NEW POLL: do you support road pricing?
Written by Stephen Tall on 3rd June 2008 – 10:15 pmThe party has today launched its new transport programme, Fast Track Britain: Building a Transport System for the 21st Century, promising to “significantly increase long-term rail investment, introduce road user pricing to tackle pollution and congestion and hand control of buses back to local authorities have been launched today by the Liberal Democrats.”
You can find the full news release on the Lib Dem website here, and the full document is available in PDF format here.
There’s a raft of proposals - building a high speed rail network; introducing rolling contracts for train operating companies to increase long-term investment and improve services; giving power to control local bus services back to local authorities; and introducing a new fund for rural transport - but there’s no doubt what will attract most attention… The BBC website gives a clue:
Clegg unveils road charging plan
(The full details of the Lib Dem proposals for road pricing are copied below.)
Party policy has generally been in favour of road pricing - though we’ve been a bit quiet about it in the past couple of years - with most concerns centring on the privacy issues of the state collecting data on citizens’ movements.
Personally, I’ve never seen the problem (with reasonable safeguards in place). It is one thing to have to carry an ID card simply to prove to the state you exist - that’s bad; but quite another to enjoy the privilege of using a less-congested road system. The fact remains that the market is the most efficient - and certainly most effective - way of pricing road use according to the value we place upon it.
But that’s my view: what’s yours? Choose now in our new Lib Dem Voice poll asking: Do you support Lib Dem plans to introduce road pricing in return for the abolition of vehicle excise duty and cutting fuel duty?
You know the drill: simple yes / no / don’t know options are located in the right-hand column. (And of course feel free - I know you will - to use the comments thread to pick apart the question).
Motorway and Trunk Road Pricing
2.4.11 Liberal Democrats propose a motorway and trunk road pricing scheme covering all motorways and major trunk roads in Britain.
2.4.12 During our first parliament we would undertake preparatory work:
- Detailed consultation on the design of the scheme, including levels of charging and data privacy issues.
- Invest significantly in public transport through our Future Transport Fund.
2.4.13 The key aspects of our proposal are:
- Road pricing should be seen as part of a package of measures – it is not a solution on its own.
- To tax differently, not more. Our scheme will be revenue neutral for the average motorist, with the revenue from road pricing used to remove VED entirely and reduce fuel duty.
- Significant investment would be injected into public transport prior to introducing any charging, providing a viable alternative to the private motor vehicle, where possible.
- Pricing would be linked to car emissions, benefiting lower emission vehicles.
- A ‘Privacy Guarantee’ would be provided to motorists, by separating any personal details held from journey details. This would include the option of using an anonymous pre-pay system and would establish robust legal guidelines around the use of data collected (i.e. data would not be passed on to other organisations).
- Exemptions and discounts would be introduced for emergency vehicles, NHS vehicles, public transport vehicles, and vehicles used by disabled drivers who rely on their car for transport (following the disability exemptions for VED).
- We would make a firm commitment to provide political leadership in tackling emissions from the transport sector.
2.4.15 A number of locations have already implemented forms of road pricing including London, Stockholm and Singapore, and the Netherlands are currently considering a national scheme.
2.4.16 The benefits we would expect to see include:
- Fairer charges for using roads according to the polluting effect of each vehicle.
- Financial benefits for drivers who have no public transport alternatives and are dependent on the car (particularly in rural areas).
- An increase in the certainty of journey times (vital for the freight and services sectors) due to an incidental reduction in congestion levels.
- A commensurate improvement in viable public transport alternatives to the car.
2.4.17 We envisage that our motorway and trunk road user charging scheme would operate using the ‘tag and beacon’ scheme, covering motorways and trunk roads. To avoid a plague of ‘rat running’, the technology chosen must allow for penalties to be enforced on drivers who ‘rat run’ in order to avoid payment.
Posted in News
3rd June 2008 at 10:48 pm
Brilliant!
3rd June 2008 at 11:14 pm
No, no, and thrice no.
To the extent that if I had found out this policy before drunkenly allowing my fiance to talk me into joining the party I would have told him where he could stick his tenner. It is not, and never can be, Liberal to track and monitor every road user all the time, and furthermore it would be horrendously expensive to implement. We already have a pay as you drive system in place, it’s called petrol tax. If you drive at peak hours and get stuck in jams, you use more petrol and pay more. If you drive a car with a bigger engine, you use more petrol and pay more. It’s perfect.
Why in Cthulhu’s name are the Lib Dems, of all people, proposing an expensive, centralised, bureacrat’s wet dream of a policy like this?
3rd June 2008 at 11:20 pm
“We already have a pay as you drive system in place, it’s called petrol tax.”
Oddly enough, Clegg seemed to be supporting this option as recently as 4 days ago:
“I want to see the environmental cost of fuel to be reflected at the pump …”
http://www.politicshome.com/Landing.aspx?Blog=1093&perma=link#
But now he’s apparently advocating a reduction in fuel duty and road pricing instead. All very confusing.
3rd June 2008 at 11:21 pm
The problem with road pricing is that it is not as good as fuel duty in encouraging fuel efficient driving. It is possible to vary the road charging by the car’s nominal mpg. But that is still not as good as fuel tax as an incentive. Fuel tax works better than road pricing for cutting global warming because it gives you a financial incentive to:
1) get your car serviced regularly
2) pump up your tyres
3) change up at lower speeds than you might otherwise (to 5th at 26mph on the flat in my car)
4) accelerate downhill not uphill where possible
5) lose a few mph as you go uphill
6) Drive more slowly on the motorway
7) Glide forward when approaching junctions rather than driving and braking.
It is not possible to use tag and beacon road pricing to achieve any of these CO2 reducing items.
My car (1.8 petrol Mondeo) has a nominal combined mpg of 37.2. I drove to France recently and got 45mpg, because I drive with an eye to fuel economy (my record door to door is just over 48mpg, pretty good for a car of this size).
