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What do the petitioners think they are supporting?

The petition subtext highlights that there is already an effective travel tax administered through the cost of fuel: “The more you travel – the more tax you pay” it explains helpfully.

Next it goes for the heart strings, calling the proposed monitoring system “an unfair tax on those who live apart from families” and it pours pity on the “poorer people who will not be able to afford the high monthly costs“.

It rounds off with a stirring and simple plea: “Please Mr Blair – forget about road pricing and concentrate on improving our roads to reduce congestion.”

So that’s:

1. Standing up for poorer people,
2. Reuniting estranged families,
3. Caring for the commuter who’s stuck in congestion.

This is a petition (and therefore a million petitioners) with heart and compassion: it’s very warm and fuzzy, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

An Existing and Necessary Tax

The petition calls for road improvement but roads are not created or improved without investment. Funds don’t magically appear at the Dept. for Transport without tax, so the petition is implicit in it’s agreement that a travel tax is necessary, it’s just misguided about the most fair means of delivering it.

As the petition points out there is already an effective tax on travel, through fuel, but it neglects to mention that:

1. Poorer people are already affected by a high travel tax.
2. Families that live apart are already taxed when they travel to see each other.

So the warm and fuzzy words about “poorer people” and “families” obscure the real issue, that the petition is merely opposing is an alternative mechanism for taxation; not an additional tax.

Our Electric Future and the Green Tipping Point

Electric vehicles create less atmospheric pollution and less noise pollution than their combustion engined counterparts. At present, there are large tax incentives for people who switch to electric or hybrid vehicles in the combined form of a reduced road fund license fee, and a reduced need to purchase heavily taxed fuel.

There will hopefully come a time when a green tipping point is reached, where the number of alternatively powered vehicles is large enough that the fuel tax is no longer a viable mechanism for funding road maintenance.

This green tipping point cannot come soon enough, in my opinion, and it’s the reason why an alternative mechanism for travel tax is a necessity. Electric vehicles cannot travel without roads, so a travel tax will still be necessary, however, in urging the Prime Minister to abandon this line of investigation, the petitioners are supporting a taxation system that is becoming obsolete.

Diminishing Returns and Fairer Taxes

In recognizing that revenue from the existing fuel tax will diminish, we must also accept that a government that did not investigate alternative sources of funding should be accused of negligence and short-sighted governance. The government is only a representative of the people, so demanding the cessation of research into those alternatives is short sighted by the people who signed the petition.

An important aspect of a journey-based tax was overlooked in the simple text of the petition and it is this: once travel-tax is decoupled from fuel, it can be applied to the journey and the traveler directly, so if somebody who’s “poorer” is traveling, they may be able to travel at a lower tax rate.

Journeys to and from job interviews could be subject to tax incentives. Journeys during peak times could be charged at a higher rate, meaning those with good jobs who choose to commute in busy times every day would pay more. Family gatherings would end up costing less because they tend not to require peak period travel. In fact, all kinds of journeys could become subject to either incentives or penalties which overall would make travel taxation more fair.

The people who signed the petition didn’t see that – what they saw was an emotive plea that was not backed up by any real consideration for the facts.

Improved Planning

Todays monitoring systems can tell us that n-hundred-thousand vehicles pass a particular point on a particular motorway each day, which is quite useful for road planning. Knowing the entire journey of each of those vehicles will give a far greater insight into where and how specific roads should be improved (through the application of techniques such as Ant Colony Optimisation).

Conclusion: There is No Alternative to Journey-Based Tax

Road usage, and thus, congestion, will continue to increase. Without an improved mechanism of taxation on travel, the gradual switch to electric vehicles will result in reduced funds being available to the DfT for road maintenance. Poorer people will still be taxed as they are today, and families that live far apart will continue to be taxed at the same rate on journeys that take longer as peak time congestion increases because of an overburdened road infrastructure.

Road congestion will not just affect private citizens, the goods vehicles get stuck in jams too, which increases the delivery cost of whatever they’re carrying, which in turn is passed on to the consumer, a few pence added to an expensive item like a TV makes very little difference, but for companies that are hauling basics such as grain, fruit & veg, this puts a significant extra markup on everyday items that “poorer people” cannot afford not to buy.

