Vehicles are not human.
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Could a pay-per-use road charging scheme powered by vehicle data reporting be viable?
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Vehicles are not human.
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DynamicSpirit
Established Member
The problem in your logic here is that you keep asserting that vehicles reporting their location to be logged in some database infringes your right to privacy, but you've failed to explain in what manner it infringes it. And it seems that very many of us simply do not perceive any such infringement. So if you want to convince anyone, perhaps you should explain precisely how it infringes your right to privacy rather than merely repeating what looks to me like just an unsubstantiated assertion that it does.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
And therein lies the point. We have many things that theoretically could be used by a hypothetical future authoritarian Government because they are so useful. The way we keep some protection against a future bad Government is by having a functioning civil society, with checks and balances and no one arm of Government holding all the power and legal restrictions on what people in authority can do and so on. That's how it works for the police. And that's how it works for data protection too.
Saying we shouldn't collect data about vehicle location because of what a hypothetical future Government might do with that data doesn't really make sense in the context that for just about everything else that is useful to society (such as having a police force, and indeed collecting data about lots of other things) the protections we use against a future Government are based on having a sound legal framework.
The Data Retention and Acquisition Regulations 2018 was passed into law on 31st October 2018 defined the process for some government agencies to access data held by ISPs under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 in pursuit of serious crimes, i.e. those that attract prison sentences of greater than 12 months. The agencies need to request tha data via the Investigatory Powers Commissioner.
Serious as this forum is about good behaviour of it's members, I doubt that any misdemeanours online in this forum would qualify as a serious crime in the legal sense, and if it did, it would be a far more forceful body making the requests.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
The trouble is it can be an ordeal to sort out an Oyster discrepancy. A simple phone call is only simple if it is answered fairly quickly. It is also only simple if the person handling the call can figure out what credit is required. Honestly I spent ages waiting for about ten journeys that fell off the end of the failed cap to be credited. The guy could not work it out - I even suggested just subtract the cap from the total daily spend and credit that. He agreed that I should have been capped but just could not figure out the next several steps. I gave in when his arithmetic got to within £5 of of the amount I expected.
Irony was I then had to nominate a station to collect my Oyster refund from within a week. I chose East Croydon and in the end travelled there specially to get it done on the seventh day. I asked the barrier staff - they said touch in. Yippee credit was added. I then touched out as i was not travelling anywhere which instantly cost me a few £s because I am not supposed to not travel !.
Another automatic process that has "defeated me" The Dartford crossing. A few years ago I set up an account with £10 in it and email reminders if for if I drifted below £5. I did this because if I was driving North I would not get a chance to reach a computer and figure out how to pay the crossing charge even if I remembered. So I preferred to have some money on account which is what other people do. HOWEVER Now the wombats have decided to close my account because I do not use the crossing enough !. Not very user friendly considering they will very quickly fine me if I fail to pay in time.
That is why I hate automated processes. They are only designed to cater for the norm and any exception is assumed to be the users fault.
It also gets my back up that charges like this have no barrier. I can innocently enter the London congestion charge zone (just by taking a wrong turn) or the Dartford Crossing (not so tricky). I think it is MORALY WRONG that they can charge me extra before giving me time to pay AFTER they have invited me to pay. They should send a bill to people who have not immediately paid giving them time to pay. They put the onus on the user to pay when there is no obvious barrier to pass through and then no simple way to pay.
I know how unreliable things can be. I once had a hire car where I picked up a congestion charge fine and a large admin fee from the hire car company. The money was taken from my credit card. I spent months getting it sorted out. The expensive admin department at the hire company could not see that the congestion charge was for the day after I handed the car back !. So much for an admin fee. That is why I won't use Europecar any more.
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In theory having an automated system should allow you to keep accounts active for a long period of time in that there's no paper work involved in keeping the account live.
Therefore you'd want to minimise the amount of human involvement needed, so keeping an account active for at least 12 months since it was last used would appear to be sensible.
Anyway given that they have your money in advance and knowing that they don't have to process sending out fines should be fairly beneficial to them. Even if it doesn't generate then as much income their costs are also much much smaller.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
You would think the cost of hanging on to my money was negligible possibly even earning them a little bit of interest. I will point that out to the judge when I refuse to pay the fine !.
Privacy is other people not knowing what you do. Keeping track of your movements is a clear infringement of that right to a private life.
They have to find your ISP first
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Wouldn't be hard in that sort of case because devices would have been confiscated.
A VPN would still protect against monitoring where you had been looking? I am talking mass surveillance here, not the full GCHQ/NSA treatment for a top AQ bod!