Congestion charging at particular times is a very good idea when there is congestion at particular times, and building more roads is inappropriate. That will include some of the motorway network at some times.
But we need to be aware - as the Eddington Report made clear - that road charging administered in a revenue neutral way will increase CO2 emissions (it also knocks net govt revenue, as quite a big chunk will go on admin). That is why its sensible application is relatively limited.
3rd June 2008 at 11:22 pm
Road pricing/congestion charging is, of course, a form of LVT and, as such, will be welcomed by all Liberals as a thoroughly fair and non-distorting fiscal measure - especially as we are intent on REPLACING the eminently unfair VED, which penalises car ownership irrespective of actual usage. Pity that we seem intent on fiddling about with VED in the short term (subject to Conference amendments of course) while Road Pricing technology catches up, but hey - softly, softly catchee monkey!
3rd June 2008 at 11:23 pm
* shocked *
Surely a politician isn’t advocating something that contracts his own policy documents? I’m stunned!
I can’t believe people are actually voting yes to this. I bet they’re all Londoners who have grown attached to their Oyster cards and don’t MIND being tracked everywhere they go…
3rd June 2008 at 11:26 pm
Interesting, I could have swore the Lib Dem’s wanted to gain seats not lose them? The merest mention of road pricing in the more rural territories that Lib Dem’s hold will mean they choose to not stay gold for much longer.
The congestion charge (which is what I assume is referenced in london) is a joke that has not shown its worth yet, any rural area will (as they always do with good reason) claim this will be an attack on their liberties as such blanket centralised measures disproportionately impact them…worse still given these areas are more frequently not earning lower incomes.
It also completely fails to note that despite increased taxation road use is still at a huge height and not falling. When will politicians realise that before you go about showing the stick to people about car use, you need to whip the public transport industry in to shape? Why should people use a train when it is only marginally cheaper, majorly more hastle, generally longer and almost certainly less reliable than using a car? Without these issues being addressed first and foremost all that these taxes will be is just that…taxes, revenue building systems.
If that’s what Lib Dem’s want to do come out and say it, don’t hide behind the green schtick that is fast wearing thin.
3rd June 2008 at 11:31 pm
Lee, a lot of the folks on here are Greater London based. They HAVE good public transport, and don’t get what it’s like to live somewhere that doesn’t. Hell, we have good public transport in West Yorkshire compared to a lot of places. A lot of places that, as you say, are currently yellow on the map… Where’s Adrian Sanders when you need him?
3rd June 2008 at 11:33 pm
Also, Andrew, what’s wrong with scrapping VED and adding that to petrol tax too?
3rd June 2008 at 11:41 pm
Jennie, I’d tinker with the proposal, but in essence it is a half-way house between two equally undesirable polar opposites.
Describing the proposal as necessarily expensive, centralised or complicated is a failure of imagination.
By connecting existing mobile telephony technology (and the associated payment systems) with satellite navigation systems already placed in large numbers of cars we have already effectively created the ability to implement road-charging on a wider scale than we propose.
By making loud noises about the limited extent of our proposals we can push to ensure Labour and Conservatives lose any initiative to call for a blanket roll-out on all roads by distinguishing between dual-carriageway routes and the universal service roads we each live on and upon which ought to have our right to travel freely guaranteed.
This is something which is too important to fudge or allow to be replaced by local ‘congestion charges’.
I think another by-product of such a plan would be the increased emphasis on planning long-term transport systems around which regional development can grow with more certainty.
Of course it will be controversial, but it is an argument which we need to win to prevent the inevitable organisational messes that a politicised plan would entail.
It is equally important to highlight how by doing it our way we will make transport both freer and fairer.
3rd June 2008 at 11:42 pm
This is an awful idea. How demoralising.
3rd June 2008 at 11:46 pm
It’s true that petrol tax is a quite good way to tax the burning of petrol, but it’s not ideal. It doesn’t take into account the efficiency of the engine burning the petrol, and it doesn’t take into account the need for the journey; it hits someone out in the country who needs to travel to buy food as hard as someone in the suburbs driving into town when there are perfectly good buses every 20 minutes. Road pricing could, potentially, help with both of these to some extent.
Also, we needn’t fear intrusion from technological tracking as long as the controls on the use of the data are kept strong. Under a Lib Dem government, they would be. If anyone else tried to implement the scheme without such controls we would be free to oppose it.
3rd June 2008 at 11:47 pm
Orangepan, it’s a line in the sand for me, I am afraid. Tracking every road user all the time they are on the road is not, and cannot be, Liberal by my definition of the word. I don’t really give a toss about the practicalities of it: tracking people is not Liberal. Full stop.
3rd June 2008 at 11:48 pm
Why the assumption that Road Pricing automatically equates with Big Brother? No one makes such a claim when they use a toll road, despite the fact that they are almost certainly being captured on CCTV as they pass through the toll point. Sure the technology may be more advanced, but it doesn’t have to be intrusive or sinister. Vehicle tracking is NOT an automatic consequence - and the “toll” goes into the public purse rather than private pockets.
Collecting a fair “rent” for your temporal and monopolistic occupation of a valuable piece of tarmac is what this is about - and REPLACING unjust taxes in the process. As with LVT, marginal areas (i.e. quiet rural roads) could and should be exempted. The argument that this would just create “rat runs” doesn’t hold, since as soon as traffic volumes increased, a charge would apply.
By the way, Congestion Charging was operational in Durham before London.
3rd June 2008 at 11:49 pm
“…as long as the controls on the use of the data are kept strong. Under a Lib Dem government, they would be…”
And a Lib Dem government, once in, would be there in perpetuity, would it?
