There have been lots of rumours that governments are determined to impose greater control over every vehicle user across Europe, through imposition of a spying device in every car on the road.
Already drivers are policed to a substantial extent and it’s all done in the name of road safety. OK, it’s difficult to argue against that on the face of it, as none of us want to be un-safe. That said, when you look at road deaths in a typical year in the UK, they are less than 3,000 and by comparison look at other avoidable causes of death, such as hospital acquired infections like Clostridium difficile (C. difficile), which in 2007 was shown on the death certificate of 8234 people. The death certificates of a further 1593 people mentioned (MRSA).
So statistically, you are three times likely to die from an infection gained from a hospital visit, than you are driving on our roads, yet it’s the driver that gets all of the attention and clearly the reason for that is the revenue they can get from road users, or cash cows as we might better be called.
I guess, if you consider it, no one can argue that we should break the law, as we shouldn’t, so the authorities very much hold the high ground here and have found themselves with a way to raise enormous annual revenues by punishing us with fines if we dare to go 34mph in a 30mph limit.
However, there seems to be some refining of the process going on, as obviously, have traffic officers on our roads and speed cameras all over the place, costs money and so the Holy Grail would be to find a way of still imposing fines that did away with the extra costs, increasing the net revenue substantially.
Now whilst no one’s going to admit to the likelihood that its going to ever be implemented, but a £36 million Europe wide new initiative called the Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) project is under research and would be used to create a European-wide vehicle surveillance system.
The CVIS would involve a mandatory fitment of a “black box” or as some prefer to call it “a spy in your car” to be fitted to every new vehicle across Europe.
It’s claimed this system would make speed camera obsolete, as your car would always be monitored, so they would know every time you exceeded a speed limit, no matter where you were, or at what time of the day.
Clearly, it doesn’t take much thought to see what else comes from this system, as your cars movements and position would always be known, so it would for example make the implementation of road pricing a real viable proposition.
The Government on the other hand denies it has any plans to bring this type of system into the UK and say that they are not involved in its development either.
A Department for Transport (DfT) spokesman has reportedly said that it had “absolutely no plans to require the installation or use of any technology to monitor individual vehicle movements” and it was “not involved in any work to do so”. But then went on to say that CVIS was simply a “research project” exploring the potential of technologies to “assist drivers, improve road safety and bring environmental benefits”.
We didn’t have any plans to go on holiday last year either, but we did!
Of interest, only around a 20% of the money raised by speeding fines is currently used to fund road safety campaigns and as now that the fines go straight to the treasury rather than to councils, police or the courts there must be a temptation to put speed cameras up everywhere they can and ideally, in the locations where they will raise the highest revenue, rather than do the most for road safety.
There were upsets earlier this year when Dorset Police refused to disclose the revenue from its speed cameras, although to give you some indication of the phenomenal sum it was likely to be, The Dorset Safety Camera Partner-ship did reveal that 708 motorists were caught in just four days when a mobile speed camera was set up at the Tolpuddle Bypass in 2007, generating a total revenue of £42,480.
Finding statistics about speed camera revenue’s is difficult and for some reason, most often hidden, but Conservative MP Mark Field found speed camera offences rose from 262,000 in 1996 to 1,865,000 in 2006, so at £60 a head, that’s around 112 million pounds in fines in 2006 alone.
The “spy in the car” just like the speed camera or like being fined for an over-filled wheelie bin, will be just another stealth tax, but one that punishes and criminalises ordinary law abiding citizens. For goodness sake, if you need the revenue, collect it in a simple and transparent manner.
Enjoy your time with your car and whilst we are not as free as motorists as we were 20 or 30 years ago, it seems that we might look back on where we are today as the halcyon days.
I will end this piece, by quoting the Metroplitan Police Magazine, “Metline” March 1999 edition. “Speed cameras have their limitations…but when these matters can be overcome they will be a sure winner for raising revenue”.
