Money for nothing
Okay so it’s floating around the news and has been Slashdotted but basically there’s some crazy plan to equip cars with black boxes that beam information about the roads that they are being driven on up to sateliettes and then the government produces a bill every month for road usage. Apparently this scheme then generates revenue. Now, I may be being stupid here, but surely the following will prevent this type of thing from ever working :
1) You could simply remove the black box and leave it on the driveway.
2) It would cost a huge amount of money to equip even new cars with the boxes, let alone all the existing ones.
To add to that, there’s the whole question of what else is this black box going to do? If it knows where you are then is it going to be reporting our movements back to central government? Will it also be producing speeding fines? What happens if your car is stolen, do you still pay the bill whilst someone else is burning around in your car? And what about all the inevitable glitches in the system? Will the bills be itemised and will there be a chance for appeal, or is it just a big pound figure landing on your doormat that you *will* pay even if you’ve not driven anywhere for the past month?
I don’t know how far in the future these plans are supposed to be as the article on BBC news does not go into much detail, but personally I think that
a) We are way off this sort of thing working and
b) It’s the wrong direction to go in.
We should be trying to stop people from having to move anyway, not charging them when they do. For example I have to make a journey to work every day, why should it cost me money out of my wage packet to have to get to and from work. I’d be perfectly happy to work from home and I could do the same thing with a decent internet link. If the government invested in that sort of infrastructure instead and encouraged firms to engage in flexible working practises then that would make a much better dent in the traffic problem than invoking charges (which surely would just be passed on to an employing company, I should think.)