* headdesk *
We’re leading ourselves into the abbatoir and handing them the shotgun here…
3rd June 2008 at 11:57 pm
Jennie, I agree that tracking isn’t slightly or entirely liberal, but the fact is we already do it in many ways.
Do you use cellular mobile technology? Do you use plastic money? Do you ever go into chain stores? Do you ever use computers?
Um, I’m afraid to worry you but tracking potential is universal and ubiquitous - it would be far better that we defined the acceptable limits for it than ignored the reality to the extent that we let it control us.
3rd June 2008 at 11:58 pm
Jennie - fuel duty is better than VED, no question. But it doesn’t discriminate over WHERE you burn the fuel, so does little to alleviate congestion. It also penalises rural users who may have to travel further to access essential services. Fuel duty subsidies for rural users are open to abuse and just add complexity. Better to have a straightforward scheme based on the “value” ascribed by traffic usage (i.e. the market) to all roads - and automatically exempting those least travelled. AND NO TRACKING!
3rd June 2008 at 11:59 pm
Orange: that’s what I’m doing, here and now. I am defining the limits which are acceptable to me.
4th June 2008 at 12:01 am
Andrew: how would you do that without tracking? Because tracking is my only problem with road pricing, it’s just that I don’t see how it can feasibly be done without it. The other alternative is huggins of toll booths, which would be fine by me, although they’d be expensive to build, but I suspect most road users would baulk…
4th June 2008 at 12:02 am
“under a Lib Dem government, they would be. If anyone else tried to implement the scheme without such controls we would be free to oppose it.”
Jesus christ. That’s really all I have to say in response to that asinine quote. Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
“No one makes such a claim when they use a toll road, despite the fact that they are almost certainly being captured on CCTV as they pass through the toll point.”
The problem with this policy is two fold.
First, it’s not whether it is a big brother policy or not, it’s whether it can be perceived as one. As it happens road drivers, with their sat navs telling them where all the myriads of speed camera’s are and (as you point out) CCTV cam’s watching over them, are some of the most flinchy when it comes to the idea of being watched while they drive. If there is anyone you don’t want to give any kind of suggestion to regarding tracking their driving and get a response that isn’t about how they don’t appreciate being spied on then it is your typical driver.
So what if the system is secure, you can argue it til the cows go home, peoples perceptions on this are simply not going to change under the current climate, not for a long while.
The second issue is one of what the policy is actually aiming to do. If you’re talking about saving the environment then fuel tax is the only way to go as it’s a direct indicator of how much CO2 is released in to the world. Someone here hillariously claimed already that fuel tax isn’t fair on those with inefficient vehicles, but that’s kind of the point of what ultimately sounds in part to be an environmental tax.
However if you’re also trying to say that it would be cheaper to drive in the rural areas, and to drive where there isn’t public transport, is to completely ignore any environmental factor in the policy.
If you are trying to help the environment you have to tax everyone based on fuel, if you want to stop congestion and needless car use then you go for road pricing, right? WRONG. You could invest all that bloody money in tracking cars and collating data and managing it in to PUBLIC TRANSPORT to provide the bleeding incentive for people to move away from cars in the first place! Implementing transport systems where there are none, subsidising public transport travel more, etc.
The lib dem’s have such a good standing when it comes to bigging up public transport yet *this* is the announcement they make on their transport strategy for the future? Major, major dropping of the ball, sorry.
4th June 2008 at 12:04 am
Also? What Lee said. Lee is making much sense.
4th June 2008 at 12:14 am
BTW, let me put some perspective in here. I’m from Bristol currently, by the way, hi. We currently have the slowest commuter speed in the country I believe, slower than London. We’ve had several initiatives such as single days of awareness encouraging car sharing once a year to encourage congestion reduction but that’s not done much. Are we as a society really social enough to share a space such as the inside of a car readily? Seems not. While this was happening, local bus monopoly, First, put up their prices by something in the realm of 40% in two years. Student prices have currently risen to the degree of almost 150% in the last 6 years, for example.
There were plans for a tram system or similar but they were dropped because government funding was withdrawn. Apparently a functioning public transport system is just not a priority for funding.
Most of this happened under a Lib Dem council in case you’re interested, but now we’re under Labour. Since they came in we’ve seen more “advancements” such as the pushing through of a congestion charge system for Bristol, multiple attempts at trying to make swathes of the city require parking permits to park outside their house, and the latest was to turn part of the glorious Bristol to Bath *cycle path* in to a bus route with perennial arse tickler of the council, First Bus.
This is the sort of thing politicians are doing with regards to transport, trying to charge road users more and more for their use while stripping truly environmental measures away to make the path for big business easier and only really forking out investment for schemes that can bring money back in rather than actually change anything for the positive; and it’s the sort of thing that this policy fits right alongside in the wealth of poor and misguided ideas that really aren’t engaging with the public…unless of course you can get the BBC to do their usual hatchet job on policy announcement and get them to concentrate on how “Lib Dem’s will cut fuel tax and VED” as if that’s the end of the story
4th June 2008 at 12:18 am
Hang on a minute… Lee’s still making sense. I’m worried now…
4th June 2008 at 12:22 am
I’m not that bad usually
4th June 2008 at 12:23 am
You’re right - perception is everything and we have to be able to sell the benefits of this. The key is being clear over which hated taxes we intend replacing (which is why I’d rather we didn’t fiddle around with VED in the interim), and ensuring that tracking isn’t an automatic consequence. I think the best way around that would be a pre-payment system which simply deducted credit on a Pay-As-You-Drive basis and wouldn’t necessarily be linked to a particular vehicle. In other words, you would purchase a card from a retailer, slot it into the appropriate holder on the inside of your windscreen and pay as the roadside scanners read the barcode. The only way of tracking a particular individual would be if they were foolish enough to make the original purchase with plastic rather than good old cash - or barter of course.
4th June 2008 at 12:25 am
The problem with toll booths would be importing all the french workers and managers to operate them!
