This is just what we need.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is funding Irish provider of location technology products Mapflow to undertake a feasibility study to look into the possibility of implementing a pan-European road tolling system. The research aims to establish whether satellite technology can be used to calculate the cost of motoring.
A plan exists to complement this activity with a real demonstration of the virtual tolling concept in the greater area of Lisbon. Also under ESA funding, the project is being conducted by the Portuguese company Skysoft in close cooperation with the Portuguese motorway authority. The demonstration is planned for the end of 2004.In April this year the European Commission published a proposal that all vehicles should pay road tolls electronically, with full implementation foreseen for 2010. Under the proposal, all vehicles will carry a ‘black box’, which will be tracked by satellites relaying information on the distance travelled by the vehicle, the class of road travelled and the time at which the journey was made.
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Germany recently received EU approval to implement a new tolling system for goods vehicles. The system – currently being tested – uses the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS). The government hopes to raise 650 million euros a year through the new charges.
Satellite-assisted tolling would make use of Galileo, Europe’s planned satellite navigation system. Galileo is a joint initiative between the European Commission and ESA to develop a global navigation system, scheduled to be operational by 2008.
I am actually in favour of charging for road use on a per kilometre basis. Inevitably this means using electronic tolling devices of some sort (and from a traffic management point of view this is desirable, as people do not have to stop to pay tolls, and also it is possible to manage congestion better by being able to vary tolls depending on time of day and traffic conditions). Equally inevitably this has privacy consequences.
However, having a top down approach in which a centralised EU agency moniters the movement of every car in Europe strikes me as terrifying. (Also, the further you remove the charging scheme from the people who are building and operating the roads, the less it becomes a charge for road use and the more it becomes a simple tax, too. A Europe wide charging scheme is about the worst way of doing it I can think of. What is much more desirable is a bottom up approach in which the individual owners of the roads implement their own systems, and from which they negotiate technology compatibility and a clearing house for sharing charges between themselves. Governments may still get their hands on the data, but a situation where it starts out in the private sectory and possibly works its way up is far better than a situation where everything starts in the hands of the EU and then works its way down.
This trial is perhaps partly a consequence of the fact that the EU has decided that Europe will build “Galileo”: its own alternative to the American GPS system. Having decided this, it needs to find uses for it. And if you are the EU, tracking Europeans at all times is the sort of thing that comes to mind.
(Link via slashdot)
Crossposted from Transport Blog
Michael,
Did you actually read what you wrote re being in favour of a tax on movement?. I can not believe that I was actually reading a ‘serious’ item when I saw your posting.
Look at the big picture, would you really feel comfortable having your every movement noted and logged for evermore?. Do you really think this will add to your quality of life, and that it is really necessary in the first place?. If you answer ‘yes’, to either question, then I have to doubt your sanity. Personally, I cannot see any sane reason for such a system.
I suppose you will reply with some plausible reason for having traffic congestion control, or some other ‘big brother’ reason for sacrificing yet another freedom for the ‘common good’.
Please tell me that the item is a send-up!….
I am in favour of charging directly for road use. This is not a tax – it is a clear case of payment for a service. Roads cost money to build and maintain, and I believe that these costs should be borne directly by the users, and not indirectly through taxes, and in particular not through the blunt instrument that is a fuel tax. (I would also like to see most of the road network privately owned). In particular, I think this is the only way we can ever hope to get rid of the hideously high fuel taxes we have in Europe. Anonymous ways of electronic charging are not terribly hard to implement – the trouble is that you have governments and other organisations who have vested interests in you doing it some other way.
Your response is interesting to me, because I wrote this as a transport blog piece, and crossposted it over here because it had privacy implications as well. Over there we discuss this sort of thing all the time, and there we pretty much assume that road pricing is (a) inevitable and (b) a good thing. The question is how you do it smoothly and efficiently without causing privacy problems.
(If what I said later didn’t make that clear, my first sentence before the quotation was meant sarcastically, however).
