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Will a more equitable road tax come via satellite?
Is satellite technology about to offer the way to a more equitable system for collecting road tax?
Studies now being conducted in Europe aim at using satellites not only for "pay as you use" road taxes but vehicle insurance calculated on a simular formula.
The Europeans, through the European Space Agency (ESA), have launched a feasibility study into using satellites linked to vehicle-mounted "black boxes" to monitor every vehicle in the European Union.
The data collected would then give traffic authorities the ability to bill every driver according to the specific use they made of the roads. This would include the time of day and distance travelled. Physical tolling systems like that used to control congestion in London, would become obsolete.
Instead the satellite would identify the vehicle immediately it entered a congestion zone and instantly impose the extra charge.
The same monitoring system would also allow the introduction of a system of "pay for use" vehicle insurance.
Richard Bryce, CEO for Mapflow, the Dublin-based company commissioned to conduct the study believes it is only a matter of time before charging motorists for distance travelled becomes normal practice.
"Distance travelled is already used when calculating charges for rail, sea and air transport; it is inevitable that road users will pay along similar pay-for-use structures, particularly at peak times" he says.
The monitoring system would become one of the major applications of the ESA's Galileo satellite navigation system scheduled to become operational in 2008. (See: TransScan July 200 page 8) Although the study is focused on Europe, there is a clear intention to market the system to other countries. China is about to sign a formal agreement with the EU to become a participant in the Galileo project.
When the agreement was first initialled in Beijing in September, the Secretary General of China's Ministry of Science and Technology said: "China will help Galileo to become the major world infrastructure for the growing market for location services."
It now seems that the "infrastructure" could ultimately include the collection of road tax.