4th June 2008 at 12:33 am
Well that wouldn’t be so much of a problem actually, what would be is to try to reverse a policy after it has been implemented by the other side.
Jennie, I’ve gotta repeat that the boundaries you are trying to mark out have already been surpassed and with the state of current technology it is unlikely we’ll get back to that stage.
4th June 2008 at 12:36 am
Andrew, have you really thought about how this would work?
Say I go and buy a card, pre-pay in my local corner shop for example. There is nothing tying me personally to the card and nothing trying the card to my car. I go past a load of scanners…(and this is assuming that there are scanners on every single road, or is congestion/pollution not worth worrying about on C and B roads?)…and it somehow works out that I have gone 10 miles since the last scan in some amazing wireless/satellite communications system that I have never heard of let alone dreamt of. Of course there could be a scanner on every single possible turning or diversion on a road, in which case a small local communication would be needed between linked scanners.
Once it’s done all this calculating of my distance travelled and what not, it needs to work out if I’m allowed to keep driving. Now sure, the card could communicate to the scanner, and some central system could be told that card #A13224213JJJ is now driving without any credit left. What does the system now do? Make the scanners flash a scary red light on top of it every time I go past? Tell the police that an unknown driver in an unknown car is driving without appropriate funds somewhere in the vicinity of this scanner, if you’re lucky enough to be able to stop every car and check their card reference number?
Let’s get real for a second, the only way that a road pricing scheme could ever work is via satellite communication between a registered vehicle and a data centre, or by annual/bi-annual audits of a top of the range route recorder. There are no other ways that a system could work cost-effectively and without breaking down every 5 minutes, and certainly no other way therefore (aside from the toll booth on every street that Jennie said) removing driver details from such a system
4th June 2008 at 12:36 am
Orange that may be so, but “things are already bad” is never a justification for “hey, I know, lets make them worse!”
4th June 2008 at 12:38 am
Let me pre-empt an insane idea. No, you cannot have a device that controls whether or not your car will actually run dependant of charge on your card. Aside from safety implications of running out of money in the middle of Dartmoor, any system which doesn’t have some kind of centralised security is more open than anything else to being circumvented by even the most haphazard of technical boffins.
4th June 2008 at 12:39 am
When you are on a stranger’s doorstep next time and they are complaining about the state of their roads and pavements and you know full well that the available budget will cover a minute proportion of the real investment needed and you’re humming and hahing and making vague promises about trying to get a bloke down with a wheelbarrow load of chippings think about what you could do with this:
http://www.transport.intelynx.net/Home.html
(I note it’s not responding at the moment but I hope it comes back - try later - it’s a fascinating look at how road pricing could be used to allow various levels of road - from s43 to motorways - to be properly maintained and make a profit for its owners, us).
Also, if Tom Papworth’s blog is back up (http://liberalpolemic.blogspot.com/), he did a very good piece in December last year I think about why roads are not a public good at all.
Mutualise the lot. Roads are little different from bandwidth, and the latter will probably become just as important in our lives in the coming years, yet we don’t squeal at having to pay for our use of that.
I vote yes, with some caveats - roads should be made to pay for themselves. Rail can already pay for itself through recovery of land values. Air travel needs to pay for our airspace it uses similarly by publicly auctioning landing slots. Fuel taxes cannot go completely as people have pointed out, but there’s a balance and transparency issue - a way both to reduce reliance on less environmentally efficient transport and to pay for the infrastructure what’s left needs to run on without it having to compete with the local social serv ices budget or whatever.
But overall, LVT on the ground beneath our feet will reduce travel distances by making more efficient use of the built space we use - people may pay more in fuela nd road use in rural locations but less in LVT and vv - people in towns will pay less per passenger mile because they do fewer miles but more for the land they use….
http://www.jockcoats.org.uk/why_eco_tax_must_include_land
4th June 2008 at 12:45 am
I dont drive but frankly the public transport where i live (not even ‘out in the sticks’) is so bad I can see why people do….if you overtax people without *first* improving public transport then people will simply pay the tax and feel aggrived that they have too…..i dont support this proposal therefore at this stage….
4th June 2008 at 12:52 am
Jennie, I’ll make the dyke-building metaphor now please.
The first line of defence (ignorance) has been breached and we are forced to build a new levee (legislation). Once the flood has been stemmed, then we can dig the cross-dykes (gradual tightening of regulations) to get the continual data seepage under control.
4th June 2008 at 1:02 am
Here’s some more perspective, trying to show why pushing people on to the current train network that is simply “more reliable” and with comfier seats is a losing game…
I want to go to Liverpool to see my girlfriend’s family. I get a taxi to the train station for £6 or I get two buses for £3.60, if they turn up at all. I have to get a train after work so the buses are less regular. I’d choose to take a taxi simply to ensure I get my train. Travel time is 20 minutes to the station.
Timed right I get straight on to my train which has cost me £60 return by booking a month in advance. I roll in to Liverpool and either need to get picked up (cheating), or take a taxi to get to relatives house. This is another £5. All in all the journey will have taken me at least 4 hours including journeys too and from the station while costing me in the region of £70
By contrast a car journey from my house to the destination door to door would take no more than 3 hours each way even with mild congestion on the motorways, it would be able to be done when I want to leave each location, and for (currently) about £50-60 depending on congestion.
This policy states nothing that would alleviate this situation, other than to potentially push that journey’s charge up in the car slightly on balance. Is that the way the Lib Dem’s really want to try to continue the increase of rail travel?
4th June 2008 at 1:04 am
Oranjepan: We’ve already started invading middle eastern countries, so why stop now eh?
4th June 2008 at 1:32 am
I am with Jennie. People should be allowed a semblance of humanity and not merely be treated as data points in some great tracking algorithm.
4th June 2008 at 3:37 am
There don’t seem to be many people in this discussion, so I’ll throw in my tuppence worth.
