Pay-per-mile driving.

The brain-dead politicians in England have given their stamp of approval to a scheme so Orwellian in its scope that it must be stopped at all costs.
They want to remove the road tax and fuel duty, and instead get everyone to install a GPS tracker in their vehicle so they can be charged per mile driven.
The litany of questions this raises proves that, as always with the British government, they haven't thought it through at all.

- GPS tracking? Civil liberties? Big Brother? George Orwell?
- what about foreign trucks and visitors? No GPS device means they use the roads for free and get uber-cheap petrol
- who's going to pay to have all these devices installed?
- what about older vehicles that won't have them?
- what about the incentive to drive cleaner vehicles? Per-mile charging means a 60mpg Prius owner would be charged as much as a 4mpg Hummer owner.
- where's the public transport alternative? England has worse-than-third-world public transport. It's unreliable, dirty, expensive, dangerous and never runs on time. You'd think the the government realises that nobody sits in congested traffic for fun. Of course they realise - they realise you have no choice so they can charge you for it.

So then. Not only can people not afford to buy a house close to their work because of the unbearable housing prices, but they now won't be able to afford to commute either. Think about it. Under their scheme, at £1.34 a mile in peak hours, it would cost someone £335 a day to commute from Bristol to London - a trip thousands of commuters make each day. (125 miles each way x £1.34). What do they propose these people do? Take the train instead? 4 trains an hour with a capacity of - what - 600 people max? 2400 people an hour? The M4 carries 2400 people a minute at peak times - there's no way the trains could cope.

This is so draconian that if it wasn't the Labour government, it would be almost unbelievable. However, given their never ending desire to tax everyone for anything and everything, no matter how small, I'm sure the annals of power view this proposal as a surefire success.

Professor Garel Rhys of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research put it best: "Governments will upset at their peril society's wish to do what it wants to do and that is to move around."

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