elanfan1 wrote:Mark,
It’s not likely to affect me much but I was wondering that government project you were involved in - how do they propose to charge folk on their mileage? The infrastructure to install cameras everywhere would be immense and impossibly costly. If you just pootle about in your classic I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to avoid roads with cameras. If it was based on mileage reading at an MOT folk will disconnect their odometers. I can’t imagine it’s a realistic prospect. Educate me if you wouldn’t mind please.
In the main it's pretty straightforward, but as usual it is the exceptions that get rather complex.
Essentially, every vehicle is fitted with a device that monitors and records the location of that vehicle at any one time. This is done three ways...with satellite positioning, road section coverage and with RFID technology on the major roads and in built up areas. No cameras are harmed in the implementation of this system.!
An individual car is assigned an identification, and it can then be tracked wherever it goes by any one or all three of the methods.. One party is responsible for the usage of that car, and they are the bill payer unless the car is reported stolen.
There are many safeguards to make the system tamper-proof. These are very simple measures for new cars with the technology built in (at a tiny on-cost) to a more complex system for units that have to be retro-fitted to older cars. The most complex system is the installation of a temporary unit, for vehicles visiting the UK on a temporary basis, in particular the large trucks that fill up in Calais with cheap diesel, can then travel 1000 miles or so in the UK without buying any fuel, and then get back in the tunnel and fill up again in France.
As the vehicle is being driven, data is collected in the onboard unit regarding what road sections the car has driven on and when. That data can be downloaded on demand or in batch mode via roadside equipment and / or simple mobile phone technology in many different modes; for example at quiet times of the day (on the network), when the traffic is crawling on jammed-up roads, when the car is parked up or in the garage.
Because road charging is a tax, the basis of the charging has to be absolutely bullet proof. That's why there are three main methods for monitoring a vehicles location, and consequently calculating charges. Each of these methods records information that is converted into miles covered per chargeable road section, cross-checked in several different ways. The Galileo satellite array would be used, rather than the American defence satellites currently used as relying on the technology of another country to calculate and collect taxes isn't seen as a very good idea. Galileo is also 'overhead', allowing reliable triangulation in cities with tall buildings.
Again, very simple for manufacturer-fit vehicles which can also employ odometer readings as a 4th cross check, and very simple to tie in to HGVs that have a tachograph to determine speed and distance.
The big stick is the enforcement of the usage of the system, with roadside equipment being able to detect tampering or other illegal use, combined with mobile enforcement to check out the functioning of equipment as cars are going along. There are a few more covert methods of inspection that would also be employed of course.
The bottom line is that this is a tax, and taxation authorities around the world have very scary powers to protect their income, as Al Capone found out.!!
Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2020 7:46 am