To return to the original technology focus of the topic, if the idea is to use technology and data to set pricing to discourage certain types of private journey by car and incentivise alternatives (e.g. as is strongly implied by posts 5, 10, 14, 18, 35, 40, 42 and others), then we could include vehicle occupancy data in the data set collected and transmitted. Most new cars now have seat occupancy sensors fitted to warn when someone isn't wearing their seat belt, so the number of passengers being conveyed by the vehicle could also be collected. Perhaps also the vehicle could have an overall weight sensor (as new trains do) so it isn't as easily fooled by a couple of bags of shopping on the back seat.
You could use this data to set pricing incentives for multi-occupancy rather than driver only journeys (given footprint per person conveyed is objectively reduced). And to differentiate the school run parent from the tradesman doing a job in the same neighbourhood, or the carer undertaking a home visit, you could detect how many occupants are in a vehicle entering an area within the vicinity of a school and how many when it leaves again, triangulate this with the time the vehicle entered and exited the area, infer a school run journey and charge accordingly if it is desired to reduce school run journeys in that particular neighbourhood.
Is this technologically possible in support of managing a fine grained transport policy? Absolutely. Will there be edge cases and a lot of refinement required to avoid rough justice in certain scenarios? Of course. Is it proportionate to the overall objective and acceptable to society at large? That's for you to decide.
You really don't need to do this. If you have 5 folk in the office who all realise they would pay £5 each to drive to work, and they all live near to each other, then they should be smart enough to realise that car-pooling would cut that down to £1 each.
The Byzantine mechanisms used to create car pooling incentives are just a sticking plaster on the fact that we don't have a vehicle charging mechanism. They have numerous flaws and they are not practical to be installed across the entire road network. At best, they could be used at specific pinch-points (think unavoidable bridges and tunnels).
The abuse relies on your false fellow passenger having nothing better to do with their time !. I cannot see them staying in the car while I do my days work !. True enough my trip to the nearest shops would be with my better half, otherwise I walk.
You'd be astonished at what people will do when the economic incentive is there. If you've not noticed the clickbait ads on the internet, there's a whole world in telling people crazy and easy ways to save £20 here and there.
But you raise a point about older cars. I drive a 1993 car. It is not brilliantly efficient but I used to avoid using it much. To replace my cherished old banger with a more efficient/environmental car involves a carbon footprint for making the new car and disposing of the old car. Not worth it if i am not using the old car much. I am a great believer in making things to last as, in the long run, that is more efficient.
Anyway as regards new cars we all know about the LIES that Volkswagon Audi Group told about the emissions from their cars/vans so as to get an unfair advantage over other manufacturers. That makes my cherished old banger less of a baddie !.
The solution to the inbuilt carbon problem of new cars is to tax carbon emissions throughout the entire supply chain. Then, the true carbon cost of manufacture will be included in the purchase price, and so all the other financing decisions (e.g. whether you'll save money vs keeping your old car) will make the right outcome happen. With a carbon tax applied on petrol and diesel the cost of running a less efficient (possibly older) vehicle would also be properly accounted for.
Here is an alternate idea to per-use charging that doesn't involve "big brother" watching your every move. (forgive me if it has already been raised).
1: Not retrospective to existing vehicles which continue to be charged as at present. Thus, the scheme will take several years before it has a material impact and will take many more before it is (more or less) fully effective. But the best schemes typically do take time to fully implement; witness reduced emissions requirements.
2: All new cars sold from (implementation date) are required to be fitted with a meter that measures distance and waiting time, in principle such as taxis have. It needn't be a big black separate box of course; it could be neatly integrated into the electronics.
3: All cars are categorised according to the factors considered material in their "cost" to the country - environment, infrastructure maintenance and so on. This forms part of the "type approval" process, just as Euro n compliance does. This is translated into a cost per mile (and waiting time) figure which will vary by vehicle type. Banded, probably. The meter is updated with the cost/band periodically (either online or at MOT time, for example).