Michael: I agree with all of your comments, including your reply to ernest young.
ernest young: I can see why you don’t like the idea of being in any way interrupted in your driving, but someone has to pay for those roads you use. There already are toad taxes, as Michael points out. You’re not putting forward an anti-tax position. Your attitude requires taxation.
If we were talking about muddy tracks in the unowned wilderness, then highway robbers charging you (which – I’m guessing – is the mental universe you are living in when you think about road pricing) wouldn’t be good. But why is a belief in charging for the use of particular stretches of road evidence of insanity? Or is that word just a way for you to avoid arguing about it?
Michael again, and everyone of course: This all strikes me as a very typical example of the Hidden Europe phenomenon that I wrote about on Samizdata – oh and it was cross posted to here too. This is the tendency for big things to happen in British policy which (a) are all about knitting EUrope together, but which (b) are justified with little or no mention of EUrope as the reason that it is all being done.
There’s a professor of transport called, I think, Begg, who is both a road pricing enthusiast and a EUro-enthusiast, who is one of the the key figures in all this.
I feel that there are some things in the communal infrastructure that cannot, and should not be privatised, and yes, should be paid for by a communal tax. Whether you call it a fee or a tax, is really of little matter, a fee is more likely to have a profit element, a tax, in theory, should be an ‘at cost’ excercise. A fee would be paid by the direct user, a tax would be paid by all.
Electricity, water and existing roads fall into this category. Electricity, by it’s nature cannot be supplied by anything other than a monopoly, the same goes for water supply, we have no choice of supplier. Therefore these services are appropriate to be communally owned.
Roads fall into this category, they are already in place and are part of the communal infrastructure. They already belong to all, and are used by all, even if you do not own a vehicle. Privatisation would not achieve anything other than an increase in price.Yes, I have read your wonderful view of the future for priced roads, as good a piece of science fiction as I have ever read.
I would stress that I feel this way about existing roads, new , purpose built roads are a different matter. The cost of land aquisition, building, etc. would be borne by the road builders, and would not be subsidised by the community at large. As things are in the UK, no doubt full use would be made of the Compulsory Purchase Order, which is just another form of highway robbery, but would no doubt be quite acceptable to you ‘road pricers’ in the fullfilment of your theories.
The excessive road and fuel tax in Europe is levied, not for road building or repair, but as a political excercise, in an effort to reduce vehicle usage in general, and to persuade us all to use public transport. Ditto Livingstone’s road pricing exercise. The amount spent on road repair in the UK, is a small percentage of the amount collected by the RFL, quite apart from the tax raised on fuel sales.
The Libertarian attitude to taxation as espoused by yourselves is at best, impracticible. Not all taxation is bad, some is inevitable and even benficial if it ensures the public ‘right-of-way’, or a fair and equitable supply of a service by a monopoly. When taxation becomes excessive is when it becomes bad.
Given your dogmatic viepoint, we would have to pay whenever we stepped outside our own frontdoor, fees or taxes, it is all the same to the payee..
I really don’t see why being charged for road use should be seen as any more of an infringement of liberty than charging for water, food, or for that matter rail or airline tickets.
As things are in the UK, no doubt full use would be made of the Compulsory Purchase Order, which is just another form of highway robbery, but would no doubt be quite acceptable to you ‘road pricers’ in the fullfilment of your theories.
Exactly what part of my theories demands the use of CPOs?
If new roads were to be planned, a part of the scheme would be to aquire the land on which to build them. In the light of past history, this has always been a contentious part of the excercise and always results in the use of the CPO. Because it is your idea, doesn’t mean that this aquisition will be any easier than in the past.
Surely we are already being charged for the road system, and we are paying more than enough for the maintenance and upkeep of said roads. At present we all pay – in one way or another. your system would put another layer of charges in place and would have no other effect than to increase the cost of transport, and thereby increase total costs across the board.