They are not tracking you, other than when you are in your car. The fact that others could use your car and that you can get about by other means of travel restricts this.
As an example I drive with my wife to location A, we stay there for a hour and then she leaves on her own (taking my phone with her). A few hours later a crime is committed in that location. Do the police know where I am and if I should be questioned from the tracking of my car?
Even if the following day my wife then picks me up from a location 30 miles away by doing the same in reverse the state would not necessarily know that is what has happened.
The fact was that my phone dropped out of my pocket on the car before I was walking along a long distance footpath and it was just coincidence that I was dropped off near where a crime was committed.
The point being is that the tracking of my car can't be used to place me at the time of the crime, nor can it be used to prove my innocence.
It doesn't take a lot of effort, on the behalf of the state, to find out who your ISP is, as there's not many of them and most devices you use to connect to their networks would be linked to your address. Unless you use data packages in a PAYG phone and top up with cash. Even then you'd best but use said device at home, as it will record which mobile phone masts which it connects to and therefore would give the state a good idea as to who it may well belong to.
“other than when you are in your car” - that really does cover an awful lot of travel! Certainly if you were getting around the country.
If they are starting from you being a person of interest. If they are starting from ‘who are these pro rail activists visiting this website’ it’s a bit different.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
The whole point, as I understand it, about privacy laws and the "big brother is watching you" thing is :-
The state now gathers more and more information about you, me and everyone else. People who object to this object to it on certain grounds. Their objection is that this information COULD be used IN SOME FUTURE SCENARIO against them. For instance if the state got too powerful (and history does repeat itself) to the point where people legitimately feel they have a right to rise up against the state. Then the mechanisms being allowed now would be useful to quell unrest.
President Assad in Syria would find the data gathering we use here useful and be quite happy to use it. The UK had a civil war back in the 1600s - what would the outcome have been if the losing side had had better information ?.
So it is not that the information gathering is in itself sinister right now. The problem is that those mechanisms could be abused in the future.
It is not about what our beloved government could do with the information now. It is about how that information could be used against us in the future by a government that had become unscrupulous. That is what certain people fear. If you read/watch George Orwell's 1984 it provides an insight into how things can go wrong. Whether you believe it could ever happen in the UK is another thing but there are plenty of governments around the world who would readily use it. So I can see some peoples belief that it could happen here and so it is better not to let the current state have the tools that would make that possible.
Personally I believe the state will end up collecting so much information about everyone that they would not know what to do with it !.
Its all the targeted advertising that grinds me down. You buy online an item you only want once in your life and behold you get loads of advertisements for it for months !.
The state now gathers more and more information about you, me and everyone else. People who object to this object to it on certain grounds. Their objection is that this information COULD be used IN SOME FUTURE SCENARIO against them. For instance if the state got too powerful (and history does repeat itself) to the point where people legitimately feel they have a right to rise up against the state. Then the mechanisms being allowed now would be useful to quell unrest.
President Assad in Syria would find the data gathering we use here useful and be quite happy to use it. The UK had a civil war back in the 1600s - what would the outcome have been if the losing side had had better information ?.
So it is not that the information gathering is in itself sinister right now. The problem is that those mechanisms could be abused in the future.
It is not about what our beloved government could do with the information now. It is about how that information could be used against us in the future by a government that had become unscrupulous. That is what certain people fear. If you read/watch George Orwell's 1984 it provides an insight into how things can go wrong. Whether you believe it could ever happen in the UK is another thing but there are plenty of governments around the world who would readily use it. So I can see some peoples belief that it could happen here and so it is better not to let the current state have the tools that would make that possible.
Personally I believe the state will end up collecting so much information about everyone that they would not know what to do with it !.
Its all the targeted advertising that grinds me down. You buy online an item you only want once in your life and behold you get loads of advertisements for it for months !.
This thread has drifted so far off-topic now that I have even checked to see whether the title has been changed to something about mass surveillance. It's actually about a fair and effective method of charging for road use once a fuel surcharge is no longer relevant, coupled with the desire of (nearly) all considerate people that unrestricted mobility in private vehicles irrespective of its negative effects on others is both unreasonable and unsustainable in the future.
