Safe Speed Forums

There has been some noise that Road Pricing is going to be trialled in a few areas. Does anyone know how this is going to work?

As far as I can see, this would require mass fitment of the transponders, reduction in road tax, monthly billings etc. How will they determine that the system is correctly charging users?

How can this setup be trialled and be representative of reality?

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Also one of the fundimentals was that fuel duty and VED was going to be slashed to make it "tax neutral".....for are they going to do that. Will the have a special fuel card that gets them cheap petrol.

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Speed camera policy Kills

It's completely unfeasible to run a trial of a road pricing system in a limited area. Instead of wasting billions on setting this up, they should put those billions straight into improving PT infrastructure.

Why are you assuming that because you'll pay per mile, you'll not also pay through fuel and road tax ?

If you assume that the object of road pricing is to raise revenue and also to reduce traffic, then reducing road tax and fuel tax makes no sense.
If you charge no road tax then your evenue is reduced immediately and the road price charge will have to make it up.
If, however, you maintain the road tax and charge extra per mile then your revenue is raised by the pricing charge/s and the cars not being used will still continue to provide road tax revenue per year, while the traffic is reduced accordingly.
Your assumption that some method of guaranteeing "fair play" is needed is also strange....the current congestion charge in London has no method of checking other than the complaints of those whose vehicle registration has been cloned, which are frequently ignored, upon which they have to prove their innocence. The cloning problem is probably going to be solved with the addition of chipped number plates.

I presume that to start with the participants in the trial would be sent fake bills, which would show them how much they would have paid if the road pricing system was operational.

However, transitioning this to a properly working system that takes into account vehicles from outside the area sounds interesting at best.

Thats the same conclusion I came to Orange; somewhat humourous to say the least.

'Here is a bill, if it were real, how would you feel about paying it?'

ROFL

Assuming the trial area were large enough to cover a range of user types and they do send out fake bills it could be the start and end of road pricing. I'm fairly certain that Paul and the media would obtain some to beat the government with.

Now has mental image of Paul with a stack of rolled up bills hitting Bliar on the head whilst repeatedly squealing "Not the momma"

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Prepare to be Judged

Only an observation---


If this was to be a trial by a LA - eg Manchester --simple way to get the data and keep the facts secure would be to use LA vehicles for the trial .
What they gave out could then be spun anywhich way they liked

it's already been trialed. there was a post on here a while back if I can find it.

The only thing I can find on this subject on the DfT site is here:

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/roadpricing/

There seem to be only computer studies and specifications for microwave systems but no reports on REAL trials.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

I'm sure you'll find something in HERE to "fuel" your desires !

Loads of interesting sites, and studies.