How it works: You make your journey. At the end of it, you are required to pay the cost of the trip using a contactless card in the car. You can leave the car without doing so, but your car will refuse to start or run again until you have paid for that last trip.
Costs could include a base level of insurance (so, not paid directly to an insurer; only additional fees for, say, inexperienced or otherwise risky drivers, are paid direct.) And fuel: older cars still have to be taxed on their fuel; these newer ones do not; hence we have tax-free ("pink") fuel which may only be used in equipped cars; non-equipped cars must use clear (duty paid) fuel. So, an extension of the existing split price scheme used by agriculture, marine etc. And vehicle exise duty of course - part of the per-trip charge.
Advantages: No "big brother", and an immediate true representation of the cost of the journey - which may make some think twice about what they do and how they do it.
There is no possible justification for an inbuilt contactless reader in every car. The government knows who owns each car on the road. If we want to charge them money, then we send them an angry letter threatening to take their car away if they don't pay up.
A good analogy to use is Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation requiring the least assumptions is probably the correct one. In our case, the system which requires the least assumptions about the state of the world is also probably the best one. A positioning-based tax system is technologically trivial and relies solely on the hard, verifiable facts about where a given lump of metal was at any given time. A tax system which can be audited by using live satellite imagery is probably better than one which requires individual interrogations of everyone involved!
Nothing yet has addressed that this doesnt need to happen and is not practical.
Thinking that because car parks and very few toll roads do it, it could be scaled up to 100% of driveable road - is asinine.
Road pricing requires someone to price each bit of road, everywhere. You want to price for congestion/pollution/maintenance/rat runs/schools/basic distance covered and so on and so on. Unlike Uber there is no demand signal, and unlike other transport options no competition - so there is nothing to drive what the price would or should be.
The arguments that will cause, due to the sheer variety of people’s usage, and the complete impossibility of even aiming at a “cost neutral” solution for drivers (with absolute uproar from those affected) - is what practically sinks this.
The only option would be to make it so cheap everyone gains, vs. fuel / VED. At which point it fails because it hasn’t solved the problem of reduced revenue.
The civil liberties argument is that aside from very specific “pinch” points, we have never been expected to have our vehicle location recorded, tracked and with financial consequences.
This is a nation that doesn’t want to have to prove who it is without due process. This system requires the owner to declare a location at all times - or be liable for the costs of others.
For a society that rejected motorway tolling even when it really wanted the roads that would pay for - this will never be accepted.
Even setting civil liberties aside - this would be a blank cheque to abuse for funding ever other non road, or non cost of driving project the Govt wanted (NHS / Defence / Education / Millennium Domes etc.). Our Govt absolutely would abuse that and people will never trust it not to.
Road pricing is dead in the UK, and trying to use the change from IC to electric vehicles is not going to be the excuse to shoehorn it in.
There is nothing asinine about it. The technological complexity we're talking about is basically trivial for even a medium-sized technology-native company. My own job involves building and maintaining systems that process orders of magnitude more data than would be needed for this.
The nice thing is that with this technology, it's possible to experiment. We can put some levers in the hands of data scientist civil servants and see what happens, just as happens in more developed public transport networks. What happens if we increase the cost of driving on a given road? What's the relationship between pricing and congestion? We can learn a whole universe of information here about how to optimise. That optimisation would be for the sake of society. Every pound of efficiency gained is a pound that can be used to better health or education or lower taxes.
I also ask you to consider, for just one second, that two months ago life was totally normal. Today, we live in a state functionally more authoritarian than NORTH KOREA. You are legally not allowed to leave your home without having at least one of a set number of excuses. The entire world of liberalism has disappeared without a trace, because we realise that something is more important. Sure, we're going to get our liberties back, but almost certainly at a cost of increased health surveillance. The speed with which the population has not only accepted but demanded the measures we're seeing must astonish you. When the existing car taxation system implodes to EVs and any alternative scheme has such obvious flaws, I think you'll be surprised by how quickly society comes around to accepting vehicle charging too. If new cars can drive themselves by then, then your entire mental model of car use and ownership has already gone out of the window. What difference would some vehicle charging make on top of that?