I think these are excellent, ambitious plans. The technical side is fascinating and (forgive the phrase) we should have clear civil liberties ‘red lines’ on how it is developed. But it strikes me as do-able.
My unscientific guess is that the best analogue of the technology is the humble mileometer. Cars need some basic technology to read what the price is of the road they are on (achievable in more ways than one) and they then just need to mutliply by mileage and fuel consumption to generate a number that is broadcast from time to time - frankly, it need not even be that frequent. Let no one who wanders the world with a mobile phone say we’re on fundamentally new ground here.
In the unlikely event we’re talking about the central computer knowing the minute-by-minute whereabouts of every car in the country, I agree that is unacceptable and probably unfeasible anyway.
Is the idea worthwhile? I think so. Tim makes some interesting points which merit investigation, but this uniquely deals with (crude) fuel consumption, congestion and the extent of alternatives on offer. Before Yorkshire gets too wound up about all this being a London conspiracy, I’d suggest turning to Shetland where they’re about to pay £1.50 for a litre of unleaded - and more of it tax than anywhere else in the country. Journeys are often quite long, and buses few and far between (if any).
We will need to make the case for these proposals, but at least they are built on good far-sighted liberal principles. When small rural communities see the alternatives which the two tory parties would settle for (as they do right now) I don’t think the job of selling these plans is that hard at all.
4th June 2008 at 7:36 am
This is a really really stupid idea as well as being downright offensive. It involves tracking where everybody travels - another advance on labour’s move to Orwellian surveillance. At a time when people are making it very clear that they are sick of an all pervading state it should be dropped.
4th June 2008 at 8:19 am
Road pricing is a device to introduce satellite surveillance of motor vehicles; nothing more, nothing less. Those (in Washington) who are foisting it on us couldn’t give a fig about environmental protection. They want to watch us and control us wherever we go. Only the feeble-minded and servile can support this. Let’s leave it to the robot radicals of the Green Party to advocate statist, Big Brother solutions. We are a LIBERAL Party. Let’s prove it, Nick.
4th June 2008 at 9:25 am
Did Labour not float this idea a couple of years back and we went balistic calling it another form Big Brother and that it would cost millions?
I for one would like to see the costings, prove to me that this will 1) save money 2)save the environment 3)will totally re-shape public transport in EVERY part of the country
Then I may be convinced, otherwise I think we have handed the tories yet another un-costed and ill thought out policy to beat us with!
4th June 2008 at 9:37 am
I realise this policy is not itself just about road maintenance but it needs to cover that too I think.
So to follow Big Mak asking for figures, there’s something that I’ve always been uncertain of…
I know we don’t hypothecate taxes to roads (though if they are not, strictly speaking, a public good then we ought to) but does anyone know whether what we actually collect from road users in all forms, whether from VED, RFL, fuel taxes etc is greater or less than what is spent on roads?
Remember that still, a third of households basically never use the roads under their own steam for they have no access to a car - so if they use the roads it’s through a public transport provider.
The most obvious plus point for this, if we already collect more than is spent would be to reduce what we collect to what is needed to maintain the network properly, then the headline cost to the user would be less, and zilch for the non-user, and THEN, use fuel tax, albeit at a much lower rate, to moderate the overall demand. No?
I just don’t buy all the arguments about Big Brother. We’re talking about building a system here. We can build it to be as intrusive or not as we please. And I for one can see how it can be done without even passing data of where you have been to anyone. If a device in the vehicle does all the calculating of how much any journey costs and then the billing system only collects that, and not details of your journey, auditing your “device” could be part of the MOT to ensure it’s not tampered with.
4th June 2008 at 9:40 am
… then how is it checked? I can see a Lib Dem government advocating your position, to be honest, but unless the Lib Dem government is in forever, it won’t last. The next government will announce a crackdown on cheats, and we won’t be able to object because the technology will already be there….
4th June 2008 at 9:49 am
Jennie, I don’t see how that is different from virtually any other function that collects useage data - your bank account, telephones, broadband, anything really. Why are these any less open to abuse by a future government? Or are road users somehow more worthy of ‘future proofing” than users of any of these other data collection functions?
I suppose one difference at first sight might be that these are privatised, so maybe the answer is to ensure the government does not have the data in the first place by privatising it.
You could, for example, make it all happen through competing insurance companies - already the motor insurance market would like to use tracking data in order to tailor insurance costs to the times and places people use their vehicles. Let them also collect the road charging income and just pass alump sum to the government perhaps.
4th June 2008 at 9:50 am
Jennie,
The UK government isn’t intended to have any say in the matter. Once this system is up and running, our every move will be viewed in Langley, Virginia.
4th June 2008 at 9:51 am
(as and aside on a different issue very briefly, I just noticed that the Google ad that appeared beneath my last posting was for “Henley’s local choice - Get to know John Howell, the Conservative candidate for Henley” - given the exchange of letters about denying Steve and the Green candidate’s local credentials it might be worth flagging up!)
4th June 2008 at 9:53 am
Jock, I don’t think it IS much different, but I don’t think those things are harmless. I fully understand that they are open to abuse by a future government, and, indeed, the current one is trying it’s damnedest with it’s horrendous database scheme which it wants to attach to ID cards.
Like I said to Orange above “Things are already bad, hurrah! Let’s make them worse!” is never going to be a convincing argument as far as I am concerned.
4th June 2008 at 9:53 am
Sesenco, since this is a Lib Dem idea, are you saying that our transport policy team is working for Langley? Why are you still here in that case?
4th June 2008 at 9:54 am
(Yeah, the Tories have been paying for google ads for a while. Is this the first one you’ve had?)
4th June 2008 at 9:57 am
So, my question still remains Jennie, why are road users any more worthy of protection that these other data collecting activities, and why the heck shouldn’t they pay for what they use, like users of these other services? Because they might, one day, have their data ripped off and used by a future nefarious government? Great. Let’s start a policy to ban databases, full stop.
