Petitions against road charges

Sorry to bother you but I feel this is very important. The government now has e-petitions and one is against road charging - another tax of course.

The government's proposal to introduce this tax 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/
 
Please pass this on to anyone who owns a car/motorcycle. Deadline to sign up by: 20 February 2007

Thanks


Some refrence to read
At-a-glance: Road charge plans
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4610877.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4610755.stm

Done! 

I sincerely doubt that the present P.M. will want to take the slightest bit of notice of public opinion on this matter, as he's never done so in the past, but we have to try. 

Given the taxes which are already fleecing the motorist in this country, not to mention the fact that the roads seem to be falling into a worse state of repair with every year that passes, this proposal really is a step too far. 

hiya

I have a feeling this type of charging will be introduced no matter what, the trials are already underway so that they can determine what the best system is and how it can be used. Other towns and cities will have the 'congestion' charge added, and once this technology is mature and implemented will spread to cover the whole country.

Whilst no one will be watching how when and where Mr and Mrs Harris from Bournemouth will be driving, sophisticated computer software and data mining will 'pick out' those users not insured, have penalty points, drove over the limit etc etc etc and of course charge them a 'ticket' for it.

Now that begs the question, if that technology can track, then surely it can be installed into a car to control it's speed? just like the current speed limiters fitted to trucks and coaches etc?  but I doubt that will happen, becuase there's simply ALOT of revenue raised by speeding, and the government needs/wants all the money it can to fill it's coffers !

To those who would want to find and remove the SatNav tracking unit, they would then show up on the system as a black hole as and when they pass through number plate recognition cameras etc. So for the government, a win win situation, everyone is tracked, danger vehicles (uninsured, no mot etc) show up instantly, money raised for  its coffers, and the motorist loses loses.

maybe with the money raised, a better, more efficient, readily available to ALL, public transport infrastructure & investment will take place.....

yeh right...

DtM! West London UK!

P.S - Have they started building the infrastructure for the London Olympics yet?  or havent the council tax rises needed to pay for it been introduced yet?!!!

Whilst no one will be watching how when and where Mr and Mrs Harris from Bournemouth will be driving, sophisticated computer software and data mining will 'pick out' those users not insured, have penalty points, drove over the limit etc etc etc and of course charge them a 'ticket' for it.

You really just need a huge database and small Query like :

Select    First_name, last_name, address
from active_account
where 
account_points > 10    -- point over the limit
account_limit  > 70     ---drove over the limit
or
account_status ='not insured'
..
..
 

Just simple SQL statement is enough , you just need a device to collect data and insert into database ( of course we are not going to use SQL Server Database ).

hi Kal,

I remember a little of my SQL queries, but have forgotten most of it, but I followed that example you gave!

However, it's getting that information onto the DB in the 1st place from various different organisations, in the correct format, double and triple checked which will increase the complexity I mentioned. Then of course it has to be accurate in terms of dates and times of when potential data change are needed - i.e when mr and mrs harris do change their car for instance the DB is updated overnight? or there and then? how will governance for it to be as quick as possible take place? will the insurance company release info that quick? what if there's something incorrect?

The simple query will still exist, but it's dependant on the underlying data being correct! then of course there's the possibilty of vast amounts of results being returned, so the simple query now will probably become quite complex.

I always view statements such as 'you just need...' with a little skepticism when it comes to IT and software related stuff! becuase (seeing as I used to do quite a bit of QA and software testing) invariably there's much more than the 'you just need...' type statements!

DtM! West London & Slough UK!

I will  not worry about Data cleansing or Extraction, transformation and loading .
But I will worry more about the numbers of database required ..

See my example below:

Here I am taking about tracking the speed of cars for every 100 Meters.

The system will have create an average of 20 records per each mile. So we will need  300,000 records for each year per each  driver( 20*15 000 miles). We need to add other data like Address , name, ...So we may need 1/2 Millions records.

Total  1/2 Millions records * 25 Millions drivers .. =  12,500,000 Millions records each year.

So we may need about  312,500   "10Terabytes-Databases" just for each a year .

Botton line 
we will need to have one database for  10-20 drivers for period of 10 years.

May be  , it is easy to build more roads than computer systems or taxing cars on their weight
like in Netherlands.

I was last month in Netherlands..I was very impressed   with their roads



Kal

If any system used for this is as efficient as most other government computer projects, we probably have little to fear with regard to them having our personal data at their fingertips!     

On the other hand, what we do seem to have a problem with is the way that various officials take the (mis) information on these unreliable databases as gospel and act accordingly.  Some refuse to accept that the data can be either out of date or just plain wrong.

Just look at the new motor insurance database.  This is supposed to allow the police to check instantly if there's insurance cover in place for a driver, and it's being used in combination with ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) and new police powers to seize a vehicle on the spot if it's being driven uninsured.

The first problem is that it can take up to several weeks for a new policy to be registered on the database.  Some insurers (particularly the more specialist ones, apparently) are not yet linked to the system, so their policies will not appear on the database at all.   These limitations alone have already led to orders being issued that a vehicle registration not showing up on the database is not sufficient reason in itself to assume that the driver is uninsured, and yet police forces in some areas have already started using the database "evidence" to seize cars.   

There was a documentary a few weeks ago in which a young lady from Manchester was stopped by the cops and almost had her car taken away on the spot because the database was wrong.  It was only her sister managing to get the insurance paperwork down to the roadside quickly that stopped the seizure, literally as the towtruck was arriving.   (Moral: Despite the fact that many drivers in the U.K. never carry their insurance certificate in the car, it seems that now may well be a good time to start doing so.)

So, is any database for tracking and charging for journeys going to be as "accurate" as the insurance database?  Are the authorities going to start acting as arrogantly (and illegally!) as some police already are with the insurance system?    Current experience with these systems doesn't inspire confidence.

I was last month in Netherlands..I was very impressed   with their roads

France has some good roads too.  They have privately financed turnpikes if you want to pay the tolls to use them, but there's usually a perfectly good Route Nationale as an alternative, and most seem to be in far better condition than British roads these days. 

They also have slightly cheaper gas, considerably cheaper diesel, and the vignette (their equivalent of British road tax) was scrapped completely a few years ago!   Of course, some other French taxation is higher than here to compensate.

Perhaps I could also persuade readers who remember me (and others too) to sign up for

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

Declaration of interest - Until December, our town of 24,000 had a train service of 10 trains per day.  Now there's one scheduled from Swindon at 06:19, one at 18:42 and that's the whole lot. And even they're cancelled more often than they run.