out of paying. The daily C-charge is at present actually less than the cost of a peak-hour travelcard or even, for most London residents, an off-peak travelcard (although it’s likely to shortly go up, so that it’s the same price as a peak-hour travelcard for zones 1 to 4, and there are six zones). If it was made vastly more difficult to commute, the people affected would be forced onto public transport and, given that supply tends to follow demand, public transport would grow and also diversify. Meanwhile, traders could ply their business in the centre of town without having to pay extra to the council for the privilege (remember, the small trader pays as much, per vehicle, as the multi-national corporation).