A sensible method that adresses the functional and persuasive needs of a future charging method has been proposed that does not affect the day-to-day freedoms of anybody who has a 'normal' law-abiding lifestyle. As with any new legislation, there are a few who claim to see all sorts of negative consequences, but so far nobody here advocating that has come up with any informationn with how it would actually affect their lifestyle. Instead there is a continuing stream of whataboutery and strawman debate of societal breakdown as a result of the scheme under discussion. The fact that the argument has not had any serious critique of it's technical impracticality or inapplicability leads me to see the anti views as a disguise of their objection to their future motoring ambitions in terms of ever lower costs, and their inability to accept the impact of irrational use and abuse of the UK's public highway network asset.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
Well yes. I was just trying to explain where some objectors views come from. But it has drifted from the PRACTICALITIES of how to charge for road use.
For my part I think the last half century has been invested in making people more dependant on their car. We need to get back to the idea of transport hubs (town centres) where the things people need are located together at/near the hub. It bugs me that in Cardiff the bus station outside the railway station has been replaced with office blocks in the last few years. The coaches from London now terminate in obscure places away from the buses and trains thus reducing the convenience of public transport. My stepson now picks us up in his car !. In fact in Croydon a few more central roads have been pedestrianised forcing the bus routes even further from the shopping centre - indeed one now has to cross a busy road to get to my bus stop home.
Nowadays we use our car to buy milk (along with other groceries). The milk is a lost leader - a term used by the supermarkets for a product that is sold at/near loss to entice people into the store. that is why everyday essentials like milk and bread are found at the back of the store. To enable you to wander past all sorts of other foods (etc) that you did not know you wanted !. In the good old days my milk was waiting for me in the morning on my doorstep in a re-usable container called a glass milk bottle. I gave up patronising my local milkman when the milk arrived after I went to work and so had been kept warm on a doorstep all day !.
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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 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.
I listed a whole load of technical challenges.
But they are all irrelevant if the public refuses to trust the government with such a privacy intrusion.
And it will be much harder for the government to slide this one through as they have with ANPR and interception of phone and computer systems, as the car driving public will see it as tax-raising persecution (See opposition to fuel price rises) rather than something to protect them from paedos and terrorists.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
The multi occupancy point is a very good idea. Obviously, as you say, there are the same risks of errors. This would cover journeys where public transport is not very feasible.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.
About twenty years ago there was an attempt at a car sharing scheme where people could register themselves and the journeys they needed to make. The problem arose that there were plenty of people willing to share their car but not enough people who wanted to sit in the car of someone else - interesting. This road pricing vs multi occupancy idea could add an incentive to that.
In Bristol (Stoke Gifford to be precise) there are bus and multi-occupancy lanes. These seem to be enforced by the bus lane cameras. So the use of cameras might help determine eligibility. Mind you I think the car 'knowing' its own occupancy is more reliable.
As for the school run. A free bus pass for all school children and in further education would be better. I know children used to get excluded if they lived too close to the school and that always struck me as counter productive. It means the council are saving money to force more pollution. Furthermore it avoided children/young-adolescents experiencing bus travel so it would potentially be something they were not used to and would never consider for the rest of their lives.
I know someone who will not use the bus. That leads me to the point that buses need to be more friendly. In London the buses accelerate and brake too harshly - I do not drive like that. It is a very real risk to injury if you are not seated before the bus moves. You have to have your wits about you especially on electric/hybrid buses as the engine note gives no clue. A few years ago I was on a bus in Leeds and I was amazed how much gentler they were driven. Also you do encounter some undesirable people on buses (this is London !) occasionally and so it would be a good idea if some rules were enforced. I know this is not directly related to road pricing but it illustrates the way the alternatives we need people to use can be improved to make them more attractive. We must not be seen to force people out of their cars - that is the road to backlash. We need to incentivise the use of public transport as much as we can.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
The problem with this is that it's wide open to abuse: If you charge less for a multi-occupancy vehicle, people will simply get their partner or a friend to unnecessarily accompany them on what would've been a single-person journey just to get the cost down. Far better - and economically much more efficient - to just charge a per-mile amount that is calculated to approximately reflect the harm done to the environment/etc. by an average car journey in that locality and the desirability of encouraging people to do their journeys by other means, without taking any other factors into account in the pricing. Just leave it to individual motorists to decide whether each journey they'd like to make is worth the cost that they'd pay to do it.
People will very likely see opportunities to reduce their costs (and therefore reduce the environmental harm they cause) by sharing journeys where it's convenient, without any need for the pricing scheme to specifically consider occupancy.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
That's still very vague, and I would say not quite right either.
Here's how I would see it: When I'm in my own house, then I expect a right to privacy - which means to be able to do stuff without anyone else watching (other than family members and people who have my consent to be there). That's because at home is where we expect to do stuff that we wouldn't usually be comfortable with other people seeing - stuff like having a shower, having sex, munching an entire packet of chocolate digestives while watching old Knight Rider episodes, and so on.
