If you drive a car read this

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tangomoon

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Not boaty but warrants mention - hope it is not a leg pull

Sarah Kennedy was on about this proposed car tax scheme on the Radio 2 - apparently there is only one month left to register your objection to the 'Pay as you go' road tax. The petition is on the 10 Downing St website but they didn't tell anybody about it. Therefore at the time of Sarah's comments only 250,000 people had signed it so far and 750,000 signatures are required to stop them introducing it.

This is from the 10 Downing Street website.

Once you've given your details (you don't have to give your full address, just house number and postcode will do), they will send you an email with
a link in it. Once you click on that link, you'll have signed the petition.

Democracy in action?

The government's proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you having
to purchase a tracking device for your car and paying a monthly bill to use it. The tracking device will cost about £200 and in a recent study by the BBC, the lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery driver. A non working mother who used the car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one month.
On top of this massive increase in tax, you will be tracked. Somebody will know where you are at all times. They will also know how fast you have been going, so even if you accidentally creep over a speed limit in time you can probably expect a Notice of Intended Prosecution with your monthly bill.
If you care about our freedom and stopping the constant bashing of the car driver, please sign the petition on No 10's new website (link below) and
pass this on to as many people as possible.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/traveltax/
 
Thanks for posting it here. It is an important issue which will effectively 'tag' every car driver in the UK just as if they were a criminal on parole. Utterly unacceptable, surely? How can anyone go along with such an invasion of privacy and liberty?
 
Addendum - whe you press your button on the DSC that gives them your position every time. Like the little blue 'lamp standards' at side of road onm A roads -cameras recording where your vehicle is every time you pass one. Motorway signs, the huge ones, now incorporate this registration plate reading and filming too
 
Allegedly, TrafficMaster cameras only record 2 adjacent letters - not numbers on your plate - for teh next time you pass one.

Allegedly they are for the monitoring of traffice flow not the movement of individual road users.

Now was I born yesterday......
 
The terms of their license to operate mean that full registration plates cannot be stored. Traffic Master and govt cameras are different issues however.
 
Surely it would only take a software change to be able to deal with entire number plates? An update could be uploaded to the cameras within minutes. If they can be aware of the precise postion of cars on the main roads at all times, before long, they will. They will counter cries of 'invasion of privacy' and 'police state' with 'War on Terror' and 'if you're innocent you won't object'. I'm innocent (whatever that means /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif) and I object
 
As I said, their licence to operate will not allow that. They are a commercial organisation, not a govt dept.


Govt cameras do take full registrations however, which they use for tax and insurance checks etc
 
Do you mean that the regulations require that it is impossible for the Trafficmaster cameras to be modified by hardware and/or software changes to store full numbers? Or do you mean that the cameras may not be capable of storing the numbers with the present software and/or hardware? If the regulations should be 'relaxed' at the request of, say, the Government then might it not be possible for the 'impossible' to become the actual situation? And might it be only a software change that would be needed, taking minimal time, particularly if code had already been developed for that contingency?
 
Traffic Master are licensed to put cameras on motorways and roads. That licence dictates that full registrations cannot be stored or transmitted. Hence the way that their software operates. It would not be easy to change their way of operation quickly. More importantly, to make a change to full registration plate storage or transmission, their licence would need to be changed, and that would make front page headlines, as many organisations monitor such things. Things cannot be 'relaxed' otherwise the directors of TrafficMaster would be operating illegally, and faced with fines and prison.
 
I hear and understand what you say and you sound as though you have detailed knowledge of the system. I have drifted this a bit further than maybe is proper for this forum - or, at least, this section - but it seems to be that given the political will the technical difficulties could be overcome with minimal problems if they have not already been considered. I would be surprised if there was not some contingency plan perhaps even with tested code ready to use if the appropriate 'national emergency' made it desirable to enable that feature on all those cameras.

Then again, maybe I have watched one episode too many of 'Spooks'? Or have I remained a bit cynical since Watergate, since when things seem to have been getting worse, not better.
 
Great!! fewer unnecessary car journeys and we can track all the terrorists that lurk on every street corner, criminals too. Surely you've seen them? Its an invasion of privacy sure, but we created the country we live in, no one else to blame! George Orwell was right, he just called it 20 yrs too early. Only way to escape is to set sail (note clever introduction of boating theme), at least thats we all aspire to I assume
 
Surely that was a troll -- a post that actually referred to boats. Anybody'd think this was a boating website. (And a UK one, you UK-centric lot. You voted them in, so as long as this is a dot com site, why should the rest of the world have to suffer?) /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif
 
No, no troll. Follow the link on the first post - it goes to the No. 10 website. Totally legit.
 
Not a troll. I think the only way out is to get in your boat, preferably pea green, with a jar of honey, plenty of money and pussy cat for company. IMHO makes no difference who you vote in, all as bad as eachother
 
[ QUOTE ]
Not a troll. I think the only way out is to get in your boat, preferably pea green, with a jar of honey, plenty of money and pussy cat for company. IMHO makes no difference who you vote in, all as bad as eachother

[/ QUOTE ]

Be sure not to carry a AIS transponder then, otherwise same thing will apply to your boat, will it not? Trackable worldwide almost....
 
Good point, better chuck it overboard quick.... to be honest, dont have one, read posts about inaccurate information or big boats not turning theirs on or something along those lines, probably overstated. Decided to stick to honest radar. Worked ok so far; noticably less traffic in bristol channel compared to solent (wow, thats an understatement), so dont really think its necessary. Can travel the seas out of swansea in blissful anonymity; seriously, in these days of CCTV, store cards, cash points, credit cards, road pricing, car trackers, mobile phones, its reassuring to know there is somewhere you can go to get away from it all
 
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