I do still want to know, however, whether overall drivers currently pay more in all the various taxes than the road system costs or whether the rest of us are paying for it too. That’s a bit like forcing me to pay for your bandwidth isn’t it? Why is that fair? Paying for what we use, whether public or private, is better if it is possible than the “collective punishment” of making us all pay for it regardless of how much we use it.
4th June 2008 at 9:58 am
What I don’t understand with road pricing is how it deters in a smart way.
The London congestion charge, whatever criticisms are made of it, is simple and clear. Go in this area at this time and you pay.
When I hear discussions of road pricing people talk about charges based on congestion, the type of road and the time of day. That sounds like a complex pricing structure which makes it hard for people to work out if changing their behaviour saves them money.
There is a danger with such a model that it ends up like telecoms deregulation where the pricing structures are so opaque that people just stick with what they know and pay the bill
4th June 2008 at 10:01 am
Road users aren’t more worthy of protection, but I can’t go back in time and stop the other things being created. Like I keep saying, just because some bad things already exist, creating more of them is not justified.
AFAIK, road tax is not ringfenced, and thus goes into the general pool, but the last statistic I heard is that roughly a tenth of what is collected actually gets spent on the road network. So road users are paying for you.
4th June 2008 at 10:15 am
Of course, if the state made a profit from Road Pricing (as Jock correctly asserts it should) and cut VED and fuel duty accordingly, public transport could be one massive beneficiary. If you were determined to avoid even the remotest possibility of being tracked (whether BB was operating out of Langley or Cheltenham), just get on the bus/train/bike/shanks’s pony. And wear a hat of course.
4th June 2008 at 10:35 am
Jock: on almost all measures, road users (as a whole) pay far more than the cost of using the road, including environmental costs and anti-social costs (deaths, etc). This is more true as time goes on, as cars anti-social costs decline (deaths per km falling, NOX etc emissions down). Motorised road transport is the only form of transport that pays its way. Pedestrians and cyclists don’t pay, buses and trains are subsidised, and aviation is not close.
Obviously there will be some roads that do not pay their way, either because they are on very expensive real estate, or because they inflict particularly high externalities (environmental, or death traps) or because so few people use them that they cost more to repair than they generate in tax.
Last time I did the maths, the Stern value on the global warming contribution of a litre of fuel was 8p, given govt 42p of duty left over to pay for the roads and other externalities. (plus VAT).
4th June 2008 at 10:39 am
The privacy issues have been well covered here but not the fact that road pricing will actually cause more congestion and pollution. The advocates of this policy do not appear to have read it properly. The proposal is not to charge for all roads which are congestion blackspots. The proposal is only to charge for using motorways and trunk roads. The effect of charging will be to move traffic off of the motorways and onto smaller roads, through residential areas, towns and villages, which will cause more pollution in the places where people actually have to live. These journeys will be slower and take longer causing more fossil fuel to be consumed. More night freight would pass through these towns and villages to keep costs down by avoiding charging but increasing noise pollution.
The London based policy groups are actually proposing to move traffic off the M1 and divert onto non-trunk roads that pass through towns like Chesterfield. This is the sort of policy that Sir Humphrey would describe as “courageous”.
4th June 2008 at 10:44 am
“I’d suggest turning to Shetland where they’re about to pay £1.50 for a litre of unleaded - and more of it tax than anywhere else in the country. Journeys are often quite long, and buses few and far between (if any).”
But this is where once again this policy shows it doesn’t know where it’s heading. If the policy is about not charging people for use of vehicles that they “can’t avoid” then sure, go ahead…but don’t kid yourself that you can do it while also being a green party.
“We will need to make the case for these proposals, but at least they are built on good far-sighted liberal principles.”
There is a very limited amount of sight in these policy proposals, unless you’re talking about high speed train services that benefit..um…very few?
“When small rural communities see the alternatives which the two tory parties would settle for (as they do right now) I don’t think the job of selling these plans is that hard at all.”
Then you clearly don’t know rural folk.
“If you were determined to avoid even the remotest possibility of being tracked (whether BB was operating out of Langley or Cheltenham), just get on the bus/train/bike/shanks’s pony. And wear a hat of course.”
So it’s essentially now a liberal position to say we should be happy to limit someones accessibility to certain things unless they’re willing to be tracked? Are you serious?
I’d join with Mak and say I’d love to see some costings. The whole of the policy document is full of ideas that seem to be no more than that. And combine the fact that the biggest idea for helping people out of their cars is road charging with the fact that they only mention lowering train fares once (and then it’s in passing) you can see just how little insight the party has made in to how they’re really going to deal with the issue of public transport. Instead they say that they want local authorities to deal with local transport? To try and claim without any kind of detail that such a “plan” is a solution is to ignore how ineffectual councils (including Lib Dem run ones) are when it comes to dealing with frequently monopolistic transport companies.
4th June 2008 at 10:48 am
Al: You’re spot on and it’s something I mentioned last night in my blog. High road charge costs on trunk roads will mean people burn more fuel on smaller less free flowing roads with more stops, while also travelling through areas with more pedestrians, more cyclists and probably less well maintained roads. This is not to mention the increased safety issue of more junctions and sharp corners that are where most accidents occur on the roads.
But then if you charge too much in fuel tax then people will try to take the most fuel efficient and fastest route.
There is, quite frankly, little that can be done to fine tune a real balance between the two, the party needs to decide if its priority is the environment or congestion…given that it’s boxed itself in to a corner by announcing these policies before detailing anything to do with improving national public transport.
4th June 2008 at 10:52 am
Jock,
Read what I wrote.
