Is road-charging on a crash course?

Earlier this month, transport secretary Douglas Alexander announced a £10m fund for the development of nationwide road-charging schemes. Despite a string of disastrous IT projects that have run massively over budget and often failed to deliver their goals, it seems the government is yet again reaching for an ill-conceived technological fix for an everyday problem.

The details of how such charging schemes might work was not broached by Alexander, but his predecessor favoured the fitting of a black box to every car that would allow their movements to be tracked by reference to the satellite GPS network.

This measure alone would take many years to complete and would cost a lot of money. But this is only half the story. In order to charge you, the government will need to feed back the information about your car's movements to a central system.
How will this be achieved? Will each vehicle also be required to have a connection to some kind of wide area data network? Building a country-wide network capable of keeping in constant touch with millions of nodes is no trivial or inexpensive task – just ask the mobile phone operators.

Perhaps the government might decide to use one of the existing mobile networks, but I imagine that the number of vehicles trying to signal their movements would overwhelm any of the commercial networks, particularly during rush hour, and could easily lead to voice calls not getting through.

Or perhaps the connection back to Big Brother could be via a network of road-side transceivers. But this would probably prove as costly, and might lead to drivers avoiding roads that have these beacons, thereby moving congestion from one road to another.

Then there is human nature. Some drivers will be tempted to avoid payment by interfering with the black box, so the government will have to waste yet more taxpayers' money in development of anti-tamper systems, perhaps requiring that the car will not start unless the box is present and functioning correctly. I'm sure you can picture the tabloid headlines the first time a single mother finds herself and her children stranded when a fault with the black box disables her car. And the consequences of a stalker managing to hack into the system don't bear thinking about.

But don't get the idea that I'm some mouthpiece for the pro-car lobby. As someone who commutes to work by train, I would likely save money under any pay-per-use road-charging scheme.

As an IT expert, it annoys me that the government seems to jump at technological quick fixes when it clearly has little idea of the scale and complexity that a solution would involve. If it did, then it would already have reached the conclusion that the vast sums of money needed to build this system might be more wisely spent on improving public transport instead of trying to tax drivers off the roads.