Congestion charge is just the start
Road charging -- paying not just for the miles you drive but also when you use the road network -- is the future.
That's according to the Government, academics and a whole host of others who cannot see any other way through the current problem of the UK's ever-increasing road congestion. However, according to the Government, the system will work using GPS tracking devices, which can track your car wherever you go. The information gathered might just be used for the purposes of road charging -- which many see as yet another, insidious tax on motoring.
It also wouldn't take much effort for a satellite tracking system also to be used for monitoring or even governing speed. Yet speed, as has been shown by Safe Speed's statistical analysis which was recently echoed by the Department of Transport, is not the biggest cause of accidents. It just happens to be the easiest motoring law to enforce.
And information has a tendency to leak. What's the betting that at some point in the future, a government will feel the financial pressure to sell that information to whoever is willing to pay the price? This sinister possibility has raised the hackles of many observers, one of whom has setup a petition on the Government's own Web site to campaign against the introduction of road pricing.
Peter Roberts set it up on 20 November and already well over 2,300 have signed. It's already the sixth most popular petition on the site of the 659 available, at the time of writing.
With the world watching what the population of this relatively wealthy but densely populated island will make of this experiment, in terms of both road charging and democratic process, now is the time to express your view.