This is a GOVERNMENT idea, which Nick Clegg has rather foolishly indicated that he supports (he still has time to see sense and back off). The Lib Dem transport team didn’t think it up. I first remember the idea being floated by Blunkett as a means of controlling traffic speed (Big Brother cuts off the fuel supply to one’s engine). No doubt you will be defending micro-chipping of the population when it comes along. Honest people have nothing to fear from the (US) government scanning our brains.
4th June 2008 at 10:53 am
Here’s how you do road pricing without tracking individual car journeys:
Along the roads you want to charge for, set up a transmitter every mile (say). This transmitter sends a signal to every car going past, telling it the price of this bit of road. (This can vary in time, so a road might be expensive at rush hour, cheap or even free at off-peak times.)
Fit every car with a reciever system that logs these price signals. This will record how much the keeper has to pay for the roads that the car has driven on, but NOT the identities of the roads themselves. For example, a record might say “20 miles on roads priced at £2 per mile, 30 miles on roads priced and £1 per mile”, but NOT “M6 from J12 to J18 on 14 July”.
On a regular basis, the receiver system connects to whichever government department system is dealing with this, and generates a bill which is sent to the keeper. (Or the keeper pays by direct debit, or whatever.)
Just like insurance and MOT certificates, the keeper has to prove that their bills are up to date before being issued with a road license for the car. The road charging effectively replaces the current vehicle licensing charge, but the rest of the licensing and enforcement system remains in place - fines for using the road without a license, and so on.
So road user have to pay for the bits of road they use, but their vehicles movements are not monitored.
4th June 2008 at 11:21 am
You have a fair point Iain, except any material that can disrupt or block the signals from outside the car pretty much make it pointless to implement.
4th June 2008 at 11:27 am
Iain - Great except:
- To avoid rat-running on non-charged roads, every single road in the country has to have these transmitters, otherwise you just push traffic off the trunk roads onto minor roads. I fail to see how this is practical and affordable.
- Then you still have a problem (under your system) of not being able to differentiate between a local resident using the road (which presumably should be lower), and someone that is rat-running through to avoid the presumably higher cost of the trunk road.
- I don’t really have a problem with the principle of road charging, but as liberals we should be looking to the simple, non-intrusive, non-bueracratic system if at all possible. As far as environmental damage (CO2 emissions etc) is concerned that option is available - it’s fuel duty.
4th June 2008 at 11:29 am
Lennon: The lib dem plan is not (purposefully) to road charge every road, only major A roads and motorways. The aim is specifically to force people off of the major roads on to less safe and less fuel efficient roads while profiting from those that have no choice but to use the faster routes.
4th June 2008 at 11:51 am
a, I have read the policy and when I wrote “I support with caveats” it means just that - I support road charging in principle - it is land that attracts economic rent that ought to be collected - which as policy goes back to Ricardo, Smith, Lloyd George and Asquith - not that I support the whole of these proposals.
I’m with those who say it ought to apply to every road, not merely A roads and motorways for a start.
It’s NOT a “government” idea. Road charging was around 200 years ago and has continued uninterrupted in other countries. It is a valid and liberal thing to want to do - pay for things through user fees rather than general taxes and so on.
Tim, thanks for your info about the amounts of tax etc - though I have to say I have seen the direct opposite asserted too (especially when you consider just how much of a backlog of maintenance there is - I realise not everyone can get a road laid like a billiards table and kept that way year in year out but it must be *the* biggest moan on the doorstep in any election (regardless of whether the body being elected can actually do anything about it!). So I would be saying there then that if you don’t treat roads as public goods and make them pay for themselves as they should then any road pricing policy should be sold as reducing the cost of using the roads while targetting that cost only at the users. That seems right and fair, but it doesn’t of course address the environmental costs and for that I still think you need fuel duty, but perhaps at the rates Stern refers to.
This either has to be about “keeping the nation moving” or it’s about deliberately attempting to drive (!) them off the roads.
There are too many things going on at once here I fear.
You don’t need ransmitters on every road. You can still use GPS, just that the receiver in the vehicle does not transmit data about where it is, just collects data about how much it costs to be where it is and tots it up.
The technology exists to enable GPS to make “intelligent” deicison about where to drive based on cost and congestion too.
Minor roads should pay for themselves, but that should be down to those with the biggest interest in them - rat running can be catered for - if you enter a road and drive straight through you get charged at a different rate than if you enter a road and stop.
Seriously, it’s a long document, but do go look at the link I posted yesterday - it does appear to be up now:
http://www.transport.intelynx.net/Home.html
Almost everything that has been objected to on this thread is covered there except with the caution that that is about ensuring quality roads, not saving the environment. I don’t think they should be conflated personally.
4th June 2008 at 11:59 am
…and Jennie, I still cannot fathom your objection to this one type of data. I am a liberal, and can see many options for doing this without even handing data to anyone other than an audit as part of your MOT or whatever, and even if it did, that could be done outside of government because we should own the roads mutually anyway. You’re probably on thousands of databases that could be “mined” by a future government. I can see ways in which road pricing can be done without your journeys *ever* actually appearing on database in a way that could be mined.
Why is it *bad* that a back keeps your data - after all you may want to refer to a payment made a year ago. Same with telcos and itemized billing. More data ought to mean better informed decision making and more power to the consumer to say “hey, that’s wrong I didn’t do/buy that, give me my money back”. You write as if all databases are a “bad thing” we just have to accept because they already exist but can resist this one.
I do think this might turn out to be one of those not very well rounded policies that is not sold very well, nor the liberal principles behind it explained because it tries to do too much at once, and that *is* an electoral liability. But I’ve come to expect half hearted attempts at radicalism from all parties.
4th June 2008 at 12:01 pm
If no details of people’s journeys were going to be recorded, that would be different.
But the document as quoted above says:
“A ‘Privacy Guarantee’ would be provided to motorists, by separating any personal details held from journey details.”
