Quarter-million say no to charges
The petition against road pricing, set up by Shropshire ABD member Peter Roberts on the Prime Minister's Web site, passed the quarter-million signature mark recently and is now heading for 400,000.
It's over ten times bigger than any of the other 1,700 petitions submitted to the site since it opened in November 2006, and is now being mentioned on over 1,100 sites, according to search engine "Alltheweb".
Roberts' petition states: "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy."
"This level of support for a petition against road pricing shows that the public are massively against the whole concept," said Nigel Humphries of the Association of British Drivers (ABD). "We believe it will quickly grow towards the 1 million mark as media coverage increases."
Roberts, an account manager from Telford, Shropshire, began the petition in November shortly after joining the ABD, and e-mailed the link to about 30 friends and colleagues. He did this on his own initiative -- the ABD has no full-time staff and relies on its members to drive forward campaigns on issues that motivate them.
When the ABD discovered the petition and realised it had been started by a member, a banner was placed on the ABD site, which is visited by tens of thousands of people interested in transport and road safety issues. The petition passed 50,000 at Christmas, and 100,000 in the first week of 2007, as people felt strongly enough about the issue to encourage others to sign. The speed with which the 350,000 mark has been passed shows this growth is accelerating, said the ABD.
PistonHeads first reported the petition when it launched in November 2006.
"I have always reacted strongly against the idea of paying per mile to use the roads," said Peter. "It is going to be unfair, and will limit our personal freedom and economic activity. It will be colossally expensive to implement and time consuming for drivers as they work out how to minimise the cost of their journeys - or even whether they can afford to travel at all.
"Road pricing has nothing to recommend it, especially when fuel duty already charges people according to how far they drive. This all seems blindingly obvious to me -- so starting the petition seemed the logical thing to do."
Unlike traditional motoring organisations, the ABD has always taken a resolute stance against road pricing in all its forms. This position has now been fully vindicated by the scale of support for this petition amongst computer literate people.
"We think this petition will radically change the political scene," said Humphries. "Hardworking people have become alienated from politics because they don't have the time or inclination to struggle with its complexities. When they do try to put their view across, rational, well argued points are fobbed off with nonsense -- spin, platitudes and stonewalling. So they give up, believing the world to have gone mad. Their silence clears the way for a small number of extremists to dominate policy making with their own agendas.
"The e:petition initiative gives the people a new way to make their point, and to know they are not alone. We welcome this new political era."
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