More happy fun surveilance from the Labour government

[spudtater]

Apparently the new scheme to cut emissions and ease congestion involves charging users per mile they drive. Which entails fitting a device to each car so that it can be tracked by satelite and charged accordingly.

Yes, the government wants to implement a scheme which will allow them to know where you've been, where you're going, and how long you stay there, for every car journey you make.

I am constantly astounded by the cheek of this government.

Now, let's go back to the problems that this scheme is supposed to solve: emissions, and congestion. And contrast our existing system, which is based on taxing fuel heavily:

1. With fuel taxing, not only are people charged for going on long journeys, they're also charged for using energy-inefficient cars. Woo! Green!
2. The more congested a road is, the longer a car stays idling in traffic, using up fuel. So the more congested the road, the more you pay in fuel taxes. Woo! Magic!

So the supposed benefits are completely bogus. And what about the negatives? Well, first of all there's cost. How much is it going to cost to manufacture and fit a tracking device for every single car in the UK? Especially as this is (*shudder*) a governmental IT project. And they certainly come in under budget and to specification, don't they?

And then there's privacy. With this and ID cards, the police will know who you are, what you do, where you live, where you came from, and where you are going. They won't need to ask for "your papers, please".

Government admits struggle to sell road pricing scheme — The Grauniad

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy. Over 200,000 signatures so far. Add yours!

Edit: while we're all signing petitions, I notice there's a new ID card petition on the 10 Downing Street site.

Comments

Pro-actively labelled tl;dr for your convenience!

[scattergather.livejournal.com]

I don't buy your refutation of the congestion argument. The capacity of a road-pricing based incentive system to be aligned with transport policy objectives is far and away greater than that offered by fuel duty and vehicle taxation. You can eliminate at a stroke many of the limitations of the current system -- for example, off the top of my head...

* Fuel duty is invariant with respect to local public transport infrastructure.

* Fuel duty offers no ability (at least not in a robust way) to make special allowances for rural areas and villages -- for example, with road pricing you could offset the cost of the extra congestion caused by a discount for rural roads against the benefits of making rural and village communities more viable in the long term.

* Road pricing allows faster routes (and possibly even lanes) to be available by paying a premium; this allows businesses in particular a greater degree of control over transport times and costs by making them more predictable, which would positively impact on the economy (and not insubstantially, either).

* Road pricing could also be used to fund construction of new roads where sufficient demand is present, offering a fairer basis for charging the costs -- those who get the benefit pay.

With regard to congestion, there's no guarantee that the extra cost in fuel of idling (which is unlikely to be that large) remotely in proportion to the optimal incentive for that road. Also, the costs associated with idling tend to be invisible (or at least seriously obscure) to the driver; itemised bills are rather more obvious, and therefore more likely to have an effect on behaviour. The London congestion charge has actually been rather successful.

With regard to costs, the devices would be fitted by manufacturers to new cars. Transitional arrangements for old cars could be used to allow a suitable period of time for the majority of vehicles to have the devices installed already before cars were required to have them installed. Transitional arrangements could be offered under a different pricing scheme to avoid penalising those with new cars, or a less robust system of discounts could be offered to those with the devices fitted to ensure neutrality (or more likely an incentive for early adopters). This would be more susceptible to fraud, granted, but it could be made sufficiently robust, and sufficiently disincentivised through fines and other legal measures that the level of fraud is acceptable within the time period of the transition. The fact that so many devices need to be fitted means there are cost savings associated with mass production. As a proportion of the cost of a car, the devices will be relatively cheap. Britain is by no means the only country looking at road pricing, and the technology R&D is being led by the private sector on its own, so it's not a pure government IT project.

On government IT projects, London congestion charging was pretty successful -- and bear in mind that government IT debacles are the only sort you're likely to hear about with any frequency; businesses don't like to make too much of a noise about their cock-ups, for obvious reasons; peoples' impressions therefore tend to be based on biased data here. I'm not claiming that government and the private sector are equally good at handling large scale IT projects, just that there are grounds for being wary of the perception that the public sector is particularly bad at it. However, it should be acknowledged that the technical issues are huge, particularly when it comes to preventing fraud; however, I do not believe they are in any way insurmountable.

Privacy... there could well be technological ways around the need for storing or making available personal data from the system (clever cryptographic protocols, etc), but whatever system is instituted would be unlikely to use such methods, and there would be large technical issues; that's an argument that stands. Although, it's worth observing that biometric ID cards could form a part of the system, and would solve several tricky technical issues.

(continued)

[scattergather.livejournal.com]

None of this is to say that road pricing is in the end a good idea, but to suggest the supposed benefits are completely bogus is hardly tenable. There are substantial benefits there, along with substantial disadvantages, and therefore a good deal more legitimate scope for argument and persuasion than your post suggests. However much the civil liberties implications alarm you or me, there are plenty more folk who are sufficiently relaxed about them for a road pricing scheme to be attractive in principle.

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

You make some good points here. I agree that the London congestion charging scheme is harder to argue against; the CCTV aspects worry me, but it has a definite and specific benefit. (Reducing traffic in central London).

How much do you know about the congestion charging scheme? Does it record information as fine grained as "on 11/01/07, 10:53 am, you were on Mornington Crescent Edgware Road going East" or as general as "on 11/01/07 you went somewhere in central London"? It's a difference of degree, not type, but at least we can feel that with the second case, data is not being collected merely for the sake of it.

There's been talk of extending that scheme over the rest of the country, and my response to that would be: only if it's really unavoidable. If you can show that it really would be beneficial to set up a controlled zone in central Edinburgh, then so be it, but don't do it just because you can.

[brucec.livejournal.com]

I believe the system can record, in real time, the presence of a car going along a specific road which has the equipment installed on it.

[scattergather.livejournal.com]

I believe the cameras are only used at the boundaries of the charging zone (not certain of this, though); so it would indicate when a car crossed the boundary, and the direction. Time will render this distinction moot, however; how long before technology allows CCTV to be mined for vehicle data? The only real palliative for this problem at present (short of abolishing CCTV networks) would be legislative safeguards (which could obviously be extended to a road pricing system). The likelihood of getting legislation you'd be content with is slim, and that's before we get into the issues of data security, granted, but in the long term, legislative safeguards are about the only long term defence of civil liberties that is viable; developments in technology will continue to throw up risks to privacy, and eventually the benefits of technology will outweigh the cost of the risk to privacy for the great majority of the population. Even at present there aren't that many people who would avoid using mobile phones because of their ability to be tracked; further developments are likely to reduce that number further.

There's been talk of extending that scheme over the rest of the country, and my response to that would be: only if it's really unavoidable.

Well, it's obviously not unavoidable, we just live with the congestion and all the costs and problems associated with it, however bad it gets.

If you can show that it really would be beneficial to set up a controlled zone in central Edinburgh, then so be it

But this isn't about avoidable or unavoidable, this is about costs and benefits, and there's therefore an implied (finite) value you place on civil liberties (or at least the ones infringed upon by congestion charging technology). That's not surprising, it's very difficult to maintain a consistent rational position without this happening, but ask yourself this:

How much would you have to offer the average citizen to make them give up some of their civil liberties? I suspect it's depressingly little...