Motorists of future 'tracked from sky and charged per mile'

EDINBURGH plans to use relatively primitive camera technology for its charging scheme, but sophisticated "spies in the sky" could be tracking drivers’ every movement within a decade.

Under the city council’s scheme, vehicles entering the capital would simply have their photographs taken crossing a cordon entry point.

But government advisers believe a satellite-based system could be available by 2014 that would charge motorists based on where, when and how far they travelled.

Under such a UK-wide road-pricing scheme, drivers would be charged between 1p and 1.34 a mile, depending on the road and how busy it was.

Payments could be calculated by equipment fitted to cars, which would be tracked by satellites.

Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, told MPs on Wednesday that Britain faced US-style gridlock unless the government comes up with radical solutions to congestion, such as road pricing. He told the Commons’ transport committee that road pricing was a "radical approach".

However, Mr Darling said that motorists must be offered benefits for paying. He said you could not suddenly start charging people on roads which had been free the day before.

The minister has yet to respond to last year’s expert study on national road pricing, but it is expected that charges could replace road tax and fuel duty. Most drivers in Scotland would be left better off as a result, because of the country’s relatively uncongested roads.

Mr Darling said last month that satellite-tracking devices would be as common in cars within ten years as a CD player is today.

A precursor to such a scheme could be the use of satellites in the government’s planned UK-wide lorry road-user charging from 2007-8, although the technology to be used has yet to be specified.

Designed to level the field between British and foreign hauliers, the scheme would see drivers charged for the distance they travelled, in return for fuel-duty discounts.

The scheme may use tachograph-type equipment in cabs, but satellite tracking is seen as feasible because it can already measure distance accurately, even though it cannot yet pinpoint a vehicle’s exact location.

TIE, formerly Transport Initiatives Edinburgh, the city council firm spearheading the capital’s charging plans, said suitable satellite technology had yet to be developed for its own purposes. A national satellite-based scheme may also not appear until half way through the planned 20-year lifespan of the Edinburgh scheme.

Seamus Healy, TIE’s procurement manager, said the use of satellites to track vehicles was still too imprecise to be viable, especially in built-up areas where high buildings also made vehicles difficult to see from space. He said that problem could mean mobile phone-tracking technology would have to be used in urban areas instead, while satellites tracked vehicles across open country.