Pay as you drive

That figure was only for cars IIRC - plus if the aim was to bring HGV`s off the road at a particular time then I`m sure the charge would be brought up to a level that would make a difference, whether it be £1 a mile or £100 a mile.

The joys of living in the North West :-)

As I said elsewhere, it`d be interesting seeing a way to police these MOV lanes correctly. I do agree that they would make a big difference to congestion mind you. Working from home is only available to certain people, but it cuold certainly be done a lot more.

I drive in work along the route I drive to and from work regularly, but while working I drive it in rush hour. Driving to and from work along a certain stretch of motorway takes 20 minutes. In rush hour it`s taken over an hour very easily. And even in 2006 I`ve noticed the queues starting earlier, finishing later and being longer. I don`t think I could handle having to mess about with that level of traffic on my own time -when working it`s just fine though - I`m being paid to be there, so I`m quite happy no matter what the level of traffic is.

There could be charges. One of the proposals is that there are varying charges at different times. So, busy routes would have higher charges during peak hours. The argument is that if you are caught in a tailback and then you hit the maximum charging period then you will be paying more even though you had not intended being on that route during peak charging hours.

GPS itself has reasonable - say several meters, and a meter a second or two, when averaged over a second (with good signal). Averaging over a longer period gives you more accurate average speed and course.

Combining this with dual axis accellerometers, and semiconductor gyroscopes, which cost about a tenner (in quantity for them both) which have good response out to 10s or so (they drift after this noticably) can give you updates down to around a millisecond.

Accellerometers similar to the ADXL202, from analog devices, and gyros IIRC from murata.

This is plenty to pick up normal accelleration and braking, and in detail crash information, as well as who's drifting round corners. (for detail when the wheels come off the ground, you'd want another gyro and accellerometer, or if you are just interested in accelleration or braking, you can live with one accellerometer)

This is far too much raw data to transmit over a mobile link generally, but with minimal data compression it could all be stored if you really wanted to. In practice you'd probably only store information about braking/accelleration rates and times, when something interesting was happening.

Assuming we've got a GPS+... box in the car to do this.

One way would be to completely eliminate the road price if there are >1 people in the car. You'd press a button on it saying "Multiple Occupancy". (or something).

If then a camera happened to snap you with only one person in the car, you get a 500 pound fine.

And the cameras would be (say) in the same place as speed cameras now? So people would behave correctly when they are in a cameras view, and then go back to driving how they wish afterwards? It`s a real problem with the MOV idea :-(

Ah yes. Pass a camera, and throw a passenger out :)

Oh - I see. No, I think we were talking at cross purposes, I missed your mention of MOV lanes. I was referring to the congestion charging. If it's free with 2 people in the car, and 1 quid/mile with one, it may well encourage car sharing.

And you`re still stuck with the problem on how to detect it. Someone driving in the MOV lane 1 up, approaches a camera so moves into the other lanes. passes the camera and back into the MOV lane. Any ideas on a reliable way round this problem?

excess complication

It don't take much to work out what's been going on if they get signals that say I was at J24 on M1 at 8:00pm and J7 at 9:15pm the same night.

-- Peter Hill Spamtrap reply domain as per NNTP-Posting-Host in header Can of worms - what every fisherman wants. Can of worms - what every PC owner gets!

No MOV lane. Congestion charging, with the GPS based thingy. The hope is that by raising charges high enough, and encouraging car-sharing by making it free if you're sharing a car, you can drop the usage far enough that you don't need the MOV lane to avoid congestion for MOV users.

Good idea. Now let me see, where did I put that blow-up doll...

Chris

True, IIRC the thread earlier went into measuring driving style with GPS.

Which isn't quite reliable with unassisted GPS.

At 12:39:57 on 04/12/2006, Colin Reed delighted uk.legal by announcing:

Simple. Park up and wait for off-peak.

Wouldnt work, itd cost the government masses to provide enough extra parking space in safe locations for those who wanted to stop.