So, clearly, the intention is to record details of people’s journeys.
4th June 2008 at 12:32 pm
I’m not against road charging in principle, I just have severe doubts that it can be done without storing immense amounts of personal data, without huge infrastructural cost, and without creating a political conflict against environmental and safety concerns. It also doesn’t seem very liberal given that it intends to build upon things like the lorry tax which surely any liberally minded person would ask why it is we’re penalising people that *need* to use the roads? Of course they talk in the document about moving from road and air freight to train and water, but where are the details? There is no fleshing out of how the Lib Dem’s intend to dismantle the haulage industry while taxing them even more, for example.
I think it’s not quite as well rounded as you believe it to be Jock, the complete lack of any real policy on sustainable public transport improvement and affordability changes means that it cannot be well rounded. But you’re definitely right that it is unlikely to be sold well.
4th June 2008 at 12:36 pm
What Jennie’s been saying, except with an implied “grr” at the end.
4th June 2008 at 12:55 pm
Lee, how does “I do think this might turn out to be one of those not very well rounded policies that is not sold very well, nor the liberal principles behind it explained because it tries to do too much at once, and that *is* an electoral liability. But I’ve come to expect half hearted attempts at radicalism from all parties” make you think I believe it to be a well rounded policy?
Anonymous (and others); detail, detail, detail. You cannot possibly believe that this, or any other, policy document can set out the technical parameters of a project when all it is really doing is saying “this sort of thing is what we want to do”.
Actually I think this, and many other of our policy documents at least (and probably other parties’ too) has too much detail for a policy document. All a policy document really ought to do is make the principled or business case and that is what needs to be sold to the electorate. Trying to second guess how a systems analyst would then break it down is worse than pointless to my mind as, as can be seen here, it confuses selling the what with explaining the how which sets up expectations that will almost never be met.
I don’t see why it needs lots of infrastructure (the GPS already exists and Norwich Union at least are already using something similar for insurance), but even if it did, my understanding from earlier discussions at conference and when I’ve heard Nick and Vince and Chris Huhne I think talk about this is that we have already ascertained from industry sources that it could be done efficiently through a private contractor bearing the costs.
4th June 2008 at 12:56 pm
Okay - why can’t I post? I’ve tried three times now to post the same response to Lee and it simply does not appear.
4th June 2008 at 12:58 pm
In all honesty Nick has been the invisible man since he took over , and this is the first thing i have heard from him and I cant think of anything that would alienate voters more,Labour suggested something similar and the public protest was huge.
Tracking everywhere people go is not liberal its facist control. This is the main stumbling block to this as a Liberal Democrat policy.
To get round that , abolish Road tax , lower fuel tax , have a “car tax return” you’d have to declare how many miles any car(s) you own had done in a year (by reading the tach) and the type of car, this would allow a calculation of enviromental impact without infringing liberty that would take 30 mins a year to fill out.
Confirms that its excedingly unlikely the Lib dems will be elected if there going in this direction.
All the worse of Labours “White Men (fathers,drivers most of all) are the only acceptable target for both intense nannying, disenfranchisation and taxation, PC bile all the while selling out to big bussiness and the EU”.
No thanks.
If the Lib Dems want a popular plank try reforming the Drug War. Gordo wouldn’t listen to the Science and Davis is a myopic “sending out the message” popularist.
4th June 2008 at 12:59 pm
Anonymous (and others); detail, detail, detail. You cannot possibly believe that this, or any other, policy document can set out the technical parameters of a project when all it is really doing is saying “this sort of thing is what we want to do”.
Actually I think this, and many other of our policy documents at least (and probably other parties’ too) has too much detail for a policy document. All a policy document really ought to do is make the principled or business case and that is what needs to be sold to the electorate. Trying to second guess how a systems analyst would then break it down is worse than pointless to my mind as, as can be seen here, it confuses selling the what with explaining the how which sets up expectations that will almost never be met.
4th June 2008 at 1:02 pm
“In all honesty Nick has been the invisible man since he took over”
I don’t know what MSM you read or watch or listen to but that itself is just hogwash from what I can see on the outlets I read and watch!
4th June 2008 at 1:06 pm
“Anonymous (and others); detail, detail, detail.”
Codswallop!
Whether or not the party is proposing to set up a huge database, with details of everyone’s car journeys in it, is anything but a matter of detail.
It’s as clear a matter of principle as you could wish for. If the Liberal Democrats don’t oppose this kind of thing, what is the point of carrying on?
4th June 2008 at 1:12 pm
Jock: your comments got mistakenly caught as spam, but I’ve now freed one version.
When this happens, it’s best not to repeatedly submit the same comment as that makes your IP address look more spammy to the anti-spam software, and so more likely to make a mistake in future too.
4th June 2008 at 1:16 pm
I’m flabbergasted to discover that “we” support this policy. It is wrong-headed on every level: in principle; in practice; and electorally.
I put “we” in quotation marks because I can’t possibly remain a member of a party that supports such a policy, or even vote for one, so when my subs lapse that’s it for me I’m affraid.
4th June 2008 at 1:28 pm
My problem has long been with us or any other party…what’s the beef?!
As in what’s it going to cost me, my family and everyone in the country?
Anyway (including me) can come up with an idea or policy, but until it can be costed and the infrastructure it would require thought out then its nothing more than just that…an idea.
However with the Tory press like a pack of wolves at the moment we seem hell bent on throwing them scraps of red meat like this.
I voted for Nick, I know & like Nick but as with our stance on the Euro constitution this seems to be a mistake.
Nothing that would be a disaster but as and when this comes up at conference they are going to do a hell of a lot to convince me to vote for it.
Others who may vote on its principle to the environment without digging deeper need to think if they want to spend at least another decade in the wilderness, I for one don’t. The Tories will use this and keep pushing on, I do sometimes think we have “speak before we think” syndrome!