As we already own and pay for the use of the roads, any handing over of this communal asset to private operators would only increase the user costs – you dont expect Govt. to reduce any of the aforementioned taxes when such a hare-brained scheme is put into operation, do you?.
If past privatisations are anything to go by, then this also is doomed to be a failure. The main pillars of communal infrastructure should remain in public ownership or control, anything where by nature, the supply to the customer cannot be by anything other than by a monopoly, is too open to abuse. Of course, that assumes that in communal ownership these utilities would be professionally and capably managed, they always were, until politics became involved.
Why do I get the feeling I’m being ganged up on?. first Michael, then Brian, and now Patrick…I must have struck a chord somewhere…
I’m not convinced all road building schemes would necessarily rely upon compuslory purchase order. If someone refuses to sell something, it is presumably because the price being offered is not high enough. Alternatives to CPO might be paying more, renting the land instead of buying it, or building the road somewhere else. Any increase in cost this produces would be reflected in the road toll. No coercion necessary.
By the way, I’m not trying to help gang up on Ernest Young – I’m just airing some ideas tor scrutiny. 😉
Rob, 🙂
I was making my comment re CPO’s from past experience. The furor over the land aquisition for building the Guildford By-pass, and several other high profile schemes in that area, would more than likely be repeated, especially if the scheme involved handing the CPO’d property over to a commercial outfit for developement and ownership.
If I remember rightly the Guilford episode went on for some eighteen years, prior to building commencement.
I’m sure the ‘powers-that-be’ have already considered offering a ‘fair’ price. after all, CPO’s have been around for a very long time. It is just that different people have a different idea of exactly what constitutes ‘fair’. If you want it, and I don’t wish to sell, then the ‘fair’ price will be a lot higher than buying from a motivated seller.
I took the ‘ganging-up’, to be somewhat of a compliment, as the “gang’, has a collective high reputation.
ernest: That’s what happens when you call someone’s views ‘insane’. He will mention it to those other people he thinks are likely to ensure him it is not. It is possible that they may then have opinions on the matter themselves that they will post. If that counts as “ganging up on you” then yes, we are ganging up on you.
My feelings on compulsory purchase are that this has been used for building roads and railways in the past, and that this has been the case whether it has been the private sector or the public sector. I would very much like to have someone show me some clear examples where it has not been used and the infrastructure has managed to be built anyway, because if this can be done it would make me happy. However I think it is a separate issue from whether roads should be public or private, and whether roads should be publicly or privately built.
Michael,
In the UK the road infrastructure is called ‘The Right of Way’. Now this is not just a fancy name for a road, it means what it says – it is a Right of Way, granted as a right by Royal decree a long time ago.
A ‘right’ can also be described as a ‘freedom’, take the right away and you diminish the freedom.
Let new roadways be built by private enterprise, but don’t hand over what is currently a communal asset to private enterpise. If what they build is as good as you say, and is worth the fee per km. then it will be a success, but let us keep the current infrastructure in commual ownership, at least as some alternative to the private road. To hand over an existing road to a private operator where there is no alternative route, would be – if I may say it, ‘insane’, and would be asking for a ‘gouging’ scenario.
The nightmare scenario of the UK being completely covered by concrete and ashpalt looms ever larger.
Thank you all for the debate, very thought provoking, if not thought changing. But then, you can’t win them all!.
I’m with Ernest on this one – it is also called the public highway. We have all paid in some form for its construction through taxation, and I’ll be damned if I approve any toll scheme on them. (Nor will I co-operate with any chipping of my vehicles. Doubtless there will be a market in dechipping and I’ll be first in the queue). New roads constructed and funded privately are entierly another matter (the M6 bypass for example). We have the option to pay and use or not use whichever takes our fancy and that’s fair enough.
The current obsessive taxation was put in by previous administrations as a “green” tax and the built in accelerator designed to put us off using road vehicles in favour of public transport – now, there’s a joke. Public in what way? Privately owned monopolies usurping public funds – our taxes, again….
Okay, rant over.