An alternative journey-based taxation system, could encourage more flexible travel practices by all and enable travel by “poorer people” through targeted tax incentives and journey-based insurance policies. The empirical knowledge of the road network and it’s use would lead to more effective improvements that are targeted at the problems of congestion (rather than the symptoms, which are all that can be monitored by measuring traffic flow and choke points).

So looking at the subtext of the petition again and see how it stacks up:

1. Standing up for poorer people – failed – with high fuel-based taxes they’re no better off when traveling, and with increased freight costs, the basic cost of living will increase.
2. Reuniting estranged families – failed – with high fuel based charges and increasing congestion they’re worse off: it will take longer and thus cost more in fuel to get home.
3. Caring for the commuter who’s stuck in congestion – failed – with increased congestion and high fuel charges they’ll switch to an electric vehicle, but still be stuck in traffic, on a road system that is not properly maintained, so they’re worse off too!

One million people can be wrong. One million people put their name to a solution which only exacerbates the problems that they are hoping to solve.

Update: The Email Campaign & The Anti-Petition

Apparently the one-million mark was passed thanks to an email campaign that (for want of a better description) scare-mongered about the hardware costs for such a system, yet none of the figures suggested were verifiable, or very realistic. Then scare-mongered about the loss of civil liberties that the system might represent.

Looking around the web several people are commenting on the story, some highlight the hardware cost issue. Roo from The Book Garden pondered the foolishness of the whole petition. Conversely Gavin Ayling described it as “proof of a backlash against government misuse of power“, though I think a more realistic description is:

a worrying example of how people can be persuaded to do anything if you push the right emotional buttons and provide them with imbalanced information.

Derren Brown eat your heart out.

Sanity: An anti-petition!

Thankfully, there is some sanity and balance in the world.

Thank you Tim Lewis for starting an anti-petition to the above nonsense. Tim petitions the prime minister; “don’t scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.” His supporting text is rather eloquent, and makes for a far more convincing petition:

Having recently received an email asking me to sign the a petition to scrap the vehicle tracking policy, I’d like to propose the opposite. I strongly feel that driving is a privilege and not a right. There are simply too many cars on the road and too many people making journeys by car when they could simply walk or cycle. Thousands die every year in road accidents and many, like myself, are forced to risk our lives in trying to get to work in a sustainable manner. We are dependent of foreign oil and the wars to secure such resources will only get worse if we don’t curb our driving habits. Driving started off as a freedom but as we’ve redesigned our land around the auto mobile, rather than the pedestrian, it’s become nearly a necessity. It is, however, perfectly possible to live a successful, car-free life. I would like to advocate that this become the norm and if this law helps driving to become even less attractive than it already is, I’m all for it.

I am delighted to sign such a sensible petition.

Other voices…

People are starting to speak up about the road pricing scheme.

1. Paul Kingsnorth takes a more direct route than myself, lambasting the “petrol heads” supposing that “the next thing we know they’ll be campaigning to ban zebra crossings, ambulances and traffic lights on the grounds that they slow them down unacceptably.”
2. Clive Bates has some interesting thoughts on the numbers involved, and discusses why the many counter petitions are at a disadvantage.
3. Richard Dows wonders if the proposed system could help build “a truly worthwhile, cheap, eco-friendly, and on-time national transport grid?“
4. Brendan of the excellent PetrolPrices.org asks If the proposed system is a bad idea then how do you think motoring should be taxed in the future?

News reports are focusing on the town of Innisfail at the moment, probably because it’s the most populated area and the eye of the storm appears to have passed overhead there; but looking at the weather satellite images the storm was huge, so there’s going to be a lot of people affected.

The place we stayed is approximately 14 miles from where the storm centre hit the land. Around the same time, the main storm area was about 200 miles in diameter.

The huts are in the rainforest just up from Bingil Bay, and it sounds like the area has had a battering.

Ms Welch said the landscape was usually dense with rainforest, but “all of a sudden it is just open and we can see the hill in front of us. We can see houses in the next street we couldn’t see before.”

Hope you’re all ok folks.

Cyclone Larry

By overlaying satellite images from the last 24 hours I’ve been able to fairly accurately model the path and the extent of the storm.

The extent of cyclone:

The path of the cyclone:

Google Earth Model

To view this model of cyclone Larry in 3D get Google Earth (it’s free).