Despite a petition earlier this year against road pricing on the Downing Street website signed by 1.8million citizens, government ministers have decided to go ahead with ‘trial’ expansion of road pricing/congestion charging to UK cities outside London.
Up to 10 cities may be included in the initial ‘trial’ with Birmingham and Manchester being mooted as likely candidates to be first. Such congestion charges could be enforced by Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras of the type used for the London Congestion Charge.
Of course, this is quite likely to preceed a ’stealth’ roll-out of national road pricing after this ‘trial’ because once any two cities have a congestion charge perimter enforced by ANPR, it would be trivial to charge motorists when they drive between two major centres.
The upshot of this method of implementing national road pricing is that it boils the frog slowly and the UK motorist may not notice that while still paying the classic ‘pay as you drive’ (fuel tax) he is now to be ‘double-dipped’ for road pricing. It also allows the government to track all vehicle movements with an extended ANPR system instead of a potentially more costly in-car GPS+GPRS or tagging system.
Entries (RSS)