Do you agree with more of this?
The anti-road-charging petition is now huge -- approaching 50,0000 signatures -- and is reportedly the biggest on the Government's e-petitions Web site.
The site is designed, it says, as a modern equivalent of the traditional petitions presented at the door of No.10. It enables people to put their views to the Prime Minister. According to the site, can now both create and sign petitions on the site, giving the opportunity to reach a wider audience and to deliver a petition directly to Downing Street.
How much notice the PM will take is another matter entirely.
This one, setup by Peter Roberts on 20 November, is about road charging -- paying not just for the miles you drive but also when you use the road network. It's the future, according to the Government. The Government, academics and a whole host of others cannot see any other way through the current problem of the UK's ever-increasing road congestion.
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.
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.
Peter Roberts set up the petition against road charging on 20 November.
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