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electronic road use taxes in the UK and elsewhere
``` [If any RRE reader in the UK obtains a copy of the report mentioned here, I'd love to get a copy. Also, I have been hearing about public resistance to electronic road taxes in the Netherlands as well, and I'd appreciate any documentation or other leads on this topic. Finally, if anybody is informed about the privacy aspects of the newly announced Singapore system for electronic road taxation then I'd much appreciate references, clippings, etc. Thanks a lot.]
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 95 11:10:07 EST
From: Computer Privacy Digest Moderator
Computer Privacy Digest Sat, 28 Oct 95 Volume 7 : Issue: 035
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Date: 27 Oct 1995 11:15:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: Phil Agre
A newspaper article in the UK describes a report on the possibility of public resistance to road use taxes ("tolls") implemented using electronic systems for (though the article does not use this particular term) "automatic vehicle identification":
Jonathan Prynn, Road tolls "could be another poll tax", The Times (London), 2 October 1995, page 4.
It quotes the report, issued by the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank closely associated with Britain's governing Conservative Party, as asserting:
If electronic tolling is not seen as fair, there is a very real risk of civil disobedience. ...
Many motorists might decide simply to ignore the law and drive on motorways without paying tolls. The Government would be quickly overwhelmed by the number of violations and could have no choice but to abandon the system. The experience of the poll tax might not be entirely irrelevant.
This last sentence is a reference to the massive public resistance to the "poll tax", officially known as the "community charge", an extremely unpopular per capita tax instituted by the Thatcher government around 1990. I was living in the UK at this time and was most impressed; resistance to the tax was highly organized and drew on centuries of cultural memory of popular resistance to unfair taxes. (Thus the term "poll tax".)
But resistance to electronic road use taxes has occurred elsewhere. Citizen councils and professional societies in Hong Kong rejected such a "congestion pricing" scheme in the 1980's, citizens in Washington State are currently waging an effective campaign against similar proposals there, and a so-called "Citizens Jury" in Minneapolis recently came out strongly against the idea in that area. The pattern is pretty common: concerns over unfair or excessive taxation rank highest in citizens' minds, but as the issue unfolds they learn more and become more concerned about the serious privacy issues associated with such systems. The CPS report, for example, proposes that the Government maintain databases listing every road user in the country as either a "low" or "high" road user, keeping track of everybody's travels and issuing bills to "low-use" drivers who exceed a certain limit. Unlike electronic automation of existing toll collection systems, participation in these proposed schemes is effectively mandatory because it would be impractical to pay all of the new tolls with cash. The effect is to create the technical means to track the movements on public highways of practically everbody in the country. The article states:
This [system of registering low and high users] would be policed by a network of roadside cameras linked by microprocessor to a hard disc list of high-use vehicles.
Such proposals are going forward in one fashion or another throughout nearly the whole of the industrialized world, and it is crucial that a proper public debate take place on them before they provoke massive public resistance -- or, much worse, before they progress so far that resistance becomes futile. The solution to the civil liberties problems, as pointed out in an article in the October 2nd US News and World Report, is for these systems to employ technologies such as digital cash that prevent the capture of individually identifiable information about citizens' movements. Technology is not going to solve the taxation problem, but all of these systems embody choices that ought to be made through proper public debate, not the back-room fiat that is now the norm.
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Phil Agre
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End of Computer Privacy Digest V7 #035
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