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Every movement of yours will be tracked by satellite and logged on a Government database. You will be followed and charged for your usage of the British road network. A frightening thought. This is what road pricing will mean for millions of motorists in Britain. In recent years the British State has massively extended it's intrusion into the lives of citizens and road pricing would move this one step further - one step too far. No longer free to travel without the Government knowing where you are, no longer able to pop to the shops without it logged.

The system rests on the principle that different parts of the road network should have different price levels at different times of the day to reflect demand and spread traffic more evenly across the road network. As far as i can see this is fundamentally flawed in practice as there is significant information failure: in order for you to make the best judgment you have to be aware of at least a few alternative routes to any given destination, from any given point, at any given time of the day. The sheer number of possibilities means in reality people will continue to use either the same roads or only a couple of other routes and so will end up paying higher charges than necessary.

Road pricing is lauded as a new way to ensure the user pays for their use of the roads, except that we already do through fuel duty. Fuel duty, and the VAT charged on top, not only forces the road user to pay, but it also causes the lest efficient and most polluting cars to pay more. In this sense fuel duty is a crude but very effective method for achieving the same goal as road pricing with the additional environmental benefit: who is going to sit in a traffic jam for 3 hours a day, wasting petrol, when an uncrowded alternative route is available? The user still pays for road use and congestion, it's just not as obvious.

So if the objectives can be fulfilled, in the most part, by fuel taxes then why do we need an expensive satellite system that would give the Government unprecedented and unwanted information over our lives?

The economy will be hit as people limit their journey's, not just to save money, but also because they are worried a journey might cost them more than they had anticipated or can afford. The inability to know the costs of different routes ahead of time will cause havoc. The impact on democracy will be more subtle: the immediate erosion of liberties is obvious but the power the Government will wield over voters could entrench an affective dictatorship. What will be the result? we will just have to wait and see.

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