But the instant I step out onto the street, I'm in a public area and I no longer expect, nor have a right to, privacy. Anyone who happens to be passing can freely observe what I'm doing, where (at least at that instant) heading, what I'm wearing, and so on. That is how it has been for thousands of years - ever since streets were invented, really! There are certainly some social conventions around this... I expect people to respect my personal space, and I'd probably feel a bit weirded out if a stranger picked on me and started specifically following me to the exclusion of anyone else, but in terms of privacy against people seeing me and knowing where I'm at - there is none. If I want privacy, I'll return home to get it.
There is therefore no real conflict with privacy if I'm in a car and my vehicle continually reports its location to be logged in a central database. Just as there is no conflict with privacy if I'm on a train and a security camera on the train continually automatically records pictures that I'm in, and the details of my contactless journey are held on a computer by TfL.
cactustwirly
Established Member
17x21x10 for me using your system, that's a fairly hefty tax! Over 10 times more than what I currently pay.
Why would you give older vehicles less tax, that defeats the whole object of this, as they pollute a lot more than newer cars.
And you're unfairly discriminating against a significant amount of car owners by taxing arbitrarily against VAG group cars.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
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.
Ah - there you have it. I have just realised that the point is people see their car as part of their personal space rather similar to their home. Witness the (very & illegally) tinted windows some feel they have to have. Not like public transport. Don't underestimate how deeply the car has permeated many peoples lives.
This was pointed out earlier.
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 !.
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cactustwirly
Established Member
So if insurance companies got hold of all this data, and forced everyone onto their rip-off black box policies you'd be on with this?
I for one made sure not to get a black box when buying my car insurance!
I'm very sceptical of the accuracy of this, especially when black boxes used by insurance companies, are notoriously unreliable, and accuse you of speeding when you're on a completely different road etc.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
Did I not see a case recently where there was one based on what the drivers mobile phone experienced ?. Unfortunately the customers' (intercity) train journeys led to them being declined insurance !. I think it was the persistent speeding at up to 100mph that did it.
cactustwirly
Established Member
I agree with your point, I drive a 2003 car, it's still perfectly good, it's problems are because of neglect and lack of servicing by the previous owner, rather than being almost 17 years old.
And tbh I really enjoy owning it, rather than some bland generic hatchbatch I would have otherwise got.
Although, being an older larger engine, it pumps out loads of CO2, but I pay a lot more tax for that, but that's the choice I made.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
My experience of newer cars is that they can be terribly unreliable and hard to work on. They are designed to go obsolete quickly. I have known someone give up on their newer car because the computer could not be beaten and so insisted on a fault that did not exist. Modern cars have too much to go wrong on them and since when was air conditioning environmentally friendly ?. I see people at work sat in their car in the car park at lunchtime with the engine running !.
I drive a 2006 car, and (smug alert) it’s sufficiently Euro compliant to be excerpt from ULEZ charges etc.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
I think you're confusing several different things here. Most obviously if an insurance company is abusing data by using that data inappropriately, then that's a problem with how they use the data, not (necessarily) a problem with the data having been collected in the first place. And seeking to avoid that is why we have various laws and regulations about who can access data and what they can use it for. It's a reason to ensure those laws are effective - it's not a reason to avoid collecting potentially useful data in the first place.
And if insurance companies really did force everyone onto rip-off policies, then that would be a problem with how the insurance market operates - once again, not a problem with data having been collected in the first place. The solution would be for the Government to investigate the insurance market and make sure that companies are competing properly under reasonably free-market conditions. (Worth pointing out that forcing everyone onto rip-off policies would simply not be possible in a genuine free market, because if prices were actually rip-off, then you'd just have competitors coming in and undercutting the rip-off prices. I'd suggest that to the extent that rip-off prices occur, it's probably at least partly down to consumers not bothering to check if there are alternative policies available. However that's a bit off-topic for this thread).
Peter Sarf
Established Member
Pertinent point in so much as we don't have much of a choice about which roads we use !.
Yet more whataboutery. The anonymised data might be useful to insurers to establish the times of day and areas (done to stretches of road) where traffic density is highest and lowest. That's just a slightly better version of that available from Google. It wouldn't relate to any particular vehicle and certainly any person. Now there is a case for insurers to see how much a car costs in road use charges because it has relevance to the risk that they are covering rather than the single 'not more than n thouusand miles that each policy currently covers. Of course there would be winners and losers